It’s time to face your fears, Planewalkers.
You have entered a true house of horrors where the demon Valgavoth makes the rules. Step through the door and enter the world of scares that is our Duskmourn: House of Horrors Review.
Duskmourn: House of Horrors Review – The Plane
Much like with our review of Bloomburrow, this is our first time arriving on the plane of Duskmourn so I want to set the scene for everyone.
Ages ago Duskmourn was a high fantasy plane like any other, except it consisted of three realms. The physical realm and two immaterial realms – one inhabited by spirits and one by demons. Despite being high fantasy, very few people could use magic and even then they couldn’t perform very strong spells, so they turned their attention to summoning. (You can probably see where this is going.) People began to summon spirits to aid them and from here there was an explosion of technology. This is why Duskmourn seems to be our most modern setting yet.
Everything began to change when one day, someone ended up accidentally summoning the Elder Demon Valgavoth to the mortal plane. He began to consume everything (like the moth that he appears to be) and the owners of the house tried to banish. However, they lacked the power, and were only able to weaken him. Instead they bound him to a structure used for summoning and sealed him (where else) in the basement of the house. It was only a matter of time before his power was unleashed again.
While still bound to the house, Valgavoth’s influence on his surroundings grew and he was able to manipulate the boundaries of his prison until the house grew in size and soon encompassed the entire plane. You see folks, Duskmourn isn’t the name of the plane itself, that name has been lost to time. Duskmourn is the house; a living, plane-spanning entity that feeds and thrives on the fear of its inhabitants.
Duskmourn: House of Horrors Review – What’s In The Set
Duskmourn is the 102nd expansion for Magic: the Gathering and you’ll find 276 cards in the main set. As you search through packs for a way out, you’ll be able to find the usual assortment of special showcase cards as well as a collection of full art “Manor” basic lands depicting different, terrifying rooms found throughout the house. These can be found in a bundle or one of the four commander decks.
Duskmourn: House of Horrors Review – New and Returning Mechanics
As a whole, Duskmourn is an “Enchantments Matter” set, meaning there’s a higher number of enchantments in the set compared to other sets and you’ll see plenty of payoffs for playing them. On top of that, Wizards of the Coast have also created a new Enchantment type called…
Rooms
Rooms appear as split cards with two “doors” referring to either side of the card. A player can choose which side to cast and you’ll “unlock” that “door”. After that, the controller can then choose to unlock the other door on the card by paying it’s cost. Once both doors have been unlocked the Room itself will be considered “fully unlocked” and you can use both effects.
Eerie
Eerie is a new ability that goes hand in hand with Rooms. Eerie triggers when either an enchantment enters the battlefield on your side and when you fully unlock a room. It can basically be seen as a variation of the mechanic Constellation which made its appearance in the enchantment heavy block of Theros. The only difference being Constellation doesn’t care about unlocking doors.
Impending
Impending is a mechanic found exclusively on the Overlord cycle of cards in the set. They’re a set of large and terrifying Avatar Horrors that represent different parts of the house, it’s also notable that they’re enchantment creatures. The Impending mechanic works similar to the old mechanic of Suspend. You can cast the Overlords for their Impending cost which is much lower than their normal cost. Unlike Suspend where you exile the card, the Overlords will still enter the battlefield, just not as creatures. They’ll enter as enchantments with a number of Time Counters on them equal to their Impending number. At the beginning of your end step you remove a time counter from the enchantment and once the final time counter is removed, the Overlord will become a Creature.
Survival
Survival is another new mechanic and focuses on your creatures. Survival triggers if the creature is tapped when you start your second main phase, this is supposed to signify that they survived the horrors of combat. Though it is important to remember that your creatures don’t need to be tapped just from combat. If you can find a way to tap them without putting them in harm, Survival will still trigger.
Delirium
Our first returning mechanic, Delirium cares about what’s in your graveyard, specifically if you have four different types of cards in your graveyard. This is the first time in a standard set that this mechanic has made an appearance since its first showing in the Shadows Over Innistrad block. It’s also cool that in two back to back sets we’ve gotten powerful Graveyard centric mechanics since we had Threshold in Bloomburrow.
Manifest Dread
Manifest returns with a twist. You may remember our mention of Manifest during our review of Murders at Karlov Manor where we talked about the Cloak mechanic, well Manifest Dread is yet another spin on the mechanic. This time when you Manifest Dread, you look at the top two cards of your Library. You then choose one to go into your graveyard and the other to be placed face down as a 2/2 colourless creature which can be turned face up for its mana cost if it’s a creature. If it’s not a creature, sadly it has to stay face down forever. This mechanic goes perfectly with Delirium as it helps fill your Graveyard with different card types.
