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very now and then the people at Wizards do something crazy that shakes up the way Magic is played. The Innistrad expansion contains one thing that does just that.
Hallo and welcome back to another instalment of The Planeswalking Peddler’s Magic Tutorial, Innistrad edition. As usual, we’ll be looking at the mechanics of the new set and I’ll guide you through how they work.
The first thing that I want to draw your attention to are double-faced cards. Such a thing was hitherto unheard of in the Magic world. Here’s an example:
Double-faced cards don’t have backs, instead they have pictures and texts on both sides. A double-faced card always enters the battlefield sun-side up. The sunny side has the sun symbol on the top left corner of the card (see Thraben Sentry). After transformation, you flip over the card so that the moon-side is up (Thraben Militia has the moon symbol on the top left corner).
Some cards flip only one way. Others can flip back and forth between the two sun / moon sides. Be sure to read the cards carefully to see which ones only flip once and which ones can flip multiple times.
That’s the very basic explanation of double-faced cards. But how do you play them in a deck? There are two ways. One is you use opaque sleeves to sleeve up your entire deck. That way, all the cards look the same when shuffling your library. But if you don’t have opaque sleeves, or choose not to use them, you will have to use this card:
This is a checklist card and has a real Magic back. You’ll use it as a proxy of the double-faced card you’ll want to play. To designate which double-faced card the checklist is representing, you make a mark in the circle above the name of the card, then insert the power / toughness value into the empty space on the bottom right. After that, you can shuffle the card into your Magic deck as normal.
When you cast your double-faced card, instead of putting the checklist onto the battlefield, you take away the checklist and put the real double-faced card onto the field. When the double-faced card dies, you take it away and put the checklist into your graveyard.
Just a bit of a heads up; things can get a bit messy with double-faced cards since it’s still an experimental concept. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or worry too much about making mistakes. Take it slow and steady and you should be all right.
And now, curses.
Curses are simply aura enchantments that enchant players. A player enchanted by a curse aura will suffer a detrimental effect from the curse. Some other cards will refer to curse auras and might do certain things to them. Other than that, curse auras work the same as normal auras.
Flashback is a returning mechanic. It only appears on cards that are instants and sorceries. Flashback means that if an instant or sorcery is in your graveyard, you can cast it again. If you do, remove it from the game after that. This means that you get double value out of you flashback cards since you can cast them twice, once from your hand, the next from the graveyard. Note that if the flashback card is a sorcery, you can only cast it whenever you can cast a sorcery, so you can only flash it back during your own main phase, when nothing is on the stack.
Now we go to morbid.
Morbid is an ability word that indicates that if a creature died this turn, do something. That’s all. For example, in the case of Reaper from the Abyss, if a creature died this turn, the Reaper will kill another creature. In the case of Morkrut Banshee, if a creature died this turn, you get to potentially kill another creature by giving -4/-4 to its stats.
Finally we are introduced to a ‘new’ evergreen keyword called fight. The fight mechanic has been in the game for years but only now is getting recognised with a specific keyword.
When two creatures fight, what happens is this: both fighting creatures will deal damage to the other, and that damage is equal to their power. So if your 4/4 creature fights with a 2/1 creature, your 4/4 will deal 4 damage to the other creature while the other creature will deal 2 damage to yours. The outcome of this fights is obvious: your creature will be victorious, the opponent’s will be dead.
We pretty much covered all the five mechanics of Innistrad. There’s actually plenty more to say about double-faced cards, so if you want to know about them in detail, visit the following link at the Wizards website:
http://www.wizards.com/magic/tcg/article.aspx?x=mtg/tcg/innistrad/dfcrules
Until next time, don’t be afraid to ascend into darkness.
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