Magic: the Gathering celebrates a bloody vampire wedding with Crimson Vow

The preview season for Magic: The Gathering’s new set, Innistrad: Crimson Vow, begins today. Wizards of the Coast just wrapped up a broadcast showing all the basics of the upcoming expansion, the second set taking place on the Innistrad plane this year. What’s going on in Crimson Vow? What mechanics can players expect? Is there anything exciting for card collectors? Look no further! You can find all those answers below.

The lore of the crimson vow

In an unprecedented move recently, WOTC is releasing a fifth standard legal set this year and something of a sequel to the previous one, Midnight Hunt. Innistrad’s horror setting and tropes are favorites of Magic players. Instead of taking a quick tour of the plane, we get two full expansions; each focused on the world’s most popular tribes: werewolves, and now a focus on vampires in Crimson Vow.

Continuing the story of the Midnight Hunt, where humans failed to prevent the plane from plunging into eternal night, vampires are ready to thrive in endless darkness. One of the heads of a vampire clan, Olivia Volderan, has taken an artifact known as the Moonsilver Key, a component necessary to restore the day on the plane. Of course, being a nightwalker, Olivia would use the key to gain power and influence among the vampire clans.

Olivia Voldaren and in her wedding attire, with a veil made of souls.

Point out the crux of Crimson Vow: Olivia Voldaren’s opulent vampire wedding to another blood-drinking family leader, Edgar Markov, the long sleeper progenitor of all vampires in Innistrad. Marrying Edgar and uniting the two most prominent vampire families will place Olivia Voldaren in a position of incredible power.

The Planeswalkers in Midnight Hunt’s Innistrad return, but those who had no cards in that set will be represented in Crimson Vow. Expect new Planeswalker cards for Chandra Nalaar, Kaya, and of course the vampire Planeswalker Sorin Markov, with Teferi, Arlinn Kord, and perhaps Wrenn as part of the story. Can the heroic group of Planeswalkers stop Olivia’s plan, retrieve the Moonsilver Key, and restore balance to Innistrad? The answer is most likely to be found on the cards.

Crimson Vow Mechanics

Some mechanics will return, closing the gap for Midnight Hunt, including Disturb and Daybound / Nightbound, which you can check out here. A third mechanic technically counts as a returning mechanic, even though he’s from another plane entirely …

Exploit

Making your way back to Magic from the Khans of Tarkir block is a simple but tasty mechanic: Exploit. Cards with Exploit allow the player to sacrifice a creature they control for the effects to occur. While the keyword costs a creature on your board to consume, you benefit from the detailed effect on the Exploit card, as well as allowing you to play any sacrifice or graveyard synergies around which your deck can be built. In the case of Fell Stinger, Exploit allows the target player to draw two cards and lose two life.

Now for the new mechanics debuting in Crimson Vow:

Blood tokens

These artifact tokens belong to a family similar to clues, food, or treasures. Blood tokens are artifacts for which you can pay a mana, tap, discard a card, and sacrifice the token to draw a card. As for mana, it is cheaper than a clue to draw a card, although you do have to lose something from your hand. However, with many strategies in Innistrad sets, sometimes you will want cards in your graveyard for greater purposes. I hope to throw a lot of Unrest cards into the graveyard using these Blood Tokens.

Adhere

In one of the most interesting ways Wizards has found to reduce the character count on a card, Cleave allows players to cut bracketed words into a card’s rules text for an alternative mana cost.

Here’s an example: Dig is a card for a green mana that reads “Search your library for a [basic land] card, [reveal it,] put it in your hand, then shuffle. “If you pay the Cleave cost of four mana, you ignore the words in the brackets, causing the card to read like” Find a card in your library, put it into your hand, and then shuffle. “The card no longer needs to be What you’re looking for is a basic land, you don’t even have to reveal it. Find any card and put it into your hand, a very powerful upgrade. I’m very excited to see what other great effects Cleave will reveal hidden within other cards in Crimson Vow.

Training

The humans have an uphill battle to fight after wasting the day on the plane and being overwhelmed by Innistrad’s horrors and monsters. The new keyword Training is sure to help bolster your forces. The training rules text reads: “Whenever this creature attacks with another creature with higher power, put a + 1 / + 1 counter on this creature.” It’s like a reverse mentor to Guilds of Ravnica from 2018. Some creatures will also have an added benefit when they “train,” like Savior of Ollenbeck, which exiles a creature from the battlefield or graveyard each time the effect triggers.

Showcase of Alternative Art Treatments and Frames

Crimson Vow’s vampire-exclusive Showcase frames lean heavily towards creature-type luxury and Olivia’s impending wedding. Magicians call this new treatment the “Tusk Frame” which features, well, fangs-shaped ornaments and ornate filigree around the edge of the art.

The most exciting of these is the Fang Frame version of Sorin The Mirthless, which you can see above. Your eyes are not deceiving you, Sorin looks like Alucard. That’s because famous Castlevania artist Ayami Kojima was hired to paint a rendition of everyone’s favorite vampire prince. And she absolutely left him out of the park!

The black and white horror-inspired Eternal Night cards also return from the Midnight Hunt, appearing on legendary creatures that are not naturally vampiric. You can see below that the alternatives are for Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, returning to Standard for the first time in nearly a decade. Ten additional full-art basic land cards with new art using this style can also be found in booster packs.

All of the above art treatments can be found in any Innistrad: Crimson Vow booster pack. Whether it’s a draft, a set, a theme, or a collector’s booster; you have the opportunity to release these incredible versions from anywhere.

Dracula series

2020’s Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths marked the first time alternate name cards with art from a non-Magic property were printed featuring Godzilla characters. With Crimson Vow, Wizards is tapping into the most iconic vampire of all time, Dracula. These alternate art cards, with alternate names, are functional copies of the Crimson Vow cards from the universe, only featuring the names and character art of the Bram Stoker novel Dracula. Above, you can see the alternate version of Sorin, who is Dracula himself, and below is Sister of the Undead, the Dracula series version of Olivia, Crimson Bride.

Dracula has been portrayed in many ways over the years in countless movies, TV shows, games, and books. Wizards took the art direction from the source, the original novel, so every little detail of each of the characters is drawn from the words written by Bram Stoker himself.

These cards will only be found in two places: collector’s packs and as box toppers for booster boxes. Any type of booster box will come with a Dracula series card packaged in the box.

Commander

Commander decks for Crimson Vow will complete the set started in Midnight Hunt with two new 100-card pre-made decks featuring vampires and spirits, respectively. It also continues from Midnight Hunt the trend the Wizards established by inserting Commander-centric cards into Set and Collector power-ups that can’t be found anywhere else. These cards include the Wedding Ring, a new white artifact that allows an additional card to be drawn, an action normally lacking in that color.

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Crimson Vow will be available at Magic: The Gathering Arena on November 11, with pre-release events kicking off in local game stores on November 12. The official release for the physical set will be the week after November 19.

And that’s all the great news from today’s Magic: The Gathering Innistrad: Crimson Vow reveal event! Let us know what you think of the new set. Are you aiming to pull that amazing Ayami Kojima Sorin like me? Give us your opinion in the comments below!