Magic Untapped takes a look back at Shadows over Innistrad, the first half of the two-set SOI block.
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Video Transcript:
Hot off of the events from the previous two sets (Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch) comes Shadows over Innistrad, Magic: The Gathering’s 70th expansion.
Released on April 8, 2016, the set takes the game’s new “Gatewatch” story arc to (you guessed it) the gothic horror plane of Innistrad.
When the game left Innistrad most recently, things seemed to be on the up-and-up, but how quickly things can change as madness and stranger things seem to be afoot.
How strange? Lovecraftian strange. Cosmic horror strange. Need-to-figure-out-exactly-what-is-going-on strange.
<DTW SOI 4:12-26 “One of the things…investigation going on.”
That all said, let’s dive into that with our story summary:
Innistrad, a world that should be filled with hope and light after the return of its protector, the Archangel Avacyn, is now anything but.
Strange, alien occurrences have been happening around the plane. Werewolves, which had been turned docile from Avacyn’s Cursemute spell, were becoming feral and more vicious. The hunger of the plane’s vampires are becoming more and more intense. New cults are forming, and strange, new, twisted stone monuments known as Cryptoliths are beginning to appear across the plane.
But that’s not all.
Innistrad’s angels are acting different. In fact, rather than protecting the humans of the plane as they had always up until now, they are in fact attacking them. Driven mad by some unknown source, the plane’s angels now fly with blood-soaked wings.
Even Avacyn isn’t immune to the madness as she somehow got it into her head that, since no human can be completely pure and immune to corruption, all humans should perish.
But not all of the plane’s angels had succumbed to the madness. One angel alone, Sigarda, somehow remained unaffected and she continued her charge of protecting the plane’s human population.
It’s in this new reality that Jace Beleren arrives on the plane as he seeks council with Sorin Markov, a vampiric planeswalker native to Innistrad. He’s hoping they can work together to locate and (hopefully) eliminate the third and final of the Eldrazi titans, Emrakul, as she had seemingly left Zendikar.
Unfortunately for the mind mage, he had no inkling as to where Sorin might be at the moment. Thankfully, an acquaintance of his just happened to be on the plane as well at that time: Liliana Vess.
He paid her a visit to ask for her assistance. Feeling jilted from their last encounter together when she traveled to Ravnica and attempted to ask him for help with her (literal) demons only to have him depart instead with Gideon Jura to assist with the Eldrazi threat on Zendikar, she refused to help him in any way.
He leaves Liliana in no better a position than before and decides to travel to Markov Manor, Sorin’s ancestral home. Upon arriving at the manor, however, Jace finds it in ruins. Not only that, it was somehow floating much like the hedrons on Zendikar do.
The mind mage also begins to feel something isn’t right not just with the plane, but with himself as he feels his mind slip just a little.
He travels in to the ruined mansion and discovers members of the Markov clan had been turned to stone and literally embedded into the mansion’s walls and columns. He also discovers, in the hands of a dead man, a modest-sized tome.
It’s the journal of Tamiyo, a moonfolk scholar planeswalker from Kamigawa.
He opens the journal and finds a trove of valuable information including notes on the strange cryptoglyphs, the changes on Innistrad’s werewolves, and more.
The more he explored the manor and poured over the pages of Tamiyo’s Journal, however, the more his now slightly unstable mind would slip, providing him with hallucinations and vague visions. Somehow, he was able to find his way out of the mansion and back to relative sanity.
Guided by the journal, Jace next made his way to the Nephalia Drownyard. There, he discovers a ring of aligned cryptoglyphs and throng of toiling zombies.
It then strikes the mind mage that all of the mysterious cryptoglyphs that have appeared across the plane were pointing here – to the Nephalia Drownyard. Yet, he knew not why. For all he can tell, his investigation has hit a dead end.
Meanwhile, while Jace was both trying to track down Sorin as well as figure out what, exactly, was going on in the world, the vampire planeswalker was traveling across the plane as well, visiting each of Innistrad’s vampiric clans asking for help.
Specifically, he’s seeking help dealing with an old, vengeful friend of his: a lithomancer planeswalker from Zendikar known as Nahiri.
As it turns out, a century or more before, Nahiri was trying to reach out to Sorin from Zendikar asking for help with a major threat there. Sorin, however, had cast a protection spell on Innistrad and, thus, wasn’t able to notice Nahiri’s calls.
