Top of the Duskmourning, Part 2

Last week, I introduced the Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams, showed off some cool previews, and talked about the beginning of Duskmourn: House of Horror design. Today, I will introduce you to the Set Design and Commander Design teams, preview a new card, and continue the story of Duskmourn's design.

In Part 1, I talked about the creation of the enchantment theme to capture the mood and tone of the set, and then talked about the many ways the design incorporated the enchantment themes, from the Room cards, to the eerie ability word, to the rare cycle of impending creatures, to the Glimmer enchantment creature tokens, and beyond. Today, I'm going to talk about the non-enchantment part of the set's design.

More Mourn-ing People

But before I do that, I want to introduce you to some of the people that brought this set to life. Normally, the lead designer of the set introduces the Set Design team, but Jules Robins, the set design lead of Duskmourn, has since left Wizards. Instead, Jadine Klomparens, a member of the Set Design team and who oversaw the set's play design, is introducing everyone.

In addition to the Set Design team, Duskmourn also had a Commander Design team. Here's the lead designer of the team, Annie Sardelis, introducing herself and the team to you all.

A Dreadful Manifestation

Now it's time to talk about the non-enchantment related mechanics in the set. The first one I'll talk about is the one other mechanic we handed off from vision design: manifest dread.

One of the key things you want in a horror-themed set are card designs that invoke fear. Ideally, it's great to have a whole mechanic or two that can do it. In original Innistrad, we had transforming double-faced cards (TDFCs) that could turn into scarier things and morbid, a mechanic that meant any death could trigger something bad for you. The one thing Innistrad didn't do was create a sense of mystery. Yeah, that TDFC could become scarier, but at least you knew what that scarier thing was. We wanted to make a mechanic where your opponent didn't know what was face down, where that creature could become something dreadful.

With that prompt, we looked back at previous mechanics to see what had captured that feeling. Morph initially jumped to mind. You'd play a 2/2 that could become many different things, but that wasn't a complete surprise. You didn't know what exactly it could become, but it was limited to a subset. Was there something that you completely didn't know? That got us to manifest.

Morph was created by the rules team as they were figuring out how to make two Alpha cards, Camouflage and Illusionary Mask, work in the rules. When they pitched it to me, I was looking for some new mechanics for Onslaught and felt the mechanic played nicely with the typal theme. Morph was popular when it was released and would later be brought back in Time Spiral block.

We would bring it back for a second time in Khans of Tarkir. The set had a quirky block construction of large-small-large, where the small set drafted with each large set. We needed a flavorful reason to explain why and ended up with a time-travel story where the main character, Sarkhan Vol, goes back in time to save Ugin, resulting in Sarkhan saving all of the Dragons of Tarkir. Because the second set was back in time, we thought it would be cool to create a mechanic that felt like proto-morph.

The first ever Exploratory team (Ethan Fleischer, Shawn Main, and myself) came up with manifest. You would put cards, usually from your library, face down onto the battlefield as colorless 2/2 creatures and could turn them face up, if they were creatures, by paying their mana cost. Unlike morph, your opponent had no idea what the card was, because it could literally be any card in your deck. That was the feeling we were going for.

The one problem with manifest is that the cool part of the mechanic didn't happen enough. Forty percent of a deck is usually land, and at least another ten percent is often noncreatures, which meant you only manifested a face-down card that was a creature about half the time. The word manifest was good for a horror set, and we liked the general play pattern. Was there a way to make the cool part happen more?

Here's the tweaked version of manifest we handed off from Vision Design:

Manifest Evil (Look at the top three cards of your library and put one onto the battlefield face down as a 2/2 Horror creature. Put the rest on the bottom of your library. Turn it face up any time for its mana cost if it's a creature card.)

This version wasn't too far from the printed version. There were four main changes:

• Bottom of your library changed to your graveyard.
  Delirium was eventually added to the set, and having a byproduct of manifest dread putting cards in your graveyard helped fuel delirium. It also shortened the template, which is something we're always looking to do.
• Three cards went to two cards.
  Vision Design started with looking at the top three cards of your library, because we wanted to make sure you found a creature most of the time. It turns out two cards accomplished that task well enough, and discarding two cards made reaching delirium a little too easy.
• The face-down creature went from being a Horror to being nameless.
  Vision Design had the face-down creature be a Horror to tie into the afraid ability word, which I talked about last week. For a short time, it was even an enchantment creature. When afraid became eerie and Horror didn't matter mechanically anymore, the creature type was dropped. We did spent some time talking through whether the face-down creature was supposed to have ward to line up with  Murders at Karlov Manor, but Play Design said it wasn't necessary, so we dropped it.
• The name changed from manifest evil to manifest dread.
  The name change came from the Creative team who wanted the mechanic to better represent fear.

Before we move on to the next mechanic, my preview card today is a manifest dread card.

Grave Concerns

The Vision Design team was trying hard to create a set that felt mechanically distinct from Innistrad sets, so avoided using the graveyard, at least on a whole mechanic. By the time the file got to Set Design, it had so much of its own personality that the team wasn't worried about the comparison. Graveyard themes are popular and add a lot of nuance to sets. Plus, the resonance between the graveyard and the horror genre was so strong that Set Design felt they should use it.

The first thing a design team will do when they want to add something is examine what has already been done. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel, as the expression goes. They made a list of all the possibilities, but one stood out: delirium.

