Duskmourn Set Review - White

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Grabbed by the Ghoulies

Good evening, ghouls and ghosts, I'm Michael Celani, and the house is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding house. Preview season is upon us, which means I am once again brooding, writing card reviews in the dead of night, in an icy cold room, alone. Good God, how I wish that was a joke.

Duskmourn: It Really Should Be Spelled Duskmourne is our target this time. Is it filled with horror, or is it filled with horrible? Let's find out together in this set review that is literally longer than the Magna Carta.

Mythics

Dollmaker's Shop // Porcelain Gallery

Let's talk about Rooms, a subtype with a name now forever unavailable to lands. We have a card called Kitchen! If kitchens aren't rooms, then HGTV lied to my mom.

Pedantics aside, Rooms are a new enchantment subtype that Matt Tabak likes to call "split permanent cards." Pedantics considered, I don't think that's a particularly precise description of the mechanic. Put simply, Rooms let you cast either half of the card. Then, you can then pay the mana cost of the other side later to add its abilities to the permanent on the battlefield. In that sense, they play more like Classes with two levels that you can take in either order.

All this means that there's four states a Room can be in: one state with none of the two sides (doors) active (unlocked), two states with one door unlocked, and a final state with both doors unlocked. Like reviewing a Class, fully critiquing a Room necessarily requires us to investigate all four three of the states that actually matter.¹ Luckily, we're starting with a great example, because it turns out that Dollmaker's Shop // Porcelain Gallery is really good.

Dollmaker's Shop is an efficient and resilient method to create creatures when attacking. Combat-focused go-wide decks, like Adeline, Resplendent Cathar, want cards like this as a repeatable source of token-generation; the fact that the creatures they make are 1/1s matters less than the fact that they're additional bodies. Dollmaker's Shop adds some artifact synergy in here as well since the Toys that come in are artifact creatures.

Previously, if you wanted this effect at the price point of two mana, you either had to attack with a specific creature or jump through so many hoops that it made Superman 64 look tame.

There's none of that here, and thankfully this version even avoids the common pitfall of generating the new dork tapped and attacking. In any sufficiently advanced board state, a 1/1 born tapped and attacking quickly becomes a dead 1/1, so it's nice knowing you'll have something left once you're done hitting your enemies.

The only major downside I can think of when casting Dollmaker's Shop is that it foreshadows Porcelain Gallery, which is a kill-on-sight threat. People might feel inclined to remove it before you can unlock the second door, limiting the amount of time you get to generate creatures. Dollmaker's Shop is also particularly bad late game, but it makes up for it with the other door.

Yup, there's no sense beating around the bull in the china shop: Porcelain Gallery is a go-wide win condition, and a good one. It's comparable to Coat of Arms, a card that ends games the turn it's played, but it makes up for that by eschewing the restriction that your creatures all share a type, too.

Purists may scoff at this comparison, because Coat of Arms doesn't effectively reset the base power and toughness of your board to 0 before applying its buff, but if we're being completely honest, the base power and toughness of your army never really mattered all that much in a Coat of Arms scenario anyway. That's like complaining that all you could buff up with your Craterhoof Behemoth was ten measly 1/1s.

In any given white go-wide deck, it would be pretty reasonable to have, say, five creatures on the board; assuming they have some sort of evasion (maybe they're Birds), that's twenty five damage ready to swing out and kill someone the moment this comes down. It's plainly absurd... as long as you're building a big board.

Dollmaker's Shop is going to end up more modal than some of the Rooms in this set. Situations where you want to play one half don't correspond to situations where you want to play the other half, and given the raw power of the card, this case is more of a choice than a logical progression. It might be tempting to try to parlay Dollmaker's Shop into an eventual Porcelain Gallery, but like any win condition, it'll draw removal.

