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In anticipation of each new Premier (Standard-legal) Magic set, MTG’s head designer Mark Rosewater publishes a list of teasers over on his Tumblr, Blogatog. Without actually revealing any new cards, Rosewater typically includes some interesting factoids about some of the things we can expect to see in the set, along with a few lines of text that will appear on new cards and some interesting typelines.
Today, Mark Rosewater unveiled his teaser for Streets of New Capenna, the next MTG set which is slated for a late April release.
Additionally, Wizards of the Coast also published the first webfiction in a series about Streets of New Capenna, which interested players can check out over on their website. Along with it, however, we’ve also gotten teased with a single never-before-seen preview card that’s the start of a new three-color cycle: Maestros Charm!
In this article, we’ll take a look at Rosewater’s teaser and break down some of the interesting tidbits that stand out. Afterwards, we’ll check out that new preview card – let’s get into it.
A Mechanic Returns from the 00’s
Obviously there were a ton of new mechanics in MTG to debut in the 2000s, but we have a couple recent clues that point towards one in particular that Rosewater could be referencing here: Hideaway.
Originally, cards with the mechanic just had “Hideaway” printed on it, but a recent Secret Lair drop changed the templating to say “Hideaway X,” where X is the number of cards you look at from the top of your library. Additionally, the cards now have the “Enters the battlefield tapped” clause written separately in the rules text rather than being in the reminder text for the Hideaway ability.
As another hint, Rosewater also included this line of rules text as a teaser: “Then if you control ten or more creatures, you may play the exiled card without paying its mana cost.” This isn’t a dead giveaway for Hideaway, but it certainly does line up with how a Hideaway card would work.
“A Draft Theme Caring About a Threshold in the Graveyard”
Another interesting bit here is that we will be getting a new mechanic that cares about cards in the graveyard in a different way from mechanics that have looked at the yard in the past. We’ve had a number of mechanics along these lines in the past, such as Threshold, Delirium, and Undergrowth, but this one will apparently function based on some other property.
Even though there have been lots of mechanics that care about the graveyard in the past, there is still a lot of design space that Wizards could be looking to explore along these lines. Commenters on Reddit speculated that it could have something to do with having different mana costs in the graveyard, or it could perhaps have something to do with the colors (or lack thereof) of the cards.
Given that Streets of New Capenna is to be a three-color focused set, something having to do with colors makes a lot of sense – but we’ll have to wait and see to know for sure.
Lots of Sacrifice Themes!
In the section where Rosewater shows off individual lines of text from some of the new cards, there is quite a bit of text that directly references sacrifice effects. “Count the colors of the sacrificed creature,” “where X is the number of permanents you’ve sacrificed this turn,” and there’s more: this set looks like it’s going to have no shortage of sacrifice-based effects.
It only makes sense to build sacrifice into a set about demonic gangsters, but it does pique my interest. Sacrifice decks have already been popular on and off in all three of Arena’s constructed formats, especially since Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty added Oni-Cult Anvil to the card pool. Just last week, we saw streamer crokeyz take the #3 Mythic spot using a Rakdos sacrifice deck in Alchemy, and Orzhov Sacrifice decks have been around in both Standard and Alchemy since rotation.
We’ll be keeping an eye out for new cards to help bolster this theme in Streets of New Capenna.
A New Preview Card – Maestros Charm
Maestros Charm becomes the first card in a second Streets of New Capenna cycle that we’ve seen following in the footsteps of other three-color sets in Magic’s past. At the SNC Prebeat at the beginning of the month, Wizards revealed a new cycle of Ascendancy enchantments with Brokers Ascendancy, and now the first in a new cycle of Charms has been revealed!
The Charms are always modal spells that trade a bit of efficiency for a high degree of flexibility. While any one of the individual effects on Maestros Charm might be considered to be a bit overcosted, we shall have to see if the tradeoff is worth it to have access to all three of them on one card.
That’s all we have for you concerning Streets of New Capenna for now, but we’ll keep you posted with anything else we learn about the set between now and when it’s fully debuted and previews begin on April 7. See you then!