Duskmourn: House of Horrors Review – Showcase Art and A Very Special Guest
Duskmourn brings a bunch of special art to the table. To start we’ll talk about the showcase art frames unique to the plane. Unlike the whimsical frame from Bloomburrow, the Duskmourn “paranormal” showcase frame is very modern looking and makes the card look like a device similar to an EMF reader. Paying homage to classic horror photography, the Legendary Creatures get another showcase treatment by giving them “Double Exposure” art, giving their art some superimposed horrors. If you’re lucky you may even be able to get a raised foil version of our former Planeswalkers in the Double Exposure style. Keeping with the theme of additional beings in the picture, you may be able to find a “Lurking Evil” printing which shows the same art of a card, but with a monster stalking the character in the art. You can also let the monster get even closer with one of the “Mirror Monster” borderless art cards, these cards show the monster as a reflection, now within striking distance of our heroes. You may also be able to find special borderless, extended art cards of the Rooms and rare lands or even just your basic extended art cards.
Duskmourn is also the first set to include a set of Japanese Showcase cards. There are only ten different cards in this style, the five Overlords and the five Enduring creatures, benevolent spirits that when they die, will return to the field as enchantments. These cards are drawn by Japanese artists and feature the creatures with borderless artwork, no shading on the textbox and are designed in the style of art found in hobby shops. If you’re super lucky, you may even be able to find the new and unique “Fractured Foil” versions of these cards, but if you do that you’ve probably used up all your luck for the next year.
While we’re on the subject of Japanese artists, I can not go past talking about exactly who the designer of the big bad of the set, Valgavoth is. The designer is none other than the legendary artist Masahiro Ito! And if you don’t know his name, you certainly know his most well known creation – Pyramid Head. That’s right, Masahiro Ito is the background and creature designer for the original Silent Hill game and went on to be the lead creature designer and art director for Silent Hill 2 and 3. Wizards of The Coast released an exclusive interview with this amazing artist and one of the questions was just how he approached the artwork for this project.
“The character design for “Valgavoth” differed significantly from what I’m accustomed to. For this project, I aimed to create a style that, while grounded in a Western setting, also reflects a “Japanese artist’s” touch. I consciously used colour schemes not commonly employed by other artists. Given the overall dark tone of the piece, I interpreted the orange patterns on the surface as “luminescent.” I particularly enjoyed how these patterns reflected in the complex space around the multitude of arms. The piece was conceptualised with these multiple arms in mind. Considering the small size of the card illustrations, I designed it to ensure the space and character silhouettes were easily recognisable at a glance.
The work was completed over about four days, dedicating four hours a day. Although I was asked not to make many changes to the original design, I made slight adjustments to the surface patterns. It was challenging not to freely modify the design. Initially, I was drawing distorted, blurred facial expressions for the human characters, but I eventually abandoned that approach.”
I could gush on about how amazing the artwork is, but we need to move on with this review.
Duskmourn: House of Horrors Review – Commander Decks
As with each new set we get our 4 new commander decks with something special this time around, but we’ll get to that soon.
Miracle Worker
This black/white/blue deck has a big focus on Enchantments and also has a sub-theme using the Miracle mechanic as the commander allows you to manipulate the top cards of your library.
Death Toll
This black/green deck is completely focused around the Delirium mechanic. Fill your graveyard and reap the benefits.
Endless Punishment
There is no rest for this black/red deck. Constantly dealing damage is it’s go to, even when it’s not your turn.
Jump Scare!
This blue/green deck focuses on the Manifest mechanic with also a sub-theme on Landfall. This is probably the most different one out of the lot.
Now I did mention that there was something special with these Commander decks and that’s that they come with Scheme cards for the Archenemy format. What’s Archenemy you ask? It’s a special way to play a multiplayer game like Commander. One player is designated the Archenemy while the other three are the heroes and it’s 3v1. The Archenemy has a deck of Scheme cards which they can draw from at the beginning of their pre-combat main phase. These scheme cards will give an effect that gives the Archenemy a buff for the turn. It’s a fun way to play that needs to be visited more often. Each Commander deck for Duskmourn comes with 10 scheme cards to use.Duskmourn: House of Horrors Review – Conclusion
I’m very happy with this set. The setting is unique and while it’s not high or dark fantasy like it has been in the past, I think the theme works very well. It gives homage to the type of horror many of us grew up with and plays with the fears we’re more likely to come across. Creepy dolls, killer clowns, hockey mask wearing psychos, these are the things that can really send a chill down your spine. The art, the themes and even the story really just ticked all the boxes for what I was searching for in a new set. I hope everyone enjoys the set as much as I do!
A review pack was kindly provided by Wizards of the Coast for our Duskmourn: House of Horrors review. If you enjoyed this review, continue down the burrow into more of our Magic the Gathering reviews and join us on the Qualbert Discord to chat all things Magic!