With that in mind, avoid casting Dollmaker's Shop if you have any other token-generators on the board: the fewer turn cycles, the better. In fact, avoid casting Dollmaker's Shop at all unless you have protection or redundant go-wide buffs available to you. Otherwise, you'll just have to accept that tipping your hand this early means you won't be able to cash in the payoff later unless you get pretty lucky.

The best way to use this card is like a Craterhoof: cast Porcelain Gallery the turn you want to win the game, and then win the game. You may need slightly more creatures than a Craterhoof for the same effect and it doesn't provide any built-in evasion, but there's no shame falling a little bit short of Craterhoof Behemoth.

Overlord of the Mistmoors

We did it, team! White finally got Grave Titan!

Seriously, am I missing something? Other people seem to be on board with this card, but I'm really not seeing it.

To get it out of the way right now, the impending cost is a trap. Four turn cycles is way, way too long to wait to get a creature, and even if you were to play this on curve, it's only coming in on turn eight. Trying to generate creature tokens after impending this thing is like Homer Simpson trying to respond to an insult during a poker match: by the time you can pull it off, everyone's already gone home. Yes, you do get two flying 2/1s as a consolation prize, but that's tantamount to evoking Soul of Migration, which nobody does. Seriously, you'd have to be doing time counter shenanigans before it's even worth considering.

So that leaves the only way to play this as a more-expensive, easier-to-remove Grave Titan. The point of Grave Titan is to either provide fodder for sacrifice strategies or to take advantage of kindred synergies. Overlord of the Mistmoors utterly fails in both cases: if you're looking for sacrifice fodder and you're in white, there are vastly superior options for generating lots of creatures quickly, and if you're looking for kindred synergies, then white has no business generating Insects; that's a Golgari thing. The fact they have two power and flying doesn't save it.

More like Overlord of the Missed More.

The Wandering Rescuer

Without her spark, is she really The Wanderer? Her shtick was that she had no control over where she planeswalked. I guess now she wanders just... cuz.

Regardless, one place this rescuer won't be wandering is the command zone. Putting a flash protection piece in a public zone that everyone can see for the entire game kind of ruins the point: you'll never be able to blow someone out if The Wandering Rescuer is your commander.

In a sense, I guess that's a good thing, because it can deter your opponents from trying to interact with you in the first place, but that benefit is so nebulous and hard to quantify for most players that I think that she won't see much action. She doesn't have the color identity that saved the similarly defensive Kyodai, Soul of Kamigawa, and if you thought that her double strike meant that she can lead a Voltron strategy, then ironically she's outclassed by a different wanderer.

I do like the card as a general protection piece, though. As someone who's played with Lost in the Maze using a commander who pairs well with it, sudden, out-of-nowhere hexproof like this can really cause a turnabout if you've got creatures you really need to stick around. The Wandering Rescuer also wins a lot of combats with just her base stats, so you can also cast her as a soft removal piece. My only wish was that she cost four mana instead of five, but what can you do?

Slot this in to any given go-wide strategy; the typical buffs and anthems used in those decks pair well with The Wandering Rescuer's double strike, and you'll always have an abundance of creatures to tap to cast her.

Rares

Dazzling Theater // Prop Room

Prop Room is Drumbellower. It's another copy of Drumbellower. It's a Drumbellower on a much-harder-to-kill permanent type.  It's Drumbellower. Talk about a phantom of the opera! Now, that would be the entirety of the review, but since Commander's Herald apparently never actually reviewed Drumbellower...

This card is absolutely absurd at three mana. Let's start at the floor: giving all of your creatures vigilance by untapping them at the end of the turn, after they've swung for damage. This lets you both attack while leaving up defenses against your three opponents. Better yet, it even works on creatures that enter tapped and attacking, which is notably something that Brave the Sands misses.

It also lets you activate abilities that cost not just on your own turn, but every single turn of the cycle. That's four times the activations. Imagine drawing twelve cards with Arcanis the Omnipotent, or killing four things with Kelsien, the Plague, or surveilling equal to how wide your board state is with Tocasia, Dig Site Mentor. Additionally, if you have creatures that can make mana, then you're playing the game on everyone else's turns, too.

