When do dark ascension previews start

Unglued Unhinged Unstable Unsanctioned Unfinity. MTG Arena. Categories Innistrad block Add category. Cancel Save. Universal Conquest Wiki. Tom LaPille lead , Mark L. Double-faced cards , Cursed , Graveyard matters, Tribal , Human sacrifice. Fateful hour , Flashback , Morbid , Transform , Undying. DKA [1]. Avacyn Restored. Premium Deck Series: Graveborn. Duel Decks: Venser vs. Increasing Devotion.

Increasing Confusion. Increasing Ambition. Increasing Vengeance. Increasing Savagery. Five rare spells with Flashback , which double their effect if they are flashed back. Ray of Revelation. Saving Grasp. Reap the Seagraf. Fires of Undeath.

Wild Hunger. Each of these common spells has a flashback cost involving its counter-clockwise ally on the color wheel. This cycle mirrors the ally cycle from Innistrad , which had flashback costs in the color's clockwise ally on the color wheel. Lingering Souls. Mystic Retrieval. Deadly Allure. Burning Oil.

Tracker's Instincts. Each of these uncommon spells has a flashback cost involving the enemy color two slots later on the color wheel. They are the reverse of a cycle from Innistrad , as the colors of the flashback cost and the regular casting cost are flipped.

The plane of Innistrad has fallen into a deep night. The horrible beings that fill the world have risen to power as the careful balance and tenuous power of Humans has failed in the absence of Avacyn. As the monsters overrun humanity's defenses, despair reigns and all hope seems lost. Any despair you might be feeling at the Dark Ascension storyline is unlikely to be balmed by this awesome card:. The second act, though, is about continuing down the path set up by the first act.

Let's take Innistrad as an example, as that is the set I was dealing with. I've explained that, as far as I'm concerned, the protagonists of the environmental story as opposed to the plot-based character-driven story that a novel would have are the humans. We've come to this world to find the humans in trouble. Art by David Rapoza. Once upon a time, things weren't so bleak. They had a great protector who held all the evil at bay the angel Avacyn if you haven't been paying attention , but she disappeared and her magic—that which fueled all the humans' weapons—has been slowly dissipating.

Metaphorically, they are in a dark room surrounded by scary things and the torch that has been keeping the scary things back is slowly going out. Innistrad was the introduction of the humans and all the monsters that are coming at them from every direction. Remember that the monsters aren't working together—they just represent various threats that are all circling our heroes.

If you study story, you will find that the second act is all about watching things get worse for the protagonist s. Whatever the problem is that first popped up at the end of the first act just keeps getting more complicated.

Solutions slowly get stripped away as more and more attempts to solve the problem fail. This was where I started. I knew things were going to get worse for the humans. If Innistrad was things looking bad, Dark Ascension was things looking much, much worse. Meanwhile, there was a whole different axis that my team and I had to worry about. Another role of the second set is to mechanically evolve from the first set. Not only does the story evolve, but so do the underlying mechanics.

For Innistrad block, here's what we had to deal with:. Due to the third-act twist, double-faced cards didn't work in the third set Avacyn Restored , meaning that Dark Ascension was going to be the one set to evolve DFCs. Luckily, that wasn't going to be a problem. During Innistrad design, we came up with a number of different ways to use the DFCs and made the decision to hold off on some of the ideas until Dark Ascension.

The line I ended up drawing was limiting the DFCs in Innistrad to having creatures on both sides with the one obvious exception of Garruk. While doing top-down design, we came up with some cool cards that involved card types other than creatures and planeswalkers I don't want to give away all the twists but I hope this card shows you that expanding the mechanical limitations allows us to create some flavorful DFCs that go into some different directions.

This card's design was clearly top down. We were trying to come up with ghost tropes and an obvious one was possession. We talked about a creature that could sacrifice to gain control of anything it damaged, but once we remembered we had DFC technology, we realized there was a better way.

The earliest version of this card required the creature to get into combat with the creature it took control of as we were trying to match the flavor as close as possible. What we found, though, was that the opponent just didn't block with anything you wanted to steal.

Also, because it flew for flavor reasons, it was much harder to get things to block it. Defensively, it kept the opponent from attacking, which never leads to a good game state.

One of my biggest complaints about Innistrad 's design was that I felt we had really nailed four of the five main tribes but we hadn't managed to make ghosts as flavorful as the other four tribes.

There was a conscious effort in Dark Ascension to give the ghosts a little more mechanical flavor and Soul Seizer was part of the objective. Tribal Humans, Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, and Zombies — Speaking of tribal, the strong monster and human tribal in Innistrad was another theme that Dark Ascension needed to pick up on.

My goal for each of the five tribes was two-fold. First, I wanted to add more cool individual cards that played into what the tribes did in Innistrad. Mostly this was to help push these decks in Constructed and allow them to continue in Limited. Second, I wanted to introduce some element that shook things up a little and gave each tribe something new to play with.

As I explained above, my goal for spirits in particular was to give them more definition as a tribe. Flashback — Continuing flashback meant a few things. First, the Innistrad design team came up with more effects than we were able to fit into Innistrad, and Dark Ascension allowed us a chance to make these cards. Second, we were able to do a second off-color flashback cycle, this time going in the opposite direction on the color wheel. Third, we came up with a cool rare cycle with a twist that would allow flashback to do something it's never done before.

The "Werewolf" mechanic — I talked during the Innistrad preview weeks that although this mechanic isn't keyworded, it's my favorite in the block.