The next Magic: The Gathering set, Crimson Vow, is launching on MTG Arena on November 11 in the U.S. (Nov 12 in ANZ), with the physical edition available in game stores globally on November 19 (with prerelease on Nov 12). It takes players back to the gothic horror-infused setting of Innistrad. Where the last set, Midnight Hunt – which also took place on this plane – was themed around Werewolves, and introduced a cool day/night system, Crimson Vow has Vampires as its central focus, including a number of cards inspired by the one and only Dracula.
Of course, that’s all well and good, but classic horror is more than just Werewolves and Vampires, and today we have a new card to reveal that will help elevate one of the other monstrous creature types that was present in Midnight Hunt and is now being expanded upon for Crimson Vow – Zombies. That card is Necroduality:
Necroduality’s regular frame and borderless frame.
Anyone who has dabbled with the many variations of Dimir (blue/black) Zombies decks (such as this one) over the last couple of months would know that Zombies already have the potential to really snowball, and this enchantment represents a great way to double down on that, or to help swing the board back later in a game.
“Necroduality is one of my favorite types of cards in Magic,” Product Architect Mike Turian told me. “A card that you pick up and once you read it, the card makes you go back and reevaluate a whole class of cards to find the perfect ones to best take advantage of. In this case, with Necroduality creating a copy of each nontoken Zombie that enters the battlefield under your control, this changes the impact of every Zombie creature, reanimation spell, and cards that alter creature types in Magic. That is a lot of awesome cards to combo Necroduality with! Crimson Vow has a nice number of Zombie creatures that immediately get better. When you consider that many of the Zombies have Exploit and other powerful sacrifice effects, Necroduality will provide good fodder of creatures and powerful combos! I don’t want to spoil all of the fun our players are going to have but I bet they will be starting their own zombie apocalypse in no time!”
Good corpse, bad corpse.
I also asked Mike about how the team approached the task of following on from Midnight Hunt while also standing apart. “Midnight Hunt was such a great set and our players loved coming back to Innistrad,” he said. “We knew that the fan favorite plane of Innistrad was going to be a hit once again so with Crimson Vow, we were looking to bring in pieces of Midnight Hunt while also innovating and making Crimson Vow its own set. The switch of focus from Werewolves towards Vampires is one way that we were able to both continue what was awesome about Midnight Hunt while giving Crimson Vow space.
“Another way we set the sets apart is by introducing some new gameplay mechanics that weren’t available in Midnight Hunt. For instance, Cleave opens up brand new space in how you think about casting a spell. The introduction of Blood tokens for Vampires to feast upon let us have Vampires do something completely new and different as well!” You can read all about those new mechanics here. And you can see the cards that have been revealed so far here.
Crimson Vow is shaping up to be a fun return visit to Innistrad, so be sure to see what this Vampire-filled collection of cards have to offer on the official website.
Cam Shea has worked at IGN since the before times, has played more Breath of the Wild than just about any other game and writes about CCGs regularly. He’s not really on Twitter.