Magic: The Gathering Gets Spooky With Innistrad: Midnight Hunt

It’s September again, which means a new Magic: The Gathering set is coming our way—and this time it’s dark and spooky! Innistrad: Midnight Hunt releases globally in stores on September 24th, with prerelease weekend starting September 17th. The set will release online even earlier, becoming available on Magic: The Gathering Arena and Magic Online on September 16th.

Innistrad: Midnight Hunt will be the sixth expansion set to take place on the popular horror-themed plane of Innistrad, where vampires and werewolves own the night. The set will bring mechanical innovation to night and day with a revamped version of the werewolf transforming mechanic: daybound and nightbound, two states that players can now track using a two-sided Night and Day token card.

Werewolves and friends get top billing in Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, and Commander players will finally get a new double-sided legendary werewolf to lead their decks. Tovolar, Dire Overlord draws cards when werewolves deal damage to players, and once he transforms into Tovolar, the Midnight Scourge, he also offers an ability to give power and trample to a werewolf and make sure the damage gets through! If you recall tournament powerhouse land Kessig Wolf Run, nightbound Tovolar has that same ability!

The set includes two additional new mechanics in the horror theme: Disturbed and Decayed. Disturbed is a graveyard mechanic like Flashback or Aftermath, where cards can be used a second time from the graveyard, with the twist that the graveyard version transforms into a new, more disturbing version of the card. Decayed is a mechanic that appears on zombies. A decayed creature cannot block, and when you attack with it, you sacrifice it at the end of combat (if it survived). That’s not a great ability, but other cards will presumably benefit from being surrounded by decayed creatures.

The final new mechanic is called Coven, an ability that provides a small bonus to a card if you control creatures with three different “powers” — that means the attack power in the bottom right of the creature. So if you control creatures with 1 power, 2 power, and 3 power, they unleash bonus abilities on cards with Coven. That should help fight back the werewolves, the disturbed, and they decayed.

Are you excited to see this new set of Magic: The Gathering cards? Let us know in the comments below!