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Magic: The Gatheringhas kicked off the preview season for its final set of the year, The Lost Caverns Of Ixalan. Taking us back to the Mesoamerican world we last explored in 2018, this set will take us deep below the surface to an entire, hollow world of Angels and Gods.
In the debut, Wizards showcased the core mechanics of the set, as well as showing off alternate art treatments, some new special guests, its Commander decks, and even a hint of more of its crossover with Jurassic World.
The Lost Caverns of Ixalan takes place roughly a year after the Phyrexian invasion of the Multiverse we saw in March of the Machine. The invasion caused major upheaval, forcing many of the surface’s factions to venture below the surface, and uncover that not only is Ixalan a hollow world, a precursor civilisation has been advancing in isolation for hundreds or thousands of years.
Mechanics
The Lost Caverns Of Ixalan will feature five primary mechanics, with four brand-new ones and one returning Ixalan staple.
Returning Mechanic: Explore
Explore was one of the most popular introductions in our first trip to Ixalan. To explore, you reveal the top card of your library. If it’s a land, that card goes into your hand. If it’s not a land, you can put a +1/+1 counter on the creature that explored, and then either keep the card on top your library or put it into your graveyard.
Explore is also the focus of the game’s newest predefined artifact token, with Maps joining the likes of Treasure, Food, Clue, and Blood. Maps require you to pay one generic mana, tap and sacrifice the token to allow a target creature to explore. Interestingly, though, the creature doesn’t need to be on the battlefield when you resolve the Map token – only when you activate it.
The blue/green Commander deck, Explorers of the Deep, will be focused on the explore mechanic, giving it a Merfolk-y theme to go along with it.
New Mechanic: Descend
Potentially the most complex new mechanic of the set, descending is actually two related mechanics with very similar names, and serves as something of the inverse to Rivals of Ixalan’s ascend.
The first is descending itself. If a permanent card is put into your graveyard, you are said to have descended. Sometimes, cards will care about each individual act of descending, whereas others will only care about if you’ve descended at all that turn. Different cards will have different effects dependent on you having descended, enabling everything from sacrifice to mill strategies in new ways.
The second use of it is simply called “descend”. Instead of caring about whether you’ve descended, descend cards only care about how many permanent cards there are in your graveyard, defined by the number after the word. For instance, Didact Echo has ‘Descend 4’, and will gain flying as long as you have four or more permanents in your graveyard.
New Mechanic: Finality Counters
Finality counters are a new way of templating an effect we’ve already seen. If a creature with a finality counter on it would leave the battlefield for any reason, it’s exiled instead.
While this does make writing out the effect a lot easier (just take a look at The Eighth Doctor from Doctor Who for how messy this text could be), it does also work slightly different to the only static abilities. For instance, if you have a way to remove counters or move them around, you could keep permanents in play that would otherwise exile.
Finality counters are going to be the go-to way to use this effect, making it either a new deciduous or evergreen mechanic we’ll see more of in future sets.
New Mechanic: Discover
Cascade is one of the splashiest, most impactful mechanics in Magic, and Discover lets you do it without even needing to cast a spell.
Discover X is a keyword that has you exile cards off the top of your library until you exile a spell with mana value less than the X. Then, you can play that spell for free or put it into your hand, and put the rest back on the bottom of your library in a random order.
It’s literally cascade, just with a few minor tweaks. Instead of casting a spell and working off of its’ mana value, you’re working off the number specified next to discover instead. If you decide not to cast the spell, you may put it into your hand for later, instead of putting it on the bottom of your library with the rest of the cards you exiled.
New Mechanic: Craft
A big part of The Lost Caverns of Ixalan is transforming double-faced cards. We’ve already seen Gods that can flip into lands, and creatures turning into Sagas, but a new way to transform is with a craft cost.
If a card has a craft cost, it’ll also list ‘materials’ that you can pay by exiling cards of the listed type from either the battlefield or your graveyard. This fits in nicely with descending, as you’ll be able to mill permanents into your graveyard for a descend trigger, before exiling them and using them to pay a craft cost.
Booster Fun
According to The Lost Caverns of Ixalan’s art director Ovidio Cartagena, a big part of this set’s mission is to make “everyone in Latin America feel welcomed by this set”. With that in mind, there’s a ton of new showcase frames and alt-art treatments.
Borderless Planeswalker
As of Wilds of Eldraine, each set only has one Planeswalker in it rather than three. For The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, it’s our boy Quintorius Kand, and his introduction to the multiverse is celebrated with a couple of new, very colourful borderless treatments.
Gods of Ixalan
In March of the Machine, we were introduced to a gold coin-style showcase frame to represent characters from Ixalan. It was interesting, but received criticism for having every card look similar and equally unreadable. The style is back in The Lost Caverns, but has been reworked to make each card have its own, unique feel to it.
This frame is reserved for the Gods of Ixalan. They retain the stone carving border, but instead of being an embossed gold coin, the central figure is now made up of various materials to represent the different cultures of Ixalan, and how they worship these gods. For instance, Ojer Taq, Deepest Foundation’s is full of rusty metal colours that make it looks more like an ancient relic instead.
Cosmium Ink
Cosmium is a powerful resource hidden in the core of Ixalan, and is the driving force of the surface factions’ invasions of the caverns.
To reflect that, a style we last saw in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty has come back for various reprints of Cavern of Souls. Alongside the red, yellow, blue, and green styles we saw last time, we’re also getting a new purple ink treatment.
Legends of Ixalan
The final treatment is for the legendary creatures of Ixalan, which includes former planeswalkers Huatli and Saheeli, old Ixalan names like Breeches and Malcolm, and newer characters like the hivemide fungal horde, the Mycotyrant.
This style is inspired by the Aztec calendar, with a round border that doesn’t look too dissimilar from the One Ring treatment we saw in Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth. It still looks interesting, though, especially in how the etchings match the colour of the card, and run all the way through the background.
Commander Decks
The Lost Caverns of Ixalan didn’t start out design as an Ixalan set, with the world only becoming Ixalan later down the line. This means that the set lacks the faction focus of the first few Ixalan sets, and instead uses Pirates, Dinosaurs, Humans, Vampires, and Merfolk are five of the set’s ten draft archetypes instead.
To make up for that, the four Commander decks go all-in on the four classic factions of Ixalan, with four decks over the usual two we get alongside a Standard set release:
Universes Beyond: Jurassic World
Announced back in August, The Lost Caverns of Ixalan is playing host to the latest Universes Beyond crossover, with cards based on the Jurassic World series.
These cards aren’t legal in Standard or limited, but are playable in Commander, Vintage, and Legacy. Much like last year’s Transformers crossover in The Brothers’ War, these will only be found in Set and Draft boosters for The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, and are mechanically unique cards.
A few new cards were shown off in the debut, such as Ellie and Alan, Paleontologists, which uses the new discover keyword, and Dino DNA, a terrifying new combo piece that could print out as many creatures as you like.
On top of these cards, Wizards also confirmed we’ll be getting two Secret Lairs to tie in with Jurassic World, coming in the next Superdrop. These include Jurassic World: Life Breaks Free, which we currently know very little about, and Jurassic World: Dr. Ian Malcolm, a whole drop dedicated to Jeff Goldblum’s character in the series.