Furious at her friend for (from her perspective) ignoring her calls, the hot-tempered Nahiri traveled to the plane and attacked him. Avacyn, realizing the danger her creator was in, tried to intervene. She wasn’t nearly powerful enough, however. As Nahiri was about to end the then-young archangel’s life, Sorin took the opportunity to seal the lithomancer into the Helvault – a magical stone prison.
Fast-forward to Innistrad’s recent past and we see Liliana Vess destroying the helvault to gain access to one of her four contract-holding demons, Grislebrand. When Grislebrand was released, so was Avacyn (whom had been sucked into the Helvault along with the demon some years prior). So, too, was Nahiri.
And she was pissed.
The first thing she did was return home to Zendikar, only to find the plane in ruins from the rampaging Eldrazi.
Infuriated, she traveled back to Innistrad. She laid waste to Sorin Manor, then began forming the cryptoglyphs. For what ends, nobody knows but her.
Sorin, figuring out the destruction of his home and the slaying of his kin was the work of Nahiri, quickly deduced that whatever the lithomancer was up to was likely the source of the madness that has infected the plane.
Getting back to Jace, he departs from the drownyard and returns to Liliana. He accuses her of being the source of all of the madness and weirdness that’s been going on as of late.
The necromancer is able to largely escape the mind mage’s mental tricks thanks to his hints of madness as he lays the blame squarely on her. He blabs to her about the research he’s read in Tamiyo’s journal, of ghosts, and of some mysterious, invisible moon. It’s then that he realizes he’s pointing the finger at the wrong person. Liliana has nothing to do with it all.
A bit embarrassed, he again asks her to help him. Once again, he is denied.
The mind mage then travels to the city of Thraben and visits the Church of Avacyn’s main cathedral. He’s hoping he can speak with Avacyn and find out more about why everybody seems to be going mad.
Instead, he encounters Tamiyo. Apparently, her latest research had led her to the cathedral as well.
The scholastic planeswalker, upon seeing Jace’s ragged and losing-touch-with-reality state, tells Jace a story of the plane of Mirrodin. The breaking mind mage listens to her words. The story calms him and, by the time it’s complete, he feels his pending madness subside.
His mind now once again clear, Tamiyo warns him about Avacyn and how he shouldn’t be interfering with the happenings on Innistrad. Despite this, Jace presses on.
Tamiyo decides to humor the mind mage and she tethers her mind to his to help him stave off any further slips of insanity before setting off to find Avacyn.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), Avacyn locates them instead, displeased about two planeswalkers being inside of her cathedral.
Tamiyo attempts to speak with the archangel, but her attempts to reason with her fail and Avacyn goes on the offensive. Tamiyo uses one of her scrolls to cast a sleeping spell on the mad archangel, but it works for nigh but a moment as Avacyn quickly wakes back up even more annoyed than before.
Avacyn attacks once more, spouting vitriol about impure beings on her world, and goes in for the kill on the Kamigawan planeswalker. Before she can strike, however, Sorin bursts into the room through the cathedral’s stained glass ceiling. As her creator, the vampiric planeswalker demands that she come with him.
Hearing his voice partially clears her mind and she realizes all of the recent violence she had been committing. She then turns to Sorin and blames him for allowing her to commit such atrocities. The two come to blows and the fight continues down into the cathedral’s basement – the very room in which Avacyn was created.
Still refusing responsibility and refusing to be purified by her creator, she tells him that he can banish her if he wants, throwing the planeswalkers own words at him: “What cannot be destroyed must be bound.”
Sorin replies: “But Avacyn, you can be destroyed.”
Using what little energy he has left at this point and in anguish of having to do this to whom, essentially, is his daughter, he unmakes the archangel.
And that’s where we’ll leave the story of Shadows over Innistrad, though there’ll be more to tell once we start to talk about its follow-up set, Eldritch Moon.
As for the set Shadows over Innistrad itself, design was led by Mark Gottlieb and development was headed-up by Dave Humpherys. Jeremy Jarvis once again took up the set’s art direction.
It brought with it 297 cards (including 15 reprints) and features “graveyard matters” and typal themes.
<DTW SOI 6:55-7:40 “One of the things…oriented-sets.”>
Two mechanics return in the set: Madness (which debuted in Torment in 2002) and Transform, which debuted in the original Innistrad block. To support the double-faced transform cards, checklist cards with a standard Magic: The Gathering card back were included in booster packs for those who play either without sleeves, or with sleeves that have transparent backs.