That's not to mention that it also works with go-wide commanders that tap creatures you control for value, too. Baylen, the Haymaker is the most popular commander from Bloomburrow, and if you've got Prop Room out, she's getting huge.

Prop Room is well worth it if you have the synergy. Even if you don't, the fact that Prop Room is stapled to a card that also grants all your creature spells convoke, instantly giving you a payoff anyway, elevates this into... well, it's a rare in a Standard set, so probably the Five Dollar Zone.

The obvious winners here are decks that can play creature spells at instant speed. Sally Sparrow hit the jackpot, but if you want to talk commanders people actually like, then both Heliod, the Radiant Dawn and Errant and Giada are eating as well.

I'll admit, it's not for every deck, but it is for a hell of a lot of them, and if a lot of your creatures say , you should seriously consider this.

Enduring Innocence

Instant staple, and it's not even close. It's a Welcoming Vampire that triggers Constellation, and also it doesn't die when it's killed. Fate/Stay Night lied to me!² Welcome to The Pantheon, tiny lamb.

Ghostly Dancers

I'm going to be ranking the Eerie cards on the assumption that Eerie is just Constellation, because there aren't enough good Rooms in the game to really consider fully unlocking a Room as a common action. To be fair, none of them are bad; they just fall prey to Fair Charm Syndrome, where their individual components cost just a little bit too much for most players to consider the flexibility a worthwhile tradeoff. I don't know many people clamoring to put Meat Locker // Drowned Diner in their list, for example.

Similarly, I'm going to more-or-less ignore triggers that open doors, because you'd have to get absurdly lucky to hit the four or so cards where picking the lock makes any real sense. I'm a fan of magical Christmasland -- I write How They Brew It, after all, the series that equips Spellweaver Volute to creatures -- but I recognize some people want to actually win their games instead of just screwing around.

Now then: Ghostly Dancers is a worse Archon of Sun's Grace. That's not inherently bad: like Porcelain Gallery above with Craterhoof Behemoth, there's no shame falling short of Archon of Sun's Grace.

Whereas Archon of Sun's Grace makes flying 2/2s and also gives them lifelink for no goddamn reason, rendering the enchantress player impossible to kill, Ghostly Dancers is content with only making flying 3/1s. However, it makes a genuine effort at bridging that gap by returning a dead enchantment to your hand when it enters. Like Archon of Falling Stars before it, it's particularly hard to kill in black decks, where it goes infinite with Kaya's Ghostform and Phyrexian Altar.

Outside that interaction, it's pretty obvious where this couple belongs. My Ghired, Mirror of the Wilds Enchantmentless Enchantress deck is salivating since that thing triggers Constellation so damn much.

Leyline of Hope

Leyline of Hope looked familiar to me when I first read it, and that's because it's the same go-wide buff Righteous Valkyrie supplies combined with the steroids that Cleric Class puts on your lifegain.

A +2/+2 anthem at four mana is legitimately pretty great, especially one with as few hoops to jump through as "do the thing you want to do," but like the conundrum I mentioned when I reviewed Caduceus, Staff of Hermes, it puts a pretty big target on your back as soon as it's online. You need to pair this Leyline with enough defensive tools if you want to keep the buff. Typical pillow fort works fine, but I actually think the best way to play defense here is a good offense. Let me explain.

I did a bit of digging into Righteous Valkyrie's stats page for this review, and I was surprised to discover that it's limited solely to decks that care about the Angel and Cleric synergies. The fact that it says the words "Angel" and "Cleric" in its text makes people laser-focus on that aspect, but since I'm an expert in ignoring texts that are either on cards or from my girlfriend, it got me thinking: why isn't it seeing play in Darien, King of Kjeldor decks?

