Hey everyone! I hope you are all as excited as I am for Khans of Tarkir to be added to Magic Arena. It is a much beloved classic draft format so you’re all in for a bit of a treat. It’s going to be a huge change of pace from modern draft formats where you can get ran over early and everything has so much value packed into it. To get you started, I’m going to be discussing the mechanics of KTK for limited purposes.
Morph
This is the biggest one to understand because your decisions regarding it will be a major factor in whether you get blown out or wreck your opponent. You may play a creature with morph face down for three mana as a 2/2. You may flip it over at instant speed by paying the unmorph cost. That may seem simple, but there is a lot of decision making that goes into it.
A major thing that I’ve seen people miss out on is that morph doesn’t use the stack so it can’t be responded to. That means you can’t kill it in response to the unmorph to make them waste a ton of mana. You can respond to an ability that is triggered when it flips such as Efreet Weaponmaster, but it is already flipped at that point.
Another big thing to know is that you need to play on full control to maximize value on the morphs because otherwise Arena will give away whether or not you have one of the creatures that can be unmorphed without paying mana. I understand if you don’t want to go to that extent, but you are throwing away value if you don’t do it.
The last important thing to remember is that almost all of the morphs that unmorph into something with greater than two toughness cost five or more mana to flip. There are a few exceptions in Dragon's Eye Savants, Monastery Flock, Sage-Eye Harrier and Sidisi's Pet, but they just bounce off of other morphs instead of wrecking you. That means it is safe to block when they have four mana, but very questionable once they hit five.
When it comes to morph-on-morph action, the person on the play has a massive advantage. Being a mana ahead and the one attacking first forces your opponent to either decide to block to potentially get blown out or allow you to force damage through while still building your board.
Outlast
Outlast is an ability that allows you to pay the cost and tap it to put a +1+1 counter on the creature. The cost is two mana for commons and one mana for uncommons. It is only at sorcery speed, but it is still a nice way to eventually break through a board stall with your now much larger creatures.
Many of them have additional abilities such as Abzan Falconer which grants flying to every creature you have that has a +1+1 counter on it. These play particularly well with Feat of Resistance allowing you to get even more value out of it.
One of the problems with outlast creatures is that they are typically slightly overcosted to compensate for their potential growth despite needing to pay more mana and tap them down on future turns to achieve that. They are still generally worth it especially the uncommon ones which can be really strong.
Delve
Delve allows you to exile cards from your graveyard to pay for one colorless mana per card exiled. It can’t be used to pay for the colored costs of cards. An example is that you can exile five cards in your graveyard and pay one green mana to cast Hooting Mandrills.
This is a much better constructed mechanic than limited mechanic, but is still a nice way to take advantage of a resource that could be ignored otherwise. You don’t want to go too deep into this because otherwise you’re no longer taking advantage of an incidental resource. You’ll run out of fuel and be stuck with a bunch of expensive cards in hand. If you don’t have self-mill to fuel it, you want to limit yourself to only a few delve cards in your deck.
Raid
Raid is a very simple mechanic. If you attacked with a creature this turn and play a raid card, then it has that additional text. If you didn’t then you can treat that portion of the card as blank. An example is Mardu Warshrieker which comes down as a Hill Giant if you didn’t attack that turn. If you did, you get to add the three mana to your mana pool for a potential double spell. That’s a pretty huge difference in card power there.
This mechanic rewards coming out of the gates hard and fast with a low enough curve to ensure that you can actually get your triggers. Basically you want to be playing a very aggressive deck when you have multiple raid cards.
Ferocious
Ferocious only cares about one thing. If you control a creature with power four or greater. If you do, then you get to do the extra thing, if you don’t then that part of the card doesn’t exist.
Prowess
Prowess is a deciduous mechanic these days, but KTK is when we were first introduced to it. Whenever you play a non-creature spell then the prowess creature gets +1+1 until end of turn. This can trigger as many times per turn as you cast spells. I would say that this is slightly weaker than it currently is because there aren’t a ton of cheap spells to trigger it with.
Wrap Up
Thanks for reading! I’ll be back tomorrow with my in-depth draft guide for Khans of Tarkir. Until then, stay classy people!
If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below.
You can also find me at:
Premium >
Enjoy our content? Wish to support our work? Join our Premium community, get access to exclusive content, remove all advertisements, and more!
- No ads: Browse the entire website ad-free, both display and video.
- Exclusive Content: Instant access to all exclusive articles only for Premium members, at your fingertips.
- Support: All your contributions get directly reinvested into the website to increase your viewing experience!
- Discord: Join our Discord server, claim your Premium role and gain access to exclusive channels where you can learn in real time!
- Special offer: For a limited time, use coupon code L95WR9JOWV to get 50% off the Annual plan!
