I’m very excited about the upcoming horror-themed Duskmourn: House of Horror! I’m a lifelong fan of horror, and last week I wrote a bit about where the intersection of horror and Magic: The Gathering played into my fandom’s development long ago, so if you didn’t see that, be sure to check it out below. It even has links to two horror stories I wrote.
The debut video and previews for Duskmourn: House of Horror kicked off this past Saturday at PAX West, so today I wanted to offer my impressions on what we saw from Saturday. Let’s stick together, since splitting up is always a bad idea, and make a run for it!
New Legends!
For Commander fans, we always immediately eyeball the new legendary creatures we could build decks around, and the debut previews showed us cards from many of the main characters from the story.
Valgavoth, Terror Eater
The splashiest of what we’ve seen so far is Valgavoth, Terror Eater, the villain of the story. Valgavoth is a Demon so malignantly evil that it’s warped the haunted house he’s trapped inside such that it’s consumed the entire plane of existence… and it’s hungry for more!
Valgavoth, Terror Eater costs a whopping nine mana to cast, which means that playing it as your commander is not for the faint of heart, but you can bet it’s going to be a star in the 99 for any Reanimator-style deck. Think Sefris of the Hidden Ways or Grist, Voracious Larva. If I pick up a copy, I’ll probably slot it into my Old Stickfingers deck, which randomly shuffles ten of twenty big monsters into the deck for reanimation shenanigans that’s a surprise to everyone, including me! Cheating this card onto the battlefield will be a massive problem for your opponents. That ward cost will be very problematic for any deck that doesn’t naturally play a bunch of sacrificial fodder, and the lifelink attached to a huge flying body makes racing with damage a tough proposition.
Tyvar, the Pummeler
Tyvar, the Pummeler is yet another excellent card to slot into the 99 of any Elf typal deck you want to run. But it also works in any green creature deck that runs some number of creatures that have a high power. He’s pretty cool as a commander too, where you’ll want to “go wide” with tokens alongside some large creatures to make his activated ability potentially lethal. Notably, you’ll also want some ways to give your creatures trample – the excellent Surrak and Goreclaw springs to mind, with six power too!
Zimone, All-Questioning
I truly appreciate the design restraint shown on a Simic Commander with Zimone, All-Questioning, which notably doesn’t have either “draw a card” or “put a land onto the battlefield” – or both – printed anywhere on it. It does care about land drops, which so many Simic decks tend to leverage, but in a way that’s actually restrained, since the ability creates a legendary Fractal creature token, so you can’t chain a bunch of land triggers to make a bunch of Primo, the Indivisible tokens unless you’ve turned off the legendary rule with something like Mirror Box.
In a flavor home-run, Zimone requires the player pay attention to the number of lands and only triggers when you control a prime number of lands. The reminder text covers all the prime numbers that you could possibly need to know in the vast majority of games, but if you want to go bigger, Scryfall had this helpful note:
Winter, Misanthropic Guide
Winter, Misanthropic Guide offers another commander you can build around to Jund ‘Em Out, but before you build a deck around Winter, you’ll want to make sure your play group is okay with it. While Winter’s ability for all players to draw extra cards is nice, the delirium ability will be very oppressive if you really work hard at diversifying the card types in your deck. Add in the ward ability, and you have a potentially very divisive card in your command zone.
The Jolly Balloon Man
Lastly we have The Jolly Balloon Man, which strikes me as a direct call-out to Pennywise, the supernatural villain from Stephen King’s book It. But it doesn’t require knowledge of that story and character to be creeped out, since people have been scared of Clowns for a long, long time. The artwork suggests The Jolly Balloon Man makes Balloons out of heads of creatures, which is definitely horrific!
Mechanically, the card is a great build-around, reminding me a little bit of my own Feldon of the Third Path deck where you’ll want cards that have sweet triggered abilities when they enter, but for Jolly, the size of the creature isn’t important, since the copy is a 1/1 flying Balloon and won’t be necessarily threatening anyone’s life total. Simply search for creatures with “enters” in the text box, and you’ll have no end of sweet creatures you’ll want in the deck, with Solemn Simulacrum, Sun Titan, and Dockside Extortionist all at the top of the list.
Enchantment Creatures
Enchantment creatures are awesome, and Duskmourn seems to have no shortage of them!
Enduring Curiosity is another spin on Coastal Piracy, but the flash ability gives it some flexible trickiness where you can cast it after your opponents have let a few of your small creatures through unblocked. It also has nice resilience to removal, returning to the battlefield after dying but as a noncreature enchantment.
Enduring Innocence has the same sort of resilience and offers white some conditional (but no less appreciated) card drawing.
The white entry in the mythic rare “impending” cycle, Overlord of the Mistmoors, gives a white spin on Grave Titan, but since the two creature tokens it creates have flying, you could argue it’s even better.
Fear of Lost Teeth’s effect is probably too small for most black Commander decks outside of ones that care about multiple card types, but I can definitely see Fear of Immobility showing up in decks that can blink creatures regularly.
White Cards
Interestingly, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) previewed a ton of white cards relative to the other colors, so I’ve grouped the ones I haven’t yet covered here.
Dollmaker’s Shop features the brand-new Room enchantment subtype. You can cast either side of the Room to unlock it, and later you can spend the mana for the other side to also unlock it too. Dollmaker’s Shop is sure to make token and go-wide decks happy! I’m a huge fan of good mana sinks in Commander, so I’m definitely looking forward to seeing all the various Room cards.
Veteran Survivor introduces the survival ability word, which triggers at the beginning of your second main phase if the creature is tapped. This is a flavorful mechanic since you get the survival trigger by attacking with the creature and surviving combat, but there are many other ways to tap Veteran Survivor during your precombat main phase—crewing a Vehicle or a Mount, or paying the convoke cost on something like Knight-Errant of Eos.
