The Unwell Kingdom Devlog

“Stay close,” Lani whispered to her fellow orphans as they slinked between the dark alleyways of Crestfall. Today’s mission was special. No room for careless mistakes.

Up ahead, Kennie gave a signal: “Royal Guard ahead.” Her conjured pair of mage hands weren’t just for picking locks or causing distractions, they also made great warnings. Lani tensed, slowed her breathing. As always, she prepared for the worst.

Reuben, on the other hand, kept walking straight towards the Guard. His silver tongue and disarming smile would keep him safe from harm, and even if it didn’t… well, Reuben could take care of himself.

Thimble knew this was his chance! While Reuben kept the Guard occupied, he darted out into the market, grabbing handfuls of items from each stall and weaving between surprised onlookers. Lani let out a sigh of relief as he scurried into a connecting alley. Mission success.

Thanks to the efforts of her friends, Merka was now ready to get to work. She chirped with delight as she picked through Thimble’s haul—flour, butter, sugar, herbs, and lots of fresh figs! This was everything she needed to bake an unforgettable tart. It wasn’t long before sweet aromas filled the air of the orphans’ hideout.

However, this treat wasn’t for them. Merka snuck the tart to the place Lani had found, a small hole burrowed directly into the wall of Crestfall Castle. She set the tart down, pinned a note to it, and returned home, unsure if Lani’s plan would actually work…

…But it only took a few minutes for the smell of figs to coax a molefolk up from the tunnel! He had almost devoured the entire tart before noticing the note that came with it: “There’s trouble in the Catacombs! The Children of the Blade are plotting something, and we need to stop them. Lend us a hand. There’s more where this came from if you do.”

The orphans made a valuable ally that day.

White – Maisie’s Meat Market

White isn’t a color known for drawing cards, but Maisie is here to spread the love! You won’t building any card advantage over your opponent(s), but it may be just enough to keep you from an empty hand. The extra bit of life gain is a nice bonus, and depending on the state of the match, an opponent may actually pass on their extra card to keep you from healing out of danger.

Blue – The Crooked Cap

The last thing Blue needs is more card draw… right? The Crooked Cap offers card selection rather than raw advantage, allowing you to shuffle away your least valuable card in a miniature nod to Silas, the Scatterbained‘s ability. This makes it especially useful to switch up the top of your library in combination with scry effects or Olly, Spellslinger‘s ability. Lastly, it synergizes especially well with Mesmir, the Magnificent, who turns the shuffle into even more selection!

Black – Bagzo’s Corner

Bagzo Bones is a weird lil guy. His spin on a card draw artifact is all about bone counters, an extremely niche mechanic only seen elsewhere on Bagzo’s own card and The Indigo Broker. This means it functions as a slightly worse Phyrexian Arena on its own, since it starts needing to take turns off to refill its own bone counters after the first few draws. This makes it a decent option on its own, but once Bagzo or the Broker enter the mix, Bagzo’s Corner can turbo-charge their abilities to cheat out larger creatures from the grave or flip Bagzo into an early Fell King!

Red – The Messy Hall

Goblins love food. They don’t always eat it. The Messy Hall plays on Red’s loot draw by asking you to give as much as you get. It comes with a free Food token, which you can choose to sacrifice immediately for the draw, but which also synergizes with other cards in the Red/Black/Green goblin tokens subtheme! Grub, Apprentice Chef loves having extra Foods around, Goblin Berries can be sacrificed for card draw to get a sneaky trigger, and Spitts, Furnace Keeper is happy to burn anything for fuel! And remember, goblins aren’t picky eaters… you can always sacrifice a creature or enchantment in a pinch!

Green – Grimmtail’s Ferry

Lastly, Green is a color that needs to jump through extra hoops for its card draw, to offset the inherent strength of its big creatures and mana ramp. Grimmtail’s Ferry serves as niche ramp OR card draw, but only for Equipment. Grimmtail offers handy discounts on those Equipment, and this card rewards you by letting you spend that extra mana on card draw instead! The wording feels a bit odd on this card to match the format of the other merchants, but it also means that you don’t always need to cast Equipment to activate the draw ability… creating tokens with Kornaan, the Cobbler or using Loam Scrounger‘s passive ability can be enough to satisfy the requirement!

