Magic: The Gathering – Dark Ascension

I

 think, if I’m not mistaken, the pre-release of the newest Magic set happened this past weekend.

You know what? Yes, it did. And it was a dark, dark day to be human.

As usual, when the Monday after the pre-release comes around, so too does this tutorial article. Today I’ll be discussing the new mechanics introduced in Dark Ascension. If you want to know more about the returning mechanics from Innistrad instead, you may read this article here.

And before I get ahead of myself, you can view the entire set, thankfully spoiled in all their pretty glory, by following this link.

Okay. So curses, flashback, and morbid have been covered in that previous article. What has not been covered are ‘fateful hour’ and ‘undying’. Fateful hour is like morbid. When something happens at the right time, you get a bonus. With morbid, a creature needs to die first in order for you to get the bonus. With fateful hour, you life needs to be 5 or less to get the bonus.

Gather the Townsfolk is rather straightforward. When you cast it, you either get two Human tokens or five Human tokens, depending on your life total. It can get a bit complicate if you opponent decides to let you gain life out of the blue, but that’s basically how fateful hour works.

For Thraben Doomsayer, the moment you have 5 or less life, your creatures get bigger. The moment you have more life, the bonus goes away, and depending on how much damage your creatures have during a turn, some may die.

Now we come to undying.

I like it.

A lot.

For those that played during the Shadowmoor period, undying should feel familiar because it’s basically the ‘persist’ mechanic on steroids. A creature with undying means that when it dies, it comes back to the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter. If it dies a second time, it goes away for good.

There are, of course, ways to make a creature keep coming back. An undying creature only comes back to the battlefield if it died without a +1/+1 counter on it. So if you have ways to keep removing that counter, you undying creatures will come back forever.

I like it.

A lot more now.

Before I end this article, let me mention something regarding some of the double-faced cards. For example:

This is a twist on previous double-faced cards. Before this, the only DFCs were creatures. Now, some creatures turn into enchantments, and some artifacts turn into creatures. Bear in mind, the ruling for DFCs hasn’t changed just because the cards themselves have.

And that’s it for this brief tutorial on Dark Ascension. See you guys again when Avacyn Restored comes to our gaming tables.