Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Mechanics

 I'm very excited for the new set: Innistrad: Midnight Hunt. Along with the next set after it comes out, Crimson Vow, this will be a return to Magic's Gothic Horror plane, and a setting I was very excited to hear about when it first came out and on the return in the two-part Shadows over Innistrad block, but these came out during a time when I was not playing Magic, and so I never actually got to play with its mechanics.

Since cracking a Royal Assassin in my first Revised Edition 60-card pack, I've found myself often drawn to the darker side of fantasy, and so Innistrad seems very much up my alley. Primarily built initially as a top-down set around horror tropes, it has always had a light tribal theme with two-color tribes of zombies, spirits, werewolves, vampires, and humans.

With the archangel Avacyn, whose role it was to counterbalance all of the human-killing monsters on the plane, now gone after her descent into madness thanks to Emrakul, humans in Innistrad are turning to older, more druidic folk magic. But Emrakul's presence within Innistrad's moon has caused a big problem - the days are getting shorter while the nights are getting longer, all on a plane where monsters get a lot more powerful at night.

That day/night cycle has always been implied on Innistrad, and is most commonly reflected on werewolf cards. If a player goes for their own turn without casting a spell, werewolves will transform into their scarier, wolf form. However, if a player then casts two spells on their own turn, the werewolves turn back into their human forms.

That concept is being expanded with a new keyword, which is Daybound and Nightbound. It works the same, but keywords this ability so that werewolves can now simply have "daybound" on their human side, and "nightbound" on their transformed side. However, this mechanic is no longer bound to only werewolves, so there will be other cards that make use of this concept, as well as a special card similar to the Forgotten Realms dungeons to help keep track of it.

To represent humanity trying to combine their strengths to stand against the monsters, Coven is a new ability word. This is a modifier that will either allow certain abilities or buff spells and such, as long as you have three creatures with different powers.

Disturb, then, is a bit like Flashback but for permanents. For instance, a creature can be cast as normal, but then if it dies, you can pay its Disturb cost to return it to play, but transformed. This seems likely to work mostly with spirit creatures, where you'll have a human character who dies and then comes back as a spirit.

Finally, Decayed seems to be a keyword that only shows up on zombies (and maybe even specifically zombie tokens.) It's a drawback, where the creature cannot block, and then once you attack with it, you sacrifice it at the end of combat. I think the intention here is to let you summon a pretty enormous host of zombies, but you won't be able to keep growing it if you use them. So you either need one big push, or you can use them as sacrificial fodder for other spells and abilities.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this set a whole lot. I've already pre-ordered the 50-pack set on Arena. I really want to make a werewolf tribal deck, and if there's any set where that would be viable, it'll be this one.