We get two more high-quality removal spells in white, with Unwanted Remake joining the ranks of one-mana instant-speed creature kill. Letting the creature’s controller manifest dread can be risky, since they get two looks at potentially manifesting a creature card, but I personally find that a fun upside for casual Commander play.
Split Up offers a highly mana-efficient mass removal spell whose symmetry you can mitigate by cast before or after you tap your creatures to attack. While I do like Split Up for Commander, I am not at all happy to have yet another white mass removal spell hitting Standard, making the environment even more hostile to midrange creature strategies.
Other Cards
Okay, let’s sprint towards the exits by hitting singular cards!
Hauntwoods Shrieker
Hauntwoods Shrieker definitely caught my eye as a green mage! But as someone who doesn’t have an infinite budget to buy Magic cards, I’m not looking forward to seeing how much this ends up costing as a high-rate mythic rare. My current face-down creatures-matters deck is built around Yedora, Grave Gardener, but it’s a budget deck, and I imagine this won’t fit in there due to the cost. Still, any non-budget Morph deck will love this card.
Razorkin Needlehead
Outside of Assassin or Mercenary typal decks, I imagine Razorkin Needlehead will make a bigger splash in Standard than Commander, unless you have a player in your pod who draws an inordinate number of extra cards each time you sit down to play. I do really like the mirror monster frame style for this!
Norin, Swift Survivalist
Norin the Wary was the utterer of a lot of things that ended up as flavor text from the earliest days of Magic, on cards like Jade Statue and Goblin Shrine, and in Time Spiral, he got his very own Magic card! That card was super-weird in that it wasn’t actually any good at attacking or even blocking, since it exiles itself whenever a player casts a spell or a creature attacks. Instead, you wanted it in a deck where having a creature exile and come back over and over was a benefit – think Purphoros, God of the Forge!
The mechanic was perfect flavor for a character well known for being incredibly “wary” of just about everything, so it’s super-fun to see that Norin, is back and this time he’s been trapped in this most horrific situation imaginable. Norin, Swift Survivalist can actually attack now, and if he gets blocked, you can exile him and redeploy him this turn. He even features the Coward creature type, which calls back Boldwyr Intimidator, Kargan Intimidator, and even Pyrophobia – which has flavor text quoting Norin the Wary!
Demonic Counsel
Demonic Tutor was the original “tutor” card, showing up in Alpha through Revised before WotC decided it was way too mana-efficient for such a powerful effect. There have been a ton of black variations on the card over the years, and in my opinion Demonic Counsel is one of the coolest of them. If you do the work to meet the delirium threshold of four or more card types among cards in your graveyard, you get exactly Demonic Tutor—two mana, go get any card in your deck and put it into your hand. If you don’t have delirium, it searches specifically for a Demon card and puts it in your hand. Any black Commander deck can easily put a couple of good Demon cards in their deck in case they want to cast this before they have delirium. Think Vilis, Broker of Blood; Kardur, Doomscourge; or even Rune-Scarred Demon!
Scrabbling Skullcrab
Oh boy, yet another one-mana Crab that mills players! Luckily, the eerie ability of Scrabbling Skullcrab is much less abusable than the landfall abilities of Hedron Crab and Ruin Crab, and I’m not sure how much we’ll be seeing this in Commander.
Peer Past the Veil
An instant-speed way to discard and draw cards can do solid work in a lot of decks, but Peer Past the Veil has the constraint of drawing X cards, where X is the number of card types among cards in your graveyard. The card types that can appear on cards in a graveyard are artifact, battle, creature, enchantment, instant, kindred, land, planeswalker, and sorcery, so the maximum you can draw is nine cards – which is pretty darn good! I have a Disa the Restless Lhurgoyf deck which has a broad range of card types in the deck to turbocharge the various Lhurgoyfs, so I might try it out there.
Kaito, Bane of Nightmares
Finally, we have a planeswalker with ninjutsu. How cool is that? Its +1 loyalty ability actually creates an emblem that boosts your Ninjas by +1/+1, which is incredible in a Ninja deck. I have a Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow deck that hasn’t changed much in recent years, but I think I’ll need to find room for this new version of Kaito!
Disturbing Mirth
The artwork is super-creepy and reminds me of Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies. Is Disturbing Mirth something you’d play in an Aristocrats-style deck, since it lets you sacrifice another enchantment or creature to draw two cards? Keep in mind that you can sacrifice it to the bargain mechanic from Wilds of Eldraine, like Beseech the Mirror and Realm-Scorcher Hellkite, to manifest dread.
Valgavoth’s Lair
Baba Lysaga, Night Witch decks and other decks that care about card types get a new toy with the second enchantment land after Urza’s Saga. Valgavoth’s Lair is notably less powerful than Urza’s Saga, but it’ll be a niche player in decks that care about enchantments entering the battlefield.
Which cards that we’ve seen from Duskmourn: House of Horror are you most creeped out by or excited about?
Talk to Me
Do me a solid and follow me on Twitter! I run polls and start conversations about Commander all the time, so get in on the fun! You can also find my LinkTree on my profile page there with links to all my content.
I’d also love it if you followed my Twitch channel TheCompleteCommander, where I do Commander, Brawl, and sometimes other Magic-related streams when I can. If you can’t join me live, the videos are available on demand for a few weeks on Twitch, but I also upload them to my YouTube channel. You can also find the lists for my paper decks over on Archidekt if you want to dig into how I put together my own decks and brews.
And lastly, I just want to say: let us love each other and stay healthy and happy.
Visit my Decklist Database to see my decklists and the articles where they appeared!
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