Over the holiday weekend at PAX West, the team from Wizards of the Coast formally unveiled Duskmourn, the next set of cards for Magic: The Gathering. Inspired by 1980s slasher movies and classic horror tropes, the action takes place in an entirely new setting — a vast and mysterious haunted house. To sell the idea of a haunted house, designers came up with a new type of card called called a “room.” Here’s room cards work, and how they help elevate the set’s creepy theme.
According to senior art director Ovidio Cartagena, the plane of Duskmourn itself has a tragic backstory.
“This used to be a regular plane, with happiness and people in it,” Cartagena said during the livestreamed presentation. “But a demon that was locked inside the house took over it. And his way of taking over was growing the house until there was nothing else but him and the house. And you’ll feel his presence everywhere — the name of this demon is Valgavoth.”
The primary building block of Valgovoth’s realm are the aforementioned rooms, and those rooms take the form of two-panel horizontal cards.
“Rooms were our biggest shot; our flashiest mechanic of the set, you might say,” said senior game designer Annie Sardelis. “They are enchantments, and they ask you to unlock things.”
For instance, if you’d like to play Dollmaker’s Shop/Porcelain Gallery (shown above) you’d first pick which side of the card you’d like to play. If that’s Dollmaker’s Shop, you’d tap one white and one additional mana to bring the card into play as an enchantment. The other side of the card hasn’t been cast yet, and therefore isn’t active. But suffice it to say that the door to the Porcelain Gallery enters play alongside Dollmaker’s Shop, and can be opened later.
“Wherever you like, you can pay the mana value of the other side to enable [it],” Sardellis said. “So it really gives you that flexibility, that feeling of moving place-to-place. We really wanted to have two effects on a room, because we want to feel like we’re expressing the real massiveness [of Duskmourn], and what’s behind every door of the setting.”
Duskmourn kicked off on Aug. 19 with the first in a series of narrative pieces, cheekily called episodes, published on the official Magic website. Card previews are currently ongoing via multiple outlets, including here at Polygon where we’ll have some to share later this week. Meanwhile, Duskmourn arrives in Magic: The Gathering – Arena on Sept. 24 and at retailers as a physical product on Sept. 27.
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