Final Thoughts

What Worked

To start, it's worth mentioning that Inspiration tokens themselves have been very successful as a twist on the familiar +1/+1 counters in other Magic sets. Because they're single-use but can be applied at instant speed, the prevailing strategy is to stock up lots of them to apply "soft power". If any 1/1 creature could suddenly become a 6/6, then opponents are likely to let the 1/1 through unblocked. But them moment the attacker actually chooses to cash out on those buffs, their future attacks become much less threatening! The end result is a minigame of chicken during combat, and it's very satisfying to call someone's bluff and force them to go through with a trade in order to deplete their stash of tokens. Inspire leads to a lot of skill-testing moments that are unique to The Unwell Kingdom, and lend the set a lot of its flavor and memorability!

Gerald the Heavy is in a very funny spot as a card that playtesters often ask me to buff, despite it looking great every single time it's played. It stocks up a free Inspiration once per turn, it gives other creatures haste so they can immediately use that buff, and worst case it's a 3-toughness blocker! The most frequent feedback I get is that players wish they could activate his ability at instant-speed, mostly so they could hold it up as a blocker AND still get the Inspiration on their opponent's end step. However, I prefer forcing the choice instead. I also want to avoid instant-speed Inspiration as much as possible... this mechanic is at its best when it sits there on the board and demands players to work around it, rather than surprising them out of the blue.

The Finishers. Stockpiling Inspiration tokens is all well and good, but decks that build around the mechanic really want a way to pay them off beyond their base +1/+1 buffs. Fortunately, There are a number of bombs in the set that pull this off in unique and powerful ways.

Kingbird, Rekindled is perhaps the most straightforward of these, offering a good old Gruul overrun effect that turns each Inspiration token into +1/+1 and Trample for ALL of your creatures. Its only drawback is that it gives the opponent a single turn to react... unless it's paired with Gerald for a hasty attack trigger!

Garp Garp, Lord of Bones has the most confusing effect of these bombs at first glance, but once playtesters parse that his tap ability sacrifices himself for scalable direct damage, those 3 extra tokens start looking real nice. This card has proven to be a go-to closer for Rakdos decks, which can further combine Garp Garp with cards like Crestfall Catacombs for even more damage, or The Indigo to reanimate him and do it all again.

"Thrashikus," False Prophet is another deceptively strong attacker. Most players see a 2/3 for 4 mana and expect the worst, but even a single Inspiration token is enough to pull him up to a 4/4. Interestingly, he's been especially strong in Inspire mirror matches, where opponent's have to think twice about poppoing their own tokens, or else "Thrashikus" sees those too!

Cog has turned out to be a fantastic little deckbuilding puzzle piece! He's one of the few ways for any color to access Inspiration tokens, but he's not terribly threatening without finding ways to Inspire 3. Delightfully, this means Cog plays very differently in each color!

White - White's various blink abilities cause Cog to enter from exile. Ephemeral Unicorn is a particularly potent combo, letting Cog Inspire 3 every turn.

Blue - While more of a Dimir keyword, finding ways to play Cog from the Hoard with cards like The Indigo Herald technically counts as entering from exile! Pelly, Honest Smuggler also gets a shout-out for the time one player drafted her alongside all four copies of Cog and decided he didn't need the full Inspire 3 and was happy enough to bounce his Cogs back to hand and play them again for extra Inspire 1 triggers.

Black - Black has tools like The Indigo Broker to reanimate Cog from the grave, a nice straightforward synergy.

Red - Red ironically has the fewest ways to trigger the Inspire 3, though impulse draw like New Melody can potentially fit the bill. Instead, red decks get the most out of Cog by playing it on turn 1 to snowball into their other Inspire effects.

Green - Even green decks, which usually miss out on the Inspire 3 payoff entirely, can make use of Cog! He comes down early enough to curve into Press On for ramp, and green is able to make use of the 0/1 flying body by attaching Equipment to it instead!

