Over the holiday weekend, the Wizards of the Coast team officially presented Twilightthe next set of cards for Magic: The Gathering. Inspired by slasher films and classic horror cliches of the 1980s, the action takes place in a completely new setting – a huge and mysterious haunted house. To sell the idea of a haunted house, the designers came up with a new card type called a “room.” Here’s how room cards work and how they help reinforce the spooky theme of the set.
According to Senior Art Director Ovidio Cartagena, the plane of Duskmourn itself has a tragic backstory.
“This was once a normal airplane, with luck and people in it,” said Cartagena during the livestream presentation“But a demon that was imprisoned in the house took it over. And his way of taking power was to expand the house until there was nothing left but him and the house. And you will feel his presence everywhere – the name of this demon is Valgavoth.”
The most important building block of Valgovoth’s empire are the rooms mentioned above, and these rooms have the form of horizontal cards with two fields.
“Rooms were our biggest attempt; our most striking mechanic of the set, you could say,” said lead game designer Annie Sardelis. “They’re enchantments and they ask you to unlock things.”
For example, if you want to play Dollmaker’s Shop/Porcelain Gallery (see above), you first choose which side of the card you want to play. If that’s Dollmaker’s Shop, tap a white and an extra mana to put the card into play as an enchantment. The other side of the card hasn’t been cast yet, so it’s not active. Suffice it to say, though, that the door to the Porcelain Gallery enters play along with Dollmaker’s Shop, and can be opened later.
“Wherever you want, you can pay the other side’s mana value to [it],” said Sardellis. “So it really gives you that flexibility, that feeling of moving from place to place. We really wanted to have two effects on one space because we wanted to feel like we were expressing the true massiveness [of Duskmourn]and what lies behind every door in the setting.”
Duskmourn launched on August 19th with the first in a series of narrative pieces, cheekily called Followpublished on the official Magic website. Card previews are currently available on several channels, including here at Polygon, where we will be publishing some of them later this week. In the meantime, Twilight comes in Magic: The Gathering – Arena on September 24th and in retail as a physical product on September 27th.