First, the name was a slam dunk for the genre we were in. Second, delirium works best in a set with access to more card types. Duskmourn was an enchantment set. It had many enchantment creatures, creatures that turned into enchantments, and enchantments that turned into creatures. There was a good as-fan of cards that were enchantments. Also, the set had a decent amount of artifacts, including some artifact creatures. Sure, not as many as enchantments, but it was enough that it was something players could build around.

Our third reason was the existence of manifest dread. At the time, the mechanic put the extra cards on the bottom of the library, but it didn't have to. What if every time you manifest dread, you add a card from the top of your library to your graveyard? That would make it much easier to get a land into your graveyard, something that's usually accomplished by having lands with sacrifice effects or cards that sacrifice lands. Delirium seemed like a good fit, so they added it in for a playtest, and it never left the file. Delirium ended up in black, red, and green.

Playing Survivor

One of the recurring things we do in design is have a playtest. They happen less frequently early in design, occuring every three to four weeks, and increase as the design evolves. Usually, by the end of set design, you're playtesting once a week or more. After one of the playtests, Jules and his Set Design team were talking. Jules said something was missing. We had all these mechanics to represent the haunted house and all the horrors within it, but what about the people trapped inside? A horror movie needs its subjects, and the set needed to represent the survivors.

The survivors were creatures, so whatever represented them wanted to be a creature mechanic. The Set Design team liked the idea that the mechanic would prompt action. The reason you're a survivor is because you're doing something. The passive people don't make it. So, maybe it was a trigger that cared about you doing something?

The first mechanic they tried was a riff on enrage, the Dinosaur mechanic from original Ixalan, where you got a trigger if your creature was the target of a spell or ability and survived. It was hard to trigger and you often endangered your own creatures, which felt a bit off. 

Set Design ended up using a mechanic we'd talked about doing before but never put into a set. This mechanic triggered at a set time, but only if a permanent was tapped. Tapping, as a condition, is nice on a creature, because creatures have a built-in way to tap themselves: attacking. The Set Design team found a lot of interesting tangential ways to tap creatures outside of combat, many of which could be flavored as the creature hiding. Triggering at the beginning of your second main phase worked well, as it was just after combat. Survival was fun to both build around and play with, so it ended up being the Survivor-themed mechanic. Survival is primarily in green-white.

"I Feel a Draft"

Finally, let's take a look at the ten draft archetypes.

Eerie Tempo (White-Blue)

The white and blue archetype is built around the eerie mechanic, encouraging you to play various enchantments, including Rooms, that can trigger eerie a second time. While white-blue is often a control deck, it leans more towards tempo in this set, meaning it uses its effects to get damage through to win the game more quickly. This deck is a fast to medium deck.

Eerie Control (Blue-Black)

The reason white-blue isn't the eerie control deck is because blue-black is. This deck uses similar tools to white-blue, those being lots of enchantments, but more as a means to lock down the opponent before gaining long-term control of the game. Since this archetype involves black, there's a bunch of creature removal and discard involved. This deck is a slow deck.

Sacrifice (Black-Red)

The black-red archetype in Duskmourn treads in familiar space for black-red. It creates a lot of resources and uses them as sacrifice fodder to strengthen its creatures and spells. The theme of sacrifice felt so at home in a modern horror set that it felt wrong not to have black-red return to its roots. This deck is a medium to slow deck.

Delirium Aggro (Red-Green)

The red-green archetype uses cheap creatures, many of which are artifact creatures and enchantment creatures, and attacks. A lot of them will die, as is the case in an aggro deck. The red-green archetype makes use of the delirium mechanic, fueled by your many dead creatures, to upgrade the next batch of attackers and overwhelm your opponent. This deck is a fast deck.

Survival (Green-White)

The green-white archetype plays into the survival mechanic. You'll activate your survival creatures by attacking, but when the board gets clogged, the deck has many other ways to tap your creatures, slowly whittling down your opponent. This deck is a medium to slow deck.

Reanimator (White-Black)

The black-white archetype is focused on reanimation. The deck stalls the opponent in the early-to-mid game as it gets giant creatures into the graveyard, which it then reanimates to win the game. This deck is a slow deck.

Room Control (Blue-Red) 

The blue-red archetype leans the furthest into the Room subtype as opposed to some of the other archetypes that focus more on enchantments in general. This deck is a medium to slow deck.

Delirium Slow Grind (Black-Green) 

The black-green archetype plays a lot of different card types to gum up the board, eventually reaching delirium. It then uses its graveyard as a resource to grind out a win. This deck is a slow deck.

Power 2 or Less Aggro (Red-White) 

The red-white archetype, as usual, is an aggro deck. This deck plays a lot of small creatures and takes advantage of effects that specifically care about creatures with power 2 or less. This is a fast deck.

Manifest Dread (Green-Blue) 

The green-blue archetype takes advantage of the manifest dread mechanic. It makes a lot of face-down 2/2 creatures, some of which grow into larger, nastier monsters. This deck is a medium deck.

"I Think We're Safe"

That ends our initial tour of the haunted house and its design. I hope you enjoyed seeing how Duskmourn: House of Horror came to be. As always, I'm eager for any feedback, be it on today's article, any of the mechanics I talked about, or on Duskmourn itself. You can email me or contact me through any of my social media accounts (X, Blogatog, Instagram, and TikTok) with any feedback.

Join me next week for a look at the Duskmourn: House of Horror vision design handoff document.

Until then, keep looking over your shoulder.