Because of this, almost any deck is happy to see Cog show up in their draft, which is a huge flavor win. Just look at that lil guy!

What Didn't Work

There was only one notable stain on Inspiration this year, and it came in the form of a card everyone liked so much, they begged me not to nerf it.

Practice Cactus is the other colorless 1-drop in the set to give any deck access to Inspiration. By equipping it to a creature, it provides an effortless drip feed of Inspiration tokens each turn. It quickly became a favorite among testers, both for its cute name/art and its ability to snowball games into their favor. However, as mentioned above, Inspiration is at its most powerful when stockpiled, and Practice Cactus turned out to be a bit too good at doing exactly that.

Throughout 2024, Practice Cactus cost 1 to play and 1 to equip. This meant it could potentially curve out perfectly onto a 1-drop creature (say, a Cog) to start churning out Inspiration as early as turn 3's upkeep. This proved too fast for a lot of decks to answer. Specifically, turn-1 creature into turn-2 Practice Cactus + equip led to more non-games than any other opener, and made Inspiration-focused aggro decks feel unstoppable.

What Needs to Change

Practice Cactus received a crucial nerf in January 2025: increasing the equip cost from 1 to 2. This minor tweak means players can no longer run away with the game by curving out a 1-drop, and also makes it a bit more punishing to re-equip if the first creature is removed. It still saw some play without feeling overwhelming in the most recent playtest, so with luck it won't require any additional nerfs.

What Worked

The only Hoard cards to successfully see play have been the ones with self-contained, proactive effects.

Several dragons in the set with variations of the same effect: hoarding away all cards of a certain type from all graveyards when they enter, cheating those cards into play when they deal combat damage, and flying + another keyword to make them reliable attackers! While these cards can benefit from other cards (eg. mill effects to get extra cards into the graveyard, or other ways to access the cards once hoarded), their ability to function on their own make them easy to include in almost any deck.

Byss, Indigo Tyrant is the clear standout as the quintessential bomb mythic of the set. At 7 mana, she's tied for most expensive card in the set, but once she hits the board it usually spells doom for her foes.

Far-Flung Dragon is much less splashy but still feels good in Golgari and Jund decks. It's much easier to remove than Byss but usually manages to ramp out a few extra lands or nab a favorable trade before it goes.

Dragonform only showed up a few times in our 2024 testing, but was very strong when it did. It was notably great at bringing back Sagas, but even just giving a creature flying and hexproof was usually worth the cost of admission. It struggled with the same core issues as other Concentration Auras, so this one may now be even stronger with the recent changes to that mechanic.

Unlike the rest of this cycle, Frara, the Chromatic went largely unpicked. The 5-color cost proved too daunting for playtesters to run her, but I like her place in the set as a challenging build-around... One day, a deck will line up with the proper mana-fixing or find a sneaky way to cheat her into play!

Birth of a Dragon was the other standout Hoard card of the year, a Saga that felt great to play in most any Rakdos deck. This one plays out like a less busted Fable of the Mirror Breaker, with the first turns setting up extra card selection and ramp in the form of Treasures, and culminating in the perfect creature to pay it all off. Testers have responded very positively to the Dragon token. It's a reasonable body, and unlike the aforementioned Dragons who all cheat out hoarded cards of a certain type, this one can play anything from the hoard as long as the player can pay for it. Overall, it's a very versatile card that feels strong but never overwhelming. It's in a great spot!

What Didn't Work

Aside from the Dragons themselves, the rest of the Hoard cards were too opaque and durdly to form a compelling strategy. The original intention was for the Dragons to be the big payoffs, and everything else to support them with ways to hoard additional cards or the ability to access the hoard in smaller bursts. However, it's now clear that for the mechanic to succeed, players need more consistent payoffs than a couple of rares and mythics, or else they won't bite at all. As it stands, there are just too many hoops to jump through. Much of this can be blamed on....