That deck cares deeply about Soul Sisters. Whenever you take damage, you create that many Soldiers, and when that happens, your Soul Sisters rejuvenate you by getting all your health back. You're no worse for wear, and your board's gotten much wider. Multiple sisters, or indeed, Cleric Class, takes that lifegain from neutral to positive... so why wouldn't you want to give those Soldiers +2/+2?

That's the perfect kind of deck for Leyline of Hope: go-wide decks based on gaining life from creatures entering the battlefield. Play this early or even get it for free as a pre-game action, then heal from each dorky little token you create. If you're not playing this strategy, it's too inefficient; remember, this is Smothering Tithe mana we're talking about.

Redress Fate

Neat! A sidegrade to Brilliant Restoration that trades the heavy white pip cost for one more mana. I say sidegrade here, because once you get to the point where you're actually willing to cast a Brilliant Restoration, the raw mana value has ceased to be that pressing an issue. This slots perfectly into the noncreature reanimator strategy.

The miracle cost is a nice-to-have, but I think the only deck that can rely on it is the Aminatou, Veil Piercer deck it actually hails from. Still though, I won't deny the tale-weaving potential of ripping this off the top just after half your deck got milled. It's sort of like praying for Terminus: it's not really all that good anymore, but damn does it feel great when you pull the slot machine handle and it comes up twenty-one. I've called 1-800-GAMBLER in my time.

Reluctant Role Model

The Survival trigger doesn't matter. Luckily, Reluctant Role Model excels in being yet another Ozolith.

Seriously, like The Ozolith and Resourceful Defense after it, this card's incredible in counters decks, especially modular decks, who (frankly) need all the help they can get. My current pick for best modular commander is probably Zinnia, Valley's Voice, and he slots right in there. Pay for this guy with offspring, then pay for a modular creature with offspring, and sacrifice it the original modular creature to get (correct me if I'm wrong here) thrice the counters on the 1/1 copy.

White-partnered Reyhan, Last of the Abzan decks love to see this guy, too, and honestly, it's fine to just play this as a value piece in any deck that cares about +1/+1 counters. Not all your cards have to be an absolute fit to be worth including.

Secret Arcade // Dusty Parlor

Okay, what the hell. Secret Arcade has the same everything-is-a-Constellation-trigger-now energy as any given Gylwain, Casting Director deck has, but they forgot the word nontoken.

Secret Arcade easily goes infinite with any Constellation trigger that makes a creature, like the aforementioned Ghostly Dancers, who, for maximum meme potential, can also unlock the remaining door on this permanent. That hilarious fact and the text of Eerie ensures the combo works no matter what order you play the two in.

...I guess I should review Dusty Parlor, too. It's fine, though a bit do-nothing on its own. With both unlocked, every permanent spell gives a creature you control counters equal to its mana value... but honestly, unless you're getting some severe value or jank out of this Encroaching Mycosynth for enchantments, I wouldn't risk the added vulnerability it imparts into your deck. I mean, come on! It triggers your enchantresses! It does it really well!

Soaring Lightbringer

Soaring Lightbringer buffs enchantment creatures and enchantment creatures only, meaning it's destined for the ninety-nine of these three decks and literally nowhere else.

Honestly, though, it's a damn house there, especially in Kestia, the Cultivator, who loves never-ending upwards escalators of increasingly violent card draw. Not only are you getting a total of three new enchantment creatures if you can consistently attack all of your opponents (or even more if you're in a ten-player game that's never going to end), you're giving them all flying, making them that much harder to block. If you ever want to turn an enchantment ninety degrees, this card's a no-brainer.

Split Up

Compared to a typical three-mana removal spell, like Generous Gift, Split Up is capable of doing way more damage, and if you can tap down enemy creatures, it's even more damning.

