Today, during a preview panel at MagicCon in Amsterdam, Wizards Of The Coast pulled back the curtain on Duskmourn: House Of Horrors, a new Standard set and the first-ever "contemporary horror" set in the card game's 30-plus-year history.
This new set is set on the titular Duskmourn, a brand-new plane in the Magic mythos that's "inspired by the genre of modern horror from the 1980s up through the present day." However, this isn't an open world with multiple areas to explore a la other new planes from this year – Thunder Junction and Bloomburrow among them – instead, Duskmourn is an infinite haunted house, where every room contains some new sort of horrible horror.
Multiple cards were revealed during the panel, including some with returning mechanics like Delirium and Convoke. One new mechanic, Impending, made its debut on the Overlord of the Hauntwoods card.
Impending sees a creature with the "Enchantment Creature" type enter the battlefield with X time counters on it, with a counter coming off during that player's end step. So long as a time counter remains, the card is not a creature, only an enchantment.
Other notable cards from Duskmourn include Screaming Nemesis, which can turn off an opponent's ability to gain life for the rest of the game; Doomsday Excruciator, which turns every deck on the table into a six-card countdown into oblivion when it enters the battlefield; and The Wandering Rescuer, which is the desparked (non-Planeswalker) version of The Wandering Emperor from the plane of Kamigawa.
The preview panel also showed ten new cards from Bloomburrow, the next Standard set coming in August. Highlights of the previewed cards include Pearl Of Wisdom, which could potentially let you draw two cards for a single blue mana; Salvation Swan, a potentially more potent version of Luminous Broodmoth; and a cycle of new nonbasic lands which focus on certain creature types depending on the color of the land.
Bloomburrow launches in stores on August 2, while Duskmourn: House Of Horrors hits shelves on September 27.