The Labyrinth Lurker. Rewind to 2023. The very first Unwell Kingdom playtest was an unorthodox one, a game of sealed Two-Headed Giant instead of our usual draft 1-v-1s. The intention was to ease into the set by building decks from our own 6 packs of cards, and then having a teammate to further rely on, but it made for some wonky data. In any case, one outcome was clear. Labyrinth Lurker absolutely crushed the rest of the field and it was not close.

The winning deck went all-in on the hoard thanks to this 2-mana 2/2 common with a similar ability to Dragon tokens, allowing cards to be played directly from the hoard once per turn. However, this one also mana-fixed automatically, and the "once per turn" clause wasn't included opponent's turns as well. This was a sobering look at what the Hoard could do when it was overtuned. The game got completely locked down thanks to some hoarded counterspells and an endless one-sided flood of card advantage. Simply put, it did too much for too little. It gave near unrestricted access to hoarded cards on a body that was cheap to play, competitively statted, and could stack with multiple copies.

For these reasons, the Lurker was cut from the set completely and I was much more wary about the hoard effects that remained.

Broker's Negotiations was a more fiddly way to interact with the hoard, a 3-mana enchantment that could hoard cards from the graveyard or play cards once they're hoarded. Unlike the Labyrinth Lurker though, this demands an additional cost both ways, discarding a card from hand or sacrificing a nonland permanent respectively. If other hoard cards saw more play, I think this one might actually open up some interesting lines, but those extra costs make it difficult to play without support. The payoff is also difficult to assess at a glance. When I see Broker's Negotiations get passed up in drafts, I expect most players' eyes glaze over at all the text before they pick a more straightforward card.

Frara's Scale actually functions at about the power level it should, a 3-cost mana rock that taps for any color with minor/niche upside. This feels like a plan B, a glue piece to ensure a Hoard deck can still function even if it whiffs on its star cards, and that's okay. Like the Negotiations, it's waiting to support star cards that just don't exist in this set, so it feels weak as a result.

What Needs to Change

In order for hoard decks to work, they need something to build around that doesn't require a rare or mythic Dragon. The Indigo Herald is the perfect candidate for this, so it's getting redesigned to become a signpost uncommon for this mechanic.

Previously, it was a mill card that hoped to get more hits into graveyards for Byss, Indigo Tyrant or Dragonform. However, this was one extra step too many, so now its role will be the premiere way to directly access hoarded cards! It now allows players to cast noncreature spells from the hoard without worrying about mana colors. Labyrinth Lurker was overwhelming, but now it will live on in The Indigo Herald! Being limited to noncreature spells and being much harder to cast than the monocolor 2-drop.

In addition to giving grindy control decks extra gas, I'm very excited to see what combos this enables, especially when paired with Glimpse the Indigo to send cards straight back to the hoard when played... Bug in a Jar + Child of the Blade = infinite 1/1 tokens! Wishka Warrior + Bonus Action = infinite Inspiration tokens! Spitts, Furnace Keeper + Goblin Berries = infinite damage pings!

None of these will be easy to pull off, especially in draft. But knowing the potential now exists might give players reason to reconsider Hoard cards before passing them up again.

Finally, speaking of Glimpse the Indigo, there have been a few times where it and Drakebearer created awkward interactions because they forced ALL cards that hit the graveyard to be added to the hoard. By updating both of these cards' effects to be optional, they may find a home in more graveyard-focused decks. This is especially true for Glimpse, since it's the most straightforward burst of mill in the set.

What Worked

Ironically, the most played Concentration auras were all off-color, which made Blue feel even weaker by comparison!

Crown of Madness is an evil twist on the Concentration formula, and one of the few that want to enchant an opponent's creature instead of your own. You can read more about the design of this card here, but in short, it almost always disrupts the board and forces at least two discards, making it potentially devastating in drafts. Even then, it often felt very feast-or-famine, serving as a pop quiz for an opponent's ability to break concentration on their own creature. This is trivial in decks with Equipment or Inspiration to target their creature, but those without an immediate answer often got steamrolled.

