When Bloomburrow released, it was a bit of a polarizing set. Some people loved the cutesy animal aesthetic, whereas some people didn’t gel with it. Well, if cutesy isn’t your thing, then the newest Magic: the Gathering set, Duskmourn: House of Horror, might be your jam! But what’s it like to play? I will get to that soon.
A House of Horror?
Yup, the newest plane is a giant haunted house. There was a big baddy called Valgavoth who was imprisoned in a house, so what did he do? Scary things. He basically expanded the house to engulf the entire plane, and with its magic, he filled the rooms with all kinds of horrifying things. Not scary things, but scary things involving technology, so the theming is based on all kinds of horror from the early days through to 80’s horror.
Nashi from Kamigawa followed the voice of his dead adopted mother, Tamiyo, through a door. This door is a clever trick that Valgavoth can play where he can open doors on other planes to trick people into entering his horrifying house. As such, a rescue party gets together to go through the door and find him. The story follows this party as they go into this twisted house. There are a bunch of side stories that help give context to this weird plane. That’s a good thing, because the more I read/listened about this story, the more I was intrigued.
Duskmourn: House of Horror is a far more interesting story than I was expecting.
But what about playing it?
There are a bunch of cool new and returning mechanics here. The biggest thing is room cards. We have seen split cards before; sometimes they give you two options to choose from, like in Karlov Manor or adventure cards in Wilds of Eldraine, where you can play an instant or sorcery, and then the creature goes into exile to be played later on. The room cards, on the other hand, have you play one side of the card. Then the room stays on the battlefield, with the other half being behind a “locked door.” You can then pay that other half’s mana cost to play the second half of the spell.
Both sides of the card don’t have to be beneficial to justify using the card. You may only plan to use one half, but the second door offers some flexibility that you may not plan to use, but it’s an option. Another keyword, Eerie, triggers whenever an enchantment you control enters and whenever you fully unlock a Room. So this one is nicely tied in with rooms.
Manifest Dread allows you to look at the top two cards of your library. One goes in your graveyard, and the second you put face down as a 2/2 creature. So the disguise mechanic in a way. You can then flip it up at any time for the card’s mana cost.
Then there is survival. This basically means the card’s ability triggers if your card is tapped in your second main phase. So in essence, they survived the attacking phase. The obvious way to do this is to tap it when you attack, but there are other ways to tap a creature if you don’t want them to die to your opponent’s big blocker.
Impending is like other previously used keywords. It basically means you can pay less mana to drop a creature down, but it has a number of stun counters on it. Once they are through, your big creature is ready to roll!
A lot of the mechanics in Duskmourn: House of Horror are cleverly on theme and fun to play.
The art of Duskmourn
As mentioned, Duskmourn: House of Horror has a whole bunch of cool horror themes, which has resulted in some dark and twisted card designs. These look cool enough as they are, but added to this, there are lurking evil cards. These are the same cards, except there may be something slightly different, like a demon creeping subtly into the top of the card.
Then there are the usually full-art cards, of which the room cards look especially cool in. But the rest of the designs are where they shine. There are the mirror monster cards, which have a monster sneaking up behind a survivor or appearing in a reflection like their glasses. Then there are the paranormal frame cards, which are alt art cards where the monsters are like they are on an old school TV but with more awesome colours.
The stars of the show are the double exposure cards, which are full-art cards that look absurdly cool. These can also appear as textured foils in Collector Boosters. Then there are Japan Showcase cards, which are super rare, which sucks because they look insanely cool. Like Bloomburrow, I have yet to see one in person.
In short, I love the visual style applied in Duskmourn: House of Horror.
The Commander preconstructed decks
There are the usual ways to buy the cards, including a new Nightmare Bundle, which hasn’t been released yet. But as normal, one of my favourite MTG products are the Commander precons. When I play commander, I almost exclusively use precons.
For Duskmourn, I have been playing Endless Punishment and Death Toll. Death Toll is a green black deck revolving around the delirium mechanic, which involves exiling cards from your graveyard to return one to the battlefield. This is a cool idea and fits well with the theme of Duskmourn. The annoying part is that there aren’t a lot of cards in the deck that benefit from the mechanic the way I wish it would. Being able to pull big boppers from the graveyard at no cost could be so scary for your opponents. On the whole, it’s a fun deck that is missing some wow factor.
Endless Punishment, on the other hand, is a Red Black deck with the big bag Volgavoth as the main commander. Volgavoth gets stronger, and you get to draw cards when you deal damage to an opponent. With heaps of cards that cause your opponents to take damage, your commander can get big and dangerous quickly, which is heaps of fun.
The other two options I haven’t played with are Miracle Worker which is a white, blue, and black deck, and Jump Scare which is green and blue. I haven’t played with these decks, so I can’t comment too much on how they play, but they look a lot more fun than Death Toll.
The other super awesome part of these decks is the Archenemy cards. These allow you to play a version of Commander where one person is the Archenemy. It is everyone else’s goal to beat the Archenemy and the archenemy needs to knock everyone else off. It isn’t a 3 vs. 1 match, though. The archenemy flips one of the archenemy cards, and this allows them some kind of ability for that turn. For example, “Choose your champion” has the archenemy choose a player, then that player chooses one player to be their champion, and only the champion can attack or cast spells for that cycle of turns. The archenemy is massively overpowered, so the other three better be ready to fight.
I love this addition, as it gives you another way to play Commander. These bonus game modes in commander decks are a massive win and make this a slam dunk of a product. The commander decks still don’t come with the life total wheels or the thick extra commander cards anymore. The trade-off is you get an extra full-art foil card in your deck, and in the case of Duskmourne, this cool new way to play. This is a sweet trade-off. They also come with collector booster sample packs which give you a couple of collector booster exclusive cards. These can be hit and miss, but since I love alternative arts, it’s still the first thing I open when I open a commander precon.
Should you play Duskmourn?
As far as the set, theme, and mechanics go, I love Duskmourn. It’s creepy, clever, and all kinds of fun. The commander decks are a no-brainer as they are generally well built and fun to play, and the addition of archenemy is a massive win. There is so much to love about this set, so I hope you love horror, as this is a banger!
Some very minor issues aside, Duskmourn is a very well designed and awesome set. If horror really isn't your thing it may not be fore you, but it's a really well designed in an interesting new plane!
