I'll need to look into the odd rares and such of the latest set to see to what degree Midnight Hunt adheres to Innistrad's top-down focus. I guess they've done a lot of the classic horror tropes in earlier visits to the plane, and the mechanical themes that have developed are pretty strong, which feels like the major design focus here.
So, let's talk about those focuses (foci?)
Innistrad has always had tribes built around allied color pairs. Azorius (White/Blue) is Spirits (aka Ghosts), Dimir (Blue/Black) is Zombies, Rakdos (Black/Red) is Vampires, Gruul (Red/Green) is Werewolves, and Selesnya (Green/White) is Humans.
In Midnight Hunt, each of these has a keyword or ability word except for vampires, though there's a pretty clear mechanical theme for them as well.
Spirits have Disturb, which is, essentially, Flashback for creatures using double-sided cards. You have a human creature, and if it dies (or otherwise gets into the graveyard,) you can cast it for its Disturb cost but transformed to its spirit side, which is often either more powerful or has some kind of complementary feature. Not every spirit in the set is built this way, but I believe all the spirits have flying, so you can build a kind of flying deck around this. Spirits are a pretty common creature type, and we got a fair number in Kaldheim, which isn't going anywhere from Standard until next year (and if I recall correctly, Kaldheim is also built around two-color tribes, though it's all ten combinations, and I think Azorius colors are also spirits.)
Next, we've got Zombies. My most recent deck is a Dimir zombie one that tries to make use of decayed zombie tokens as cannon fodder. Oddly, Decayed is actually a pure downside that almost exclusively exists on creature tokens (though there is at least one exception to that.) Decayed zombies are basically one-time uses, but the point is that they're cheap to produce, which then means that you can get a lot of them and then sacrifice them for more permanent effects. Corpse Cobbling, for example, lets you basically stick them all together as one big Frakenstein-like creation that has menace (and no decayed.) And, of course, there's plenty in black to allow you to sacrifice creatures for powerful effects. I'm a big fan of Tainted Adversary, the black member of the Mythic Adversary cycle (actually, I think they're all pretty good) that is a 2/3 deathtouch zombie for 1B, and then when it comes into play (even if you didn't cast it, and even if someone kills it with a removal spell the moment it hits the battlefield) you can pay 2B any number of times to get two 2/2 decayed zombie tokens and a +1/+1 counter for the Adversary for each time you pay it. (What makes these cards great is that they have decent bodies for their cost even if you don't pay the extra costs, so you either get a mana-efficient creature early in the game or a much splashier effect with a bigger creature later in the game.)
Vampires don't have a keyword or ability word, but they do have a theme, which is that they tend to care about dealing damage to the opponent. There are a lot of creatures that have additional effects if they come into play on a turn where the opponent has lost life. Florian, Voldaren Scion, the legendary 3/3 first striker for 1BR actually has a slightly different effect, but a really powerful one - when your postcombat main phase begins, you get to look at the top X cards of your library, X being the amount of combat damage you did to the opponent that turn, and exile one of them, being able to play it for the rest of the turn. When you're hitting with multiple creatures, this lets you absolutely excavate your deck for a card you'll want to use. I think my cobbled-together Vampire deck might be my most successful one of the Innistrad archetypes so far (though my Human deck is also shockingly powerful.)
Then we have Werewolves, which are a whole lot of fun. As we've discussed before, they have the Daybound/Nightbound keyword, which keywordifies the mechanic they've always had, though I think it might work a little differently. Now that there's a day and night gamestate (you start tracking it once you put a card that cares about it into play) you can get werewolves into play on their transformed side if it's night. There are a bunch of solid cards here that work well together, including a bit of wolf/werewolf tribal support. Still, even if you're not going specifically with a werewolf deck, some cards like Reckless Stormseeker/Storm-Charged Slasher are probably going to work in any red aggro deck that isn't specifically goblins-only. Tovolar, the legendary werewolf creature, works best in a werewolf deck, though his transformed ability to give creatures extra power and trample is probably useful in any Gruul aggro deck.
Finally, we come to humans. Humans are built for a go-wide strategy, which is reinforced by their ability keyword Coven. If you have three creatures with different powers (like, power and toughness power,) these will have some extra effect. Just taking the creatures I got from my pre-order packs and burning a couple wildcards, I've managed to build a pretty powerful deck. Intrepid Adversary (another of that cycle) combos quite well with Bereaved Survivor/Dauntless Avenger (specifically the transformed side) as well as a few other creatures with enters-the-battlefield effects. Being able to distribute +1/+1 counters with something like Luminarch Aspirant makes it a lot easier to get that Coven bonus, and the Selesnya-color legendaries, Sigarda and Katilda, are both really great for this archetype. (Katilda lets you use your humans to ramp, and then use that ramp to put +1/+1 counters on all of them. Sigarda helps you get more humans out of your deck.)
Now, not all the themes in this set are tribal. One theme is Flashback, which might not be a total build-around, but I did manage to put together a halfway decent mono-red burn deck with Thermo-Alchemist and some other cards that like you to cast damage spells.
It is, of course, far too early to see what kind of deck archetypes become dominant, or if this set will unseat any of the big ones that were dominating Standard 2022 (which is now just "Standard") before its launch. Green stompy has been a big thing since Eldraine, and survived the transition to 2022 Standard, but I wonder if it will evolve into a Gruul, werewolf-based deck archetype (Ranger Class and Werewolf Pack Leader already play into that.) We've also had some pretty strong black sacrifice themes, and I could imagine a monoblack zombie theme becoming pretty strong.
I love themes, so I'm always hopeful that some new mechanical theme in a set will become viable in the format. We'll see how things shake out.
No comments:
Post a Comment