Unbreakable Bolt is a deceptively effective burn spell that managed to close out several games during playtests. While it takes a few turns to really crank up the heat, there were times it went unanswered and dealt 10+ direct damage, making it a pet card for a few of the regular testers. Extremely punishing to players who don't pack enough removal in their decks.

Finally, Press On made its way into a decent number of green decks as a pseudo-Explore. It occasionally got stuck in hand when players couldn't stick a creature on the board to enchant, but this never felt like an unfair drawback.

What Didn't Work

A handful of awkward or unintuitive interactions made Concentration feel a bit too convoluted, restrictive, and generally unpleasant to some playtesters.

Too Wordy - "Is dealt damage or targeted by a spell or ability" turned out to be trickier than expected for some players to mentally track, leading to confusion and missed triggers. While intended as a nod to both its namesake in D&D, which has characters roll to maintain their concentration spells upon taking damage, as well as to class MtG cards like Phantasmal Image which vanish as soon as they're targeted. In particular, it was easy to lose track of creatures being targeted by abilities, especially in less obvious cases like attempting to equip onto that creature.

Anti-Synergies - Players were often disappointed to learn how many "hidden" restrictions were baked into the mechanic. In addition to equip effects, a player could accidentally break their own Concentration aura by targeting their creature with Inspiration tokens or even other Concentration auras! While originally intended as clever ways to interact and free your own creatures from a Sirensong or Crown of Madness, the takeaway was usually that the entire mechanic didn't play well with the rest of the set. This understandably pushed players even further away from these cards in drafts.

The Ward Conundrum - Several of the Wizards in blue were designed specifically to be good enchant targets, with Ward making them more difficult for an opponent to target. However, I realized that it didn't actually work! Because of the way Ward is worded, a creature is still "targeted" even if the Ward cost is not played and the spell or ability gets countered. This meant Concentration could still be broken just as easily, and even led to some awkward rewording on some cards. For most of 2024, Mage Armor read "Spells that target enchanted creature cost one more to cast" since the whole point of the card was to protect a creature. Even this felt pretty bad, since it didn't account for being targeted by abilities at all... What started off as a simple, flavorful idea quickly unraveled into a tangle of disappointing edge cases!

What Needs to Change

Even after concerted efforts to buff Blue as a whole, Concentration spells continue to go largely untouched. Rather than continue to spin on their individual effects, it's time to rework the rules text of the mechanic itself:

If enchanted creature is dealt damage, sacrifice this enchantment. If a creature has two or more Auras with Concentration attached to it, all of them except the last one attached are put into their owners' graveyards.

This version of the mechanic aims to solve a few things:

Concentration is no longer broken when targeted. This brings it more in-line with D&D's version, gives players less to keep track of, and allows Concentration to work with other mechanics like Equipment, Inspiration, and Ward.

The additional clause still limits creatures to having a single Concentration Aura on them at a time. While the MtG legalese makes this seem more complicated than it is, I expect it to be more intuitive in practice... can't concentrate on two things at once!

Since the second clause gives priority to the last Aura attached, this means players can now fight over a creature's concentration – Playing a Crown of Madness to remove an opponent's Mage Armor, or vice versa. It's important that the "villainous" Auras in the set still feel like they have available counterplay now that it's no longer as trivial as equipping or inspiring the creature.

☀️ White – Charmed Sentinel

First, we have white's take on this cycle. The Charmed Sentinel has a decent (if a bit unimpressive) 4/4 body, but its real value comes from making your creatures evasive. White decks often find themselves with wide boards of smaller creatures. Sometimes that's enough for them to flood through, but with the Charmed Sentinel, they can fly right over the top of most enemies and worry less about blockers.

In addition, White cards in this set have a heavy "enchantments matter" sub-theme. As an enchantment creature, the Charmed Sentinel is able to take advantage of those extra synergies and soar to even greater heights!

💧 Blue – Unbound Basilisk

Blue decks tend to look for different strategies than straightforward aggression, instead finding other ways to swing tempo in their favor. I wanted Unbound Basilisk to be specifically powerful against midrange threats—bulky attackers that would otherwise muscle through now have to think twice or risk being locked down with a stun counter, and the Basilisk's high toughness makes it likely to survive!

