Table of Contents
Hey everyone! We’re about to head deep into The Lost Caverns of Ixalan. That means that I have once again been locked up in the content creation dungeon to pump out a ridiculous number of limited articles for all of you. Since I highly doubt that anyone is going to go spelunking into these caverns to rescue me, I might as well get started with how the mechanics are going to perform in limited.
Discover
This is an extremely powerful mechanic that may cause some flashbacks to Cascade. Depending on which side of the table you were on back then will determine how you’ll view those flashbacks.
When discovering, you exile cards from the top of your deck until you hit a nonland card with mana value equal to or lesser than the number of the discover. You can then play it without paying the mana cost or put it into your hand. Then you put the rest of the cards on the bottom of your library in a random order.
To start off, this is baked in card advantage that can often be mana advantage on top of that. It shouldn’t take much more than that to convince you that you want to be doing this. The exception to this is the common land cycle where you will be breaking even on cards while going down a bit on mana, but it’s taking up a land slot so that’s an entirely different discussion.
The option to put the card into your hand is pretty nice because it doesn’t turn into a total miss when you hit a combat trick or a counter spell.
It’s presence going to complicate matters anytime you say “what combination of cards could I possibly lose to”. Discover is going to be very good and is going to end up being a part of a lot of bad beat stories.
Craft
Craft allows you to pay the required mana cost and exile the required cards from either the battlefield or your graveyard to flip the card to its backside. The required cards range from a single artifact to a collection of four different creature types. It’s thematically similar to crafting in most RPGS because you are basically scrounging together something from what you have lying around.
This is different than most flip cards because each side has value built into it. You’ll often get an effect on the front followed up by a creature or another useful effect on the back. In that way, this is similar to the adventure spells we just had in WOE. These are a bit more vulnerable to removal though since they will be in play instead of the adventure zone.
Preferably you are crafting with something out of the graveyard which means that self-mill type effects or playing an attrition game can be beneficial.
Descend
There are four different versions of the term descend to understand. I know that sounds confusing, but they are all pretty self-explanatory. Before I get into them, I need to point out that they all only count permanents in your graveyard. That means instants and sorceries won’t count for these so you have to account for that when figuring out if you should run these cards.
The first term is descended which signifies whether or not a permanent card has gone to your graveyard this turn. It doesn’t matter how it got there, just whether or not one went there. That means you can mill it, discard it, explore it, or just do it the old-fashioned way by having something die on the battlefield. This will usually result in a trigger with some of them keeping track of how many times it happens such as The Mycotyrant.
Keep in mind that it specifically says permanent cards. That means that a token dying won’t trigger descend even though a permanent “went to the graveyard”.
Descend 4 and Descend 8 work similar to Threshold in that that part of the card just doesn’t exist unless you meet the requirements. If you have either four or eight permanents in your graveyard (depending on which one it is) than that part of the card is there. Descend 4 will most likely end up triggering just through normal gameplay, but Descend 8 is usually going to require some way to enable it such as self-mill.
The magnitude of Fathomless Descent depends on the total number of permanents in your graveyard. Most of the time these will be just fine based off of normal game play, but can do a lot more if you have some enablers.
Explore and Map Tokens
Explore, our old friend from the last trip to Ixalan, has returned. When a creature explores, you reveal the top card of your library and put it into your hand if it’s a land. If it’s a nonland you put a +1+1 counter on the creature and then choose to either keep the card on top or put it in the graveyard.
A map token is an artifact that you can pay 1 and sacrifice it to have target creature explore. One thing to note about the map token is that if they kill the creature in response you don’t get to explore because the only target has been removed.
Starting off I am valuing an explore or map token around half of a card. Obviously if you just hit a land then it is technically a full card, but the inability to get a nonland in hand makes it worse than “draw a card”.
Finality Counters
This is a very simple counter that just means that when a creature with a finality counter on it dies, it is exiled. It’s just a way to turn some previously existing text into a reminder counter for when people inevitably forget a few turns later.
I want to say Finality using the Mortal Kombat voice for it, but I shall behave myself for once (who am I kidding, you know I just did it while my wife is seriously judging me for it).
Wrap Up
Thanks for reading! I’ll be back tomorrow with the first part of my complete limited set review. Until then, stay classy people!
If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below.
You can also find me at:
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j2sjosh
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