Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths Announcement Stream – Trailer, Spoilers, Mechanics, and More!

Starting April 2 7 AM PT / 10 AM ET / 2 PM UTC, Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths will be making its debut on the official Magic: The Gathering Twitch channel! We will get a first look at the world, mechanics, some new cards from this upcoming expansion, as well as the trailer. As the stream plays, all information will be posted here for your viewing pleasure. We also have a whole bunch of spoilers to be released throughout the day, so be sure to keep an eye out on the homepage and follow our Twitter account to get the latest news around the clock!

Live Stream

Trailer

Cards

All new cards that are spoiled during the live stream will be shown here, or you can go straight to our Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths Spoiler page.

Mechanics

Mutate

Mutate allows you to pay the mutate cost in order to fuse cards together – you can put the creature on the top or the bottom of any non-Human creature. The fused creature will be a copy of the top creature with all the abilities of the bottom. So if I mutate Illuna, Apex of Wishes on top of Paradise Druid, the fused creature will be a 6/6 hexproof flying trample that can tap for one mana of any colour, and Illuna’s ability will trigger. If I mutate it on the bottom, the fused creature will be a 2/1 hexproof flying trample that can tap for one mana of any colour, and Illuna’s ability may or may not trigger; wait for the Ikoria release notes to find out!

Companion

Companion allows you to cast a chosen Companion once from outside the game (i.e. from your sideboard) if you meet their Companion requirements e.g. you can cast Keruga, the Macrosage once from your sideboard during the game, if your deck contains only lands and cards with converted mana cost 3 or greater. You’ll still need to pay all costs involved, you can only do it when you would normally be able to cast the card, all the normal stuff applies etc. You may only have one Companion at a time.

Keyword Counters

Keyword counters are a way of signifying that a creature has gained a particular ability – e.g. if a creature has a trample counter on it, that’s a really easy way to display that it has trample. This is presumably for evergreen keywords only; the ones that crop up almost every set. Here are the main keywords you can expect to see counters for: trample, flying, reach, hexproof, lifelink, first strike, double strike, vigilance, deathtouch, menace, haste, defender, and indestructible (though don’t expect to see that one too much!).

Cycling

Cycling is a returning mechanic we last saw in Amonkhet (the plane before Ixalan), which allows you to pay the cycling cost for cards in your hand to discard them and draw a new card. Cycling has been extremely popular; it helps mitigate both mana screw and flood, and lets you make good use of situational cards – cycling on a situational removal spell, for example, means it still does something against Control or other decks that aren’t giving you good targets, since you just get to convert it into a new card and still get value if they happen to draw one of their few targets.