Duskmourn: House of Horrors First Impression

 This is my jam.

While I'm a real wimp when it comes to horror movies - and there were such scary horror movies in the 1980s (though I don't know how much my feelings toward that are because I was born in that decade and thus my first exposure to horror as a genre was largely what had come out then and in the early 90s) I've always been a big fan of the horror aesthetic - frankly, I blame Magic the Gathering for that, when I pulled a Royal Assassin in my very first mixed Revised Edition deck box and learned to love playing Black.

I am also, as shown many times on this blog, a big fan of genre-bending fantasy. I was thrilled when Kamigawa Neon Dynasty reimagined modern Kamigawa as a magitek-cyberpunk world, with real technology in concert with magic. Duskmourn embraces the idea of television screens and other modern tech, though filtered through a different world's alternate history.

But beyond that, this has some serious Stephen King vibes - a house taken over by a demonic presence that grew and grew until in consumed its entire world.

As is always the case with new sets, the meta-game takes a few weeks to shift, and I fear we won't be free of the plague of aggro decks until the Dominaria/Phyrexia year rotates out of Standard.

But the deck I've found myself enjoying the most is built around Rooms. (Found on MTGA Zone).

Rooms are a new enchantment type, and Room cards let you cast one side of it or the other, but once it's on the board, you can "unlock" the other side to get the effects of both. Many simply have an enter-the-battlefield (or I guess now just "enter") effect, but this deck is built around Central Elevator / Promising Stairs as a win condition (and in my experience, it's been the condition that usually wins the game for me).

Promising Stairs has you surveil 1 during your upkeep, and then if you have eight separate rooms unlocked (which could be just four room cards on your board if you unlock them all) you win the game. (I believe they have to be unique rooms - while you can double up on multiple copies of the same room, you'll need eight unique ones here).

The deck is primarily in Izzet colors, with a few white spells to help facilitate things and maintain board control. I honestly wonder if there's a more elegant and efficient true Izzet deck, given that all of our rooms are either red or blue (or red/blue) but we'd be giving up some important control elements, like Inuqisitive Glimmer (which reduces the cost of our Rooms, whether casting them or unlocking them) and Ghostly Dancers, which can help retrieve Rooms that have been lost to removal or, more likely, dumped in the graveyard on early turns via surveil to dig for spells we can actually afford. (The Dancers also give us an alternate win condition, quite efficiently producing 3/1 spirit tokens that can swing in or help with control by being scary blockers).

One of the important rooms in the deck is Smoky Lounge (which comes with Misty Salon,) which generates RR on our upkeep that can only be spent on casting or unlocking Rooms.

In a weird way, while this is sort of a control deck, it's also vaguely aggro in the sense that you have a lot of parts that ramp up to get as many rooms out there as you can as quick as you can. Because most decks don't have a ton of enchantment removal, you're kind of racing the clock to get eight rooms opened up.

Here's what I especially love about the deck: It has a real flavor to it.

Duskmourn is a setting where an entire plane has been swallowed up by a single mega-haunted house. And I imagine, in this planeswalker-duel of a game, that winning with this deck is accomplished by successfully trapping the opponent within the labyrinth of the house. We don't even kill them - we just swallow them up to the point where they can't escape.

There's certainly some removal, largely in the form of direct damage from our red cards, and a delaying tactic with Meat Locker, one of our blue rooms, which taps a creature and puts two stun counters on them. But for the most part, we're just trying to get our haunted house assembled before the opponent can take us down. And I think that's neat!