Adventures in the Forgotten Realms Leak: Cloister Gargoyle Showcases the Dungeon Mechanic

We still have almost a month left until the official Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms preview season begins, though we have a decent idea on what the expansion might look like as we have had several cards revealed already.

One new mysterious card has inadvertently revealed today from a post on reddit, with the author citing the source as the card artist Russ Nicholson’s private social media account, which was then shared on a Facebook group they are in. Let’s take a look at Cloister Gargoyle from the Forgotten Realms:

• Card Name: Cloister Gargoyle
• Mana Cost: {2}{W}
• Card Type: Artifact Creature – Gargoyle
• Rarity: Uncommon
• Card Text:
  When Cloister Gargoyle enters the battlefield, venture into the dungeon.
  As long as you’ve completed a dungeon, Cloister Gargoyle gets +3/+0 and has flying.
• Power/Toughness: 0/4

The dungeon mechanic described by the card text “venture into the dungeon” and “completed a dungeon” is not yet known to players yet. However, we do know that the prerelease pack contains “3 foil double-sided Dungeon cards”.

A possible speculation is that it is a result of attempting to create a minigame within a game as tested in previous sets that were scrapped in the end. Let’s have a look at the past designs below, as described by Mark Rosewater in the Making Magic series of articles:

“Skirmish”

The idea behind skirmish was that we wanted there to be a battle between you and your opponent. This battle would be overlaid onto the game and would generate effects that affected the game. The second technology that skirmish used was first seen on the Monarch token in Conspiracy: Take the Crown. This uses an external card as a game piece that outlines its own rules. The cards that generate the Monarch token don’t tell you what to do, it just generates the game component which then explains itself. Skirmish would do the same thing, which was to generate a Skirmish token, meaning any card with the skirmish mechanic would have “create a Skirmish if one hasn’t been created yet.”

Making Magic: WAGING WAR OF THE SPARK, PART 3

“Stygian”

Here’s how stygian worked. When you played a card with the stygian mechanic, it would bring onto the battlefield a special card from outside the game that represented the river of the dead. One side of the river was the living. That’s where the current creatures on the battlefield would now be. The other side was the side of the dead. Creatures on the living side could only block creatures also on the living side while creatures on the dead side could only block creatures on the dead side. The Magic card this resembles closest is the Limited Edition (Alpha) card Raging River.

Making Magic: AT DEATH’S DOOR, PART 1

What do you think the new Dungeon mechanic will look like? Let us know what you think in the comments below!