Magic: The Gathering: Innistrad!

The latest set of Magic: The Gathering just had its prerelease tournaments last weekend, which I attended, and I thought I'd say a few words about the set.

First of all, the flavor of the set (gothic horror), is shown in the cards quite well. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, and spirits (along with humans) are the major players in Innistrad. They each have their own schticks - werewolves transform between human and wolf forms, humans get boosts from various types of equipment and generally for interacting with other humans, vampires suck blood in various ways (gaining power from hurting players, healing the player whenever they deal damage) along with occasionally touching the other archetypal vampire powers (turning into a bat, hypnosis and vampiric conversion), and zombies come in both the garden variety and the frankenstein's monster variant. The frankenstein's monster zombies are portrayed cleverly, and use the graveyard (the mechanical focus of the set) in a clever way - consuming the creatures within it as a requirement to play them (IE, stitching the monster together from the dead creatures).

One thing that I would particularly like to say is that the transformation mechanic for werewolves turned out to be lots of fun. At first, when I saw it, it seemed to be fairly odd and not particularly logical, but after having played with the cards, I enjoyed it quite a bit. They go from human to wolf form when no player casts a spell in a turn, and go from wolf to human when a single player casts two or more spells in a turn. On paper, it seemed to be quite arbitrary, to me, but after having played with them and seen their power, the limitation and interaction of the triggers with the players' actions works quite well. In order to transform your werewolves to wolf form, you have to hold back (most of the time, anyway - you may get lucky and have your opponent play no spells, which is a nice bonus), and in order to force your opponents wolves back to human form, you have to play lots of things, potentially storing up spells to retransform your opponents cards.

All in all, I really liked what I saw of the set. Admittedly, I didn't see that much of it in one night, but I definitely intend to look at it more closely in the coming months. Regardless, the thing I most took out of the prerelease was the following:

-Sometimes, game mechanics that seem clunky at first glance actually work well in practice. Playtesting these mechanics is especially critical - if they don't feel fairly natural to the players in practice, then the players will quickly form negative opinions of them.
-Allowing the players to directly manipulate states of the game by doing things that they would already do, but in slightly different ways than usual, can be quite fun for them.