This card is extremely good at either breaking through stale board states where nobody wants to risk a crackback or shutting off the one person that's scrappin' and flappin'. Remember, vigilance aside, you're always capable of switching the status of your creatures from untapped to tapped by going to combat, so you should almost always be able to engineer the result of this spell to leave you with the most creatures possible. If you can crew a Vehicle, even better. 

The only blind spot this spell has is that it is won't be able to reliably hit untapped creatures with a activated ability, but given that you're also probably blowing up a substantial portion of enemy boards as collateral and that the going rate for dealing with one thing is already three mana, I'm never unhappy to see this.

Toby, Beastie Befriender

Can anyone tell me Where the Wild Things Are? Because they sure as hell didn't show up on this card.

The important part of Toby, Beastie Befriender gives creature tokens flying, and, like, Combine Chrysalis does that. Wonder does that. Aven Wind Guide does that. I suppose Toby does it in white alone, but if you're playing mono-white tokens, that tends to overwhelm the field by going so wide that they dwarf the number of blockers anyway. If you have twenty guys and your opponent has three blockers, congratulations: Toby got three more attackers through. Let me get the Smirnoff Ice.

Don't worry, I'm not completely underwhelmed. I suspect Toby might play a role in some blink archetypes. The Beastie isn't legendary, so every time Toby enters, you get another one. Blink him a couple of times and you'll have a decent army to ward off enemy attacks.

Unidentified Hovership

Unidentified Hovership is just a narrower Reality Shift that you can blink, calling back to Skyclave Apparition, which is just a narrower Excise the Imperfect that you can blink. And it's pretty wholly a blink piece: if you're not blinking, you're missing it, since there's better instant-speed options at the same mana value.

Speaking to the restriction, five toughness or less is pretty broad when it comes to Magic's array of creatures, so you're probably going to be able to hit something on the board. Notably, one of the things you can hit are other manifested cards since they have a toughness of two. If you happen to have infinite blink, this decks your opponents; simply keep exiling the face-down creatures, because the manifest dread trigger is mandatory.

Uncommons & Commons

Exorcise

Make Your Move wasn't playable at three mana because Generous Gift and Stroke of Midnight exist. Moving it to two mana might have made it playable, as a power-crept Disenchant, but apparently only green gets to do that, so Exorcise was made into a sorcery.

Don't put this in your decks, guys; even at a decent price, sorcery-speed removal is just awful to play with.

Fear of Abduction

More like Fear of Getting Counterspelled, because this thing will two-for-one you in that case.

If you can get this Perfect Dark reject onto the battlefield any other way, do that, and if you can blink it in response to its enters trigger, do that too. Unfortunately, I feel like if you find yourself in a scenario where this is really strong at controlling the board, you should probably have already accrued enough value to win the game outright.

Glimmer Seeker

A little slow, but Glimmer Seeker always being capable of triggering Constellation or drawing cards means it's probably never outright bad. I don't think it survives combat all that often, though, so have some way to tap it through an ability, or make a deal with that one guy who just happens to control a 2/4.

Optimistic Scavenger

Pretty good if you land it early, especially if your enchantress deck cares about combat to any extent. Even just two or three counters on a bog-standard enchantress commander, like Sythis, Harvest's Hand, can make it decent at blocking, and believe me, stopping the mono-red player from chiseling away at your life total every turn adds up.

Patched Plaything

Blinking or reanimating Patched Plaything are both valid ways of getting a 4/3 double-striker for cheap. It's just that I don't know why you wouldn't put that effort into blinking or reanimating Combat Thresher instead, which trades a point of power for a whole card. Or, better yet, you could reanimate a Blightsteel Colossus and kill your opponent no matter what their life total is. Or even better, just pour root beer all over the Azorius control player's deck.

Shardmage's Rescue

I've actually always admired protection spells like Shardmage's Rescue, and being discounted to one instead of the usual two is a great development. While it doesn't provide indestructible the way Loran's Escape does, it triggers your enchantresses and leaves behind a buff for turns to come.

