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Descend upon the Sinful Art by Tyler Jacobson

Shadows over Innistrad Remastered Limited Mechanics

Today we're looking at the mechanics of Shadows over Innistrad Remastered for the purposes of limited.

Hey everyone! I’m sure you can feel the chills running down your spine as we inch ever closer to the release of Shadows over Innistrad Remastered. Today I’m going to be discussing all of the mechanics you’re going to be running across while laying the beats in draft. We do have a decent number of mechanics to cover, but luckily these are from when cards used to have a reasonable amount of text.

Delirium

I would like to retract my previous statement about a reasonable amount of text.

Delirium adds an additional effect to a card as long as you have four different card types in your graveyard. This being limited, it will usually be pretty easy to get creatures into your graveyard. Instants and sorceries are typically easily manageable too. Getting that fourth type in there tends to be where the problems start to pop up.

The easiest solution to reliably turn Delirium on is to use self-mill as an enabler. Hitting a land or even an artifact shouldn’t be an issue with that. This also means you typically shouldn’t be milling your opponent in this format unless you’re going to win by decking them.

You can also play artifact creatures or Terrarion to get that last type in there. The Shadows of the past bonus sheet offers some other nice solutions including Evolving Wilds and Traveler's Amulet.

Weird corner case here, but you don’t want to lose because of it. The Eldrazi are colorless, not artifacts so they don’t count as a type besides creature.

Investigate

Whenever you investigate you put a clue token into play which is an artifact that you can pay two mana and sacrifice to draw a card. One way to think about it is a cantrip on layaway. Sometimes they are even better than a generic card draw when you have cards that trigger off of sacrificing clues like Tireless Tracker (yeah, that one does everything, I’d highly recommend not passing that bad boy up if you see it).

Limited wasn’t moving at as brisk of a pace as it is now, so general card advantage was still good. Don’t be thrown off by the mana cost on clues, it’s value bay bay!

Madness

We’re all mad here. If you would discard a card with madness, you may exile it instead, and play it for the madness cost while ignoring timing rules. That means you can play creatures at instant speed giving me flashbacks to ambushing people with Arrogant Wurm back in Odyssey drafts.

It doesn’t matter how you discarded the card, you still get to play it for the madness cost even if they used a discard spell on you. Most of the time you’re going to want to be playing enablers to turn these on so value a card like Lightning Axe a bit higher if you have some madness cards.

Skulk

Skulk is an evasive ability where the creature can’t be blocked by a creature with greater power. It makes them either have a creature with similar stats or gang block it with their tiny creatures. Nice flavor as the little creature is just skulking in the background while big creatures don’t even bother to pay attention to them.

I’ll give you a nifty trick just in case it pops up. You might run into the weird situation where you pump one of their creatures to force through the last few points of damage with skulk.

Emerge

Emerge allows you to sacrifice a creature and pay the emerge cost minus the mana value of the sacrificed creature. An example is your opponent tries to use a removal spell on your four drop, you can sacrifice it in response to play Elder Deep-Fiend for Two Blue and one colorless mana. That trick only works with the ones with flash, for the rest of them you need to do it at sorcery speed.

Escalate

Escalate allows you to choose an additional mode of the card for every time you pay the escalate cost. So, you can discard two cards and get all three modes of Collective Brutality.

You can also just not pay the escalate cost and settle for one mode. No one is forcing you here, go ahead and go cheap if you want. I don’t judge.

Transform – DFCs

I don’t think I really need to explain these to most of you, but I’ll leave it in just in case. These are not modal double-faced cards so you can’t just play whichever side you feel like. They all enter face up and flip once their specific conditions are met. There are a lot of different circumstances that cause a card to transform, but you just read the individual card to find out.

Most of the werewolves function similarly to the day/night mechanic from the more current Innistrad sets, but with each one tracking themselves individually. That means that even if you have other flipped werewolves, the new ones still always enter the battlefield on the front side.

Meld

You have a much better chance of pulling off a meld than you did in BRO because the of the common and uncommon pairing of Graf Rats and Midnight Scavengers. Very simple mechanic where if you have both pieces and meet the conditions stated, you exile them both and bring them back as the back portion.

Wrap Up

Thanks for reading! Hopefully knowing how all the mechanics work and what to look out for gives you a big head start on everyone else. Check back tomorrow when I’ll be covering the archetypes of SIR. Until then, stay classy people!

I’m always open to feedback, let me know what you loved, what you hated, or just send dog pics. You can contact at:

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j2sjosh
j2sjosh

Josh is a member of the elite limited team The Draft Lab as well as the host of The Draft Lab Podcast. He was qualifying for Pro Tours, Nationals, and Worlds literally before some of you were born. After a Magic hiatus to play poker and go to medical school, he has been dominating Arena with over an 80% win percentage in Bo3 as well as making #1 rank in Mythic.

Articles: 287