I’m back from having a baby! Technically, my wife had the baby, if you’re a stickler for details. Either way, I’m tired. Almost too tired to be excited about a new set… almost!
From a mechanics point of view, The Lost Caverns of Ixalan is the best looking limited set that I can recall. Everything looks really cohesive and synergistic, with a lot of intricacies to discover! Let’s dig in!
Discover
For those familiar with the established cascade mechanic, it’s pretty much the same, with one key difference. Discover provides the option to put the card into your hand if you don’t choose to cast it. This is a huge upgrade to cascade. Not only does it provide the user much less of a headache in both deck construction and calculating odds of hitting certain cards, it also can avoid awkward situations like revealing a counterspell or combat trick.
Craft
The craft mechanic appears across all five colors, though is most prominent in blue and white. Keep in mind that each card with craft requires different materials, like Kaslem’s Stonetree requiring a Cave, or Saheeli’s Lattice requiring one or more Dinosaurs.
In some ways, craft reminds me of the Adventure mechanic. Neither side of the card is great for the cost, but if you can use both, they are. While exiling cards from your graveyard when crafting is ideal, the option to craft with things in your graveyard or the battlefield is huge, and will add some enjoyable complexity to the games.
Descend
Descend is a new keyword that cares about permanents either being or entering your graveyard, from anywhere. The mechanic appears across all five colors, though most often in black, and least in white. Descend is incredibly easy to activate, with an abundance of cards that sacrifice themselves (or others), explorers (more on them soon), and even permanents with cycling! Powerful uncommons like Stinging Cave Crawler, Coati Scavenger, and Council of Echoes care about the amount of permanents in your graveyard to get a bonus.
Explore
The explore mechanic is back, and thankfully, Wildgrowth Walker isn’t! Explore is primarily within green, nonexistent in red, and enables the new mechanics craft and descend. There are few explore-specific payoffs, which makes sense given how strong the synergies are in this set.
Landcycling Dinosaurs
I’m happy to see a cycle of landcyclers. Not only do these creatures help with mana-fixing, they will trigger descend and can serve as crafting material from the graveyard with cards like Jade Seedstones, Visage of Dread, or Saheeli’s Lattice, as they are all Dinosaurs.
Map Tokens
The new Map tokens help one of your creatures explore at sorcery speed. The mechanic isn’t very prevalent, only showing up on a handful of cards, but it’s worth mentioning a couple of rules that may not be intuitive. When sacrificing the token, it will not trigger descend, as descend counts permanent cards, not tokens. Also, the explore effect can fizzle if your target dies with the effect on the stack.
Caves
Cave is an interesting new land subtype. The cycle of “Hidden” Caves with discover seems like a welcome addition to almost every deck. I’ll be happy to play about two on average, with the activation technically costing six mana at sorcery speed, with the potential to make little to no impact on the game. That sounds pretty bad, but the opportunity cost is very low, as replacing a basic land for a tapped land is far from punishing, outside aggressive decks.
Aside from the discover Caves, there are many great reasons to go spelunking. Calamitous Cave-In (Gates Ablaze), Bat Colony, and Gargantuan Leech are among some of the most powerful Cave payoffs. I think there is room for a three- to five-color Cave deck to thrive, and I’ll most definitely try to figure it out!
I’m excited to play in the Prerelease this weekend. Hope to see you there!
Lose and Learn, Learn and Win!