Plus, I like Nashi. I feel like he would livestream someone getting wrecked by this card and then remix it into a techno song.

Sheltered by Ghosts

The vast, vast majority of Commander removal use cases are covered by instant and sorcery spells. Off the top of my head, I can name Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, Generous Gift, Stroke of Midnight, Excise the Imperfect, Bovine Intervention, and Get Lost. All of those snipe creatures, some of those snipe more things, and some of them even exile their target. You could include these seven or so instants in any white deck and be completely fine on single-target removal.

This sucks, because there's actually an entirely separate category of white removal: enchantment-based. Whether it be enchantments that temporarily exile permanents or Auras that remove abilities from creatures, white has an entirely separate suite of cards that can deal with threats. And they're terrible.

Thinking logically, who in their right mind would play Banishing Light, a sorcery-speed card that temporarily exiles a nonland permanent, when you could play Excise the Imperfect instead, an instant-speed spell that permanently exiles that nonland permanent?

The only exceptions to this dominance are cards like Reprobation, which remove the abilities of a creature, and even then they're only popular because of the ever-present availability of commanders. In a world of Swords to Plowshares, is there any way to make enchantment-based removal generally competitive?

Maybe the enchantment can do more in addition to being removal? The issue here is that now you're bashing your head against Fair Charm Syndrome. Buried in the Garden is fine, but it's expensive, and now not only do Swords and Path still exist, Wild Growth and Birds of Paradise do, too. Spells like these are too overcosted to see play... until now.

Sheltered by Ghosts is the first Aura removal spell that I legitimately think I could see myself playing. It's costed fairly efficiently at two mana, and it provides not only ward (to help stave off the two-for-one), but also lifelink and a power boost. That's not a small buff to whatever you're enchanting, and as a bonus, you get to take away your opponent's best nonland permanent.

The best targets to hit with temporary removal like this are commanders, full stop. It provides an agonizing game for your opponent to play. They can choose to put their commander in the command zone, in which case you've effectively destroyed it while also buffing your creature at a fair rate, or they can keep it in exile and hope to draw a removal spell, in which case they lose access to their commander. This is especially effective if backed up by countermagic because if they gamble their gameplan on being able to blow up your Aura with a Disenchant, you can counter it and leave them down an extreme amount of tempo.

Splitskin Doll

I don't know who was clamoring for a slightly-harder-to-use Spirited Companion, but here we are. I guess if you really want, you can use this as a discard outlet for a reanimator deck, though a repeatable artifact, like Collector's Vault, serves that purpose much better.

Unwanted Remake

I get the desire to iterate on Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile, but I'm not convinced there's any demand for a new (and frankly, worse) installment in this series. Surprisingly appropriate name.

Downgrading from exile to destroy and letting your opponent manifest dread means that this is a bad removal spell against graveyard decks in particular. It just stocks the graveyard too well. I guess I like this more than Condemn, but not by much.

Final Destination

My conclusion? You really gotta love enchantments if you wanna pick up this set. Anything that's not an enchantment or enchantment-focused is kind of unexciting for white. But that's what you get when you get a top-down set like this: a lot of pieces for a very specific list, and nothin' else. Maybe the other colors have some better general-purpose spells; go check out the other reviews to find out. See you in the sequel, where I will be replaced with another actor after being aged up twenty years!

1. Most decks generally won't have to worry about the scenario where both doors are barred up. The feng shui of the Room only gets screwed up this bad if the enchantment manages to enter the battlefield without being cast, and in that case, all Room cards are the same: nameless, 0-cost enchantments that do nothing. This caveat renders Rooms particularly bad permanents to recur or blink out. Doing either of those isn't a typical play pattern for enchantments, so most decks won't care, but some will, and for those of you looking for new pieces there, I'm sorry to say that this set's gonna be a dud for you.
2. Is this meme still relevant in any way? Do people even get it?