Ikoria Set Mechanics Revealed

Wizards dropped the keyword card mechanics for the upcoming Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths set. They are really trying to use this set to turn the game on its head.

First up is a reintroduction of Cycling. First seen around the emergence of the original Slivers back in the mid to late 90’s, this ability allows you to pay a cost in mana to discard a card and then draw a card from the top of your deck. This ability provides the choice to gain card advantage through drawing a fresh card from the top of your deck by sacrificing a currently less than useful (or extra) card to defeat your opponent.

Now for the exciting stuff. NEW MECHANICS!!!!!

First up is Mutate. Mutate literally fuses two monsters together into one massive beast. You mutate your monsters by placing the monster with the mutate ability either on top of, or underneath, another NON-HUMAN creature you control. The resulting creature is the type, color, power and toughness of the top creature on the stack. This creature gains ALL abilities of all the creatures on the stack. So if your mutate creature has flying and the other creature has deathtouch, the new mutation will have both. This also applies to non-keyword abilities such as “draw a card when this creature deals combat damage to a player.”

There are other creatures in Ikoria that may not have mutate, yet they benefit from being used in the mutation process. Zagoth Mamba, for example, does not have mutate but has an effect whenever it is used during a mutation thus synergizing well with ANY mutate creatures you use.

You can choose to mutate the same monster more than once creating a colossal creature to smash your opponents by stacking static effects (such as vigilance, flying, deathtouch, lifelink, ect.) or you can mutate several different creatures to assault your opponent with a plethora of various combinations of abilities.

Wizards put up a video explaining this exciting and fun mechanic:

The other new mechanic dropping in Ikoria is companion. There are 10 Legendary companion creatures in Ikoria. The companion mechanic adds deckbuilding restrictions to your deck in one form or another. They can limit the types of creatures you use, the mana cost of cards in your deck, even the number of mana symbols present per card. This adds spice to the deck building process. in return for these restrictions you can play with your companion outside of your deck (similar to a commander) and cast it ONCE per duel from outside the game. Unlike a commander, the companion does NOT count toward the number of cards in your deck.

You most certainly do NOT have to use the companion ability and may instead opt to simply put that Legendary Beastie directly into your deck and gain its other abilities and benefits.

Here is Wizards video explaining this tasty bit of tech:

Lastly lets touch on the new ability many cards in Ikoria have to place ability counters on your creatures. These ability counters function the same as +1/+1 counters do currently, pick a creature put on an appropriate ability counter. This is almost like a small, quick, targeted mutation to apply needed or desired ability to creatures that normally would not have access to those abilities. Speaking of mutation… since the mutated creature gets ALL abilities from the creatures on the stack you can see the potential to create unstoppable killing machines tailored to your desired specifications.

Wizards is allowing us to custom create our own creatures and the best part is we can do it again and again in new ways and combinations EVERY GAME!

Wizards is providing us with punch out ability counters to mark all of the new and crazy ways our creatures will be behaving.