#mtgafr

New Dungeon mechanic was revealed, looks pretty cool, except... there’s a bunch of things that make me feel like it’s going to be disappointing in anything outside of limited. A) The Dungeon mechanic is incredibly parasitic. As the deeper levels of the dungeon are better, a deck that wants to make full use of a dungeon needs to run a lot of dungeon cards. This isn’t inherently a problem, but if AFR is the only set in standard that includes dungeons for its entire lifespan, it makes those decks much harder to build. Meanwhile, “Dwarf tribal” or whatever will be able to use cards from half the standard sets, and “Red Deck Wins” can just grab from any standard set. B) There are only three dungeons. The way the dungeon rules work, you always have access to all the dungeons that exist, but there are only three dungeons. This means they can’t introduce new dungeons without giving functional power level buffs to every dungeon-based card that exists, and it means if they do add more dungeons, anyone in the future using a dungeon ability will have a wide variety of options every time they play a dungeon-venturing card. But the thing is, we WANT more dungeons, just by the nature of this being the sort of the game where we want more stuff and we want room to grow off of stuff. Because cool things are cool and we want more cool things. C) There’s no mechanical way for an opponent to interact with your dungeon diving, they say, so that means if a dungeon winds up being particularly strong, there could be a serious lack of counterplay.

D) This is a minor nitpick, but the attempt to be flavorful and simplistic at the same time means that I have no idea what’s going on in this three dungeons. Hopefully they do promo better dungeon cards with real art and such because these are super bland visually.