Dungeons & Dragons and Magic the Gathering Mix More Then Just Art in New Cards
Another new set from Magic: The Gathering means lots of new cards to unpack. We just had the Modern Horizons 2 release this month and are already on to talking about the next one, Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. No complaints on more MTG cards but it sure feels like a lot sometimes. If you aren’t familiar with this new set, it’s the first D&D themed MTG set.
MH2 brought us a lot of awesome throw backs and older cards, but not any extreme changes to mechanics. Forgotten Realms is adding something pretty unique though. Honestly, it’s not something I thought we would see in MTG. They are adding a new dungeon crawler mechanic into the cards. If your familiar with D&D you’ll know dungeons are a huge part of the game. The new set will be releasing a new type of Dungeon card. There will be three dungeons in this set and if you’ve been around D&D for awhile you might recognize some of them, Dungeon of The Mad Mage, Tomb of Annihilation, and Lost Mine of Phandelver.
Along with these new cards come a new keyword being added, venture into the dungeon. This will let you begin on advancing through the dungeon and completing the actions inside. As you can see on Nadaar, Selfless Paladin every time he enters the battlefield or attacks you trigger the keyword venture into the dungeon.
So all that’s great, but what if you don’t have a dungeon on the field? Well, dungeons don’t actually go in the deck. They will be outside of the game. They won’t take up any sideboard slots either but will still be playable in tournament settings even though they are outside of the game.
These new cards are going to bring up a lot of new ways to navigate them. The basics are you get a dungeon down, start going through each room (but never backwards), trigger the room actions, and get out of the dungeon so you can start a new one. Why would you even want to deal with advancing in dungeons you might ask? Some cards are going to give you special abilities for completing dungeons and give you a bit of a buff.
There are a lot of rules for how the cards work and will definitely bring some changes to how out of the game cards operate. The judges are going to love these. If you want to read more details on the technical side of things Wizards has released an entire article on it. It details a few new cards coming out that will interact with dungeons as well.
I think this will actually attract some D&D players into the game if they haven’t played and are thinking about it. It is a super interesting new way to progress on a side quest while playing the game. I can see a commander game getting very interesting with multiple people trying to progress through dungeons in a race to get the most buffs. There will be questions that come out I’m sure as to how things work when it comes to these, but once all the details are worked out it brings a fun change to things.
As for the MTG players, I’ve seen some mixed opinions on adding such a big feature from D&D into MTG. I’m not to convinced that this will become a big thing in the competitive scene, but I think we will see some people enjoy it for awhile in their LGS and with friends. Always exciting to see new things added and hope that it is received positively by the community.