Shadows over Innistrad also introduced three new mechanics to the game:
- Delirium, which is an ability word that gives an advantageous effect whenever there are at least four card types amongst cards in your graveyard;
- Investigate, which puts a colorless clue token into play. Clue tokens have the rules text: “(2), Sacrifice this artifact: Draw a card.” And;
- Skulk, an evasion ability that says that a creature with the ability cannot be blocked by creatures with greater power.
The set also features eight card cycles. Most notable among those are:
- Crazed creatures at uncommon, all of which have an enter-the-battlefield ability that can also trigger each turn if their controller has delirium;
- Vessles, five colored artifacts at common that have an activated ability that involve sacrificing the artifact;
- Typal lords at uncommon that support each of the game’s five main creature types: spirits, zombies, vampires, wolves/werewolves, and humans;
- Typal lords at rare that also support each of the game’s five main creature types;
- Shadow lands, which are five allied-color dual lands at rare that enter the battlefield tapped unless you reveal from your hand a basic land that matches one of that land’s two colors, and;
- Enemy colored taplands at uncommon that enter the battlefield, well, tapped.
In terms of specific cards of note, Shadows over Innistrad boasts a number of them, including:
- Anguished Unmaking, a flexible spot removal spell that saw much play in Standard, as well as occasionally still in other formats.
- Archangel Avacyn, a card which dominated Standard at the time thanks to it protecting your creatures and being a good offensive and defensive creature with flying on its default side as well as quite the beater with a small board-wipe-like ability on its transformed side.
- Arlinn Kord, the werewolf planeswalker. The character was supposed to debut in card form in the original Innistrad block, but got pushed out in favor of the card Garruk Relentless;
- Cryptolith Rite, a rare enchantment that turns all of your creatures into five-color mana dorks;
- Prized Amalgam, which is a key piece in dredge decks found in Modern and Vintage. It’s even seen some play in Legacy.
- Rattlechains, a spirit-typal cards that has seen notable play in Pioneer and Modern;
- Thalia’s Lieutenant, a staple in white aggro decks based around the human creature type;
- The Gitrog Monster, a fan-favorite legendary creature that is known for a number of strong combos in Commander,
- Thing in the Ice, a strong card that works well in spell-focused decks that can transform into a 7/8 kraken horror creature that returns all non-horror creatures in play to their owner’s hands;
- Thraben Inspector, a 1/2 for a single white mana that creates a clue token when it enters play;
- Tireless Tracker, a powerful value engine that has been used across a number of formats in competitive play, and;
- Triskaidekaphobia, an alternate-loss card that concerns itself with the number 13;
- Westvale Abbey, a creature-generation land that can be transformed into a 9/7 legendary demon creature with flying, lifelink, indestructible, and haste.
One other card (well, technically, collection of the same card) worth mentioning is Tamiyo’s Journal. There were multiple versions of the card printed, each with different flavor text that cite different entries into the journal. Keen-eyed players could notice that these different journal entries form a cryptic of sorts when paired with the set’s clue tokens.
I won’t spoil what it is for those who want to discover it for themselves, but I will say that it’s a message that foreshadows a key plot point that will be unveiled in the ensuing set.
As far as the set’s promotional cards are concerned, the set continued the still-used practice of any rare or mythic rare becoming a date-stamped foil found in a player’s prerelease pack. The launch promo was Angel of Deliverance. Game Day participants received a full-art Incorrigible Youths with top-eight Game Day finishers receiving a foil, full-art Anguished Unmaking. The set’s buy-a-box promo was a foil, alternate art Elusive Tormentor (a card that transforms into Insidious Mist).
Pro Tour: Shadows over Innistrad was held in April of 2016 in Madrid, Spain, and marked the 100th Pro Tour in the game’ history. In the end, American Steve Rubin (playing green-white tokens) bested Italian Magic World Cup Champion Andrea Mengucci (whom was playing a Bant Company deck) 3-1.
<SOT: MTG PRO TOUR>
As for Shadows over Innistrad itself, here’s what Magic: The Gathering’s head designer, Mark Rosewater, had to say about the set overall:
<DTW SOI 29:24-40 “We liked the…too far away.” 32:04-32:58 “Everything that was popular…as I had hoped.” 33:09-11 “All-in-all…pretty good.”>
So, what are your thoughts on Shadows over Innistrad? Were you a fan? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.
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