Then, thanks to vigilance, it's free to attack each turn. 3 damage isn't terribly threatening, but trading off a creature or risking more stun counters means it's not a fun creature to block. Perfect to help blue decks stabilize and grind down their foes!

💀 Black – Old Dead Gold Mole-Molded Mold

Black's monster is a bit of an outlier compared to the rest. Its stats are lower, making it less imposing as a brute force attacker than the others, but it comes bundled with a delayed reanimation effect. This synergizes great with a lot of what this color wants to do—Some decks just want a sticky body, some will see it as two potential sacrifice payoffs, and still others will try to cheat in an even bigger bomb from the graveyard, like Ans Fleurellian or Byss, Indigo Tyrant!

🔥 Red – Confounded Chimera

The Confounded Chimera costs an extra mana compared to the monsters listed above, but it's a fierce 5/5 body with unique versatility! The option to choose a different keyword each combat step means it can come out as a hasty attacker, soar over grounded enemies, or stomp its way through, depending on the current state of the game.

There will usually be an obvious best option (on opponent's turns, flying is the only one that matters at all), and that's okay! These big commons are designed to be straightforward to use to complement all the more complicated, decision-heavy effects across the rest of the set.

🌳 Green – Fungal Titan

Green decks love a big stompy trampler to push damage through and close out the game. The Fungal Titan is exactly that. While 5 power doesn't seem like the best deal for a 6 mana creature, it makes up for it with its ability to increase power for each creature blocking it. This lets it absolutely steamroll through small chump-blockers! The only way to stop it is by offering up larger defenders, and potentially lose crucial chunks of board presence.

⚙️ Colorless – Scrap Baby

Finally, the Scrap Baby stands (or crawls) as the most expensive colorless card in the entire set, costing a whopping 7 mana for a 6/5 trample body. Since colorless creatures can be played in any decks regardless of mana base, it's important to keep their stats slightly under rate. Otherwise, every deck would use them.

This can make them feel a bit like a consolation prize, but that's actually a good thing! I want Scrap Baby to be the sort of card that gets played as a "plan B"... If a player drafts a solid green deck but never manages to pull a Fungal Titan, they'd rather fall back on a slightly overpriced big body than nothing at all. For their troubles, the Scrap Baby also de-buffs opposing creatures with its terrifying size!

Staples, not Stars

Scraps of metal from Contraption itself had started coming to life and attacking the goblin families who lived there! While Garp Garp's father, Blargg Blargg, wasn't eager to welcome him back after all this time, he reluctantly asked our heroes for help. At this rate, Contraption would soon be destroyed unless someone could get to the bottom of the mystery!

As the party navigated grimy corridors and precariously stacked homes in search of clues, the scrap monsters they encountered got bigger and more elaborate -- from formless balls of shrapnel, to fierce serpents that grew as they churned through steel walls, to the absolutely massive scrap baby which thrashed the city's engine room!

In their fight against the scrap baby, they finally discovered the true source of the attacks. The scrap monsters were being animated by a vengeful spirit, the ghost of a young girl who had been captured and eaten by the goblins!

Gin, the party's monk, spent his turns dodging the baby's attacks and calmly talking to the ghost. After considerable persuasion, she calmed down enough to lead the party to the goblins' storeroom, where they found a few other shivering kids.

Tilde, Nurse-In-Training Creature — Elf Cleric (2/1) 009/275 Common

Partner with Rose, Devoted Florist (When this creature enters the battlefield, target player may put Rose, Devoted Florist into their hand from their library, then shuffle.) When Tilde, Nurse-In-Training enters the battlefield, target player gains 3 life.

Rose, Devoted Florist Creature — Dwarf Townsfolk (1/2) 141/275 Common

Tomas's approach was simple. His father had closed the town off from the world, so he would open it to all. Criminals, outcasts, and Resistance soldiers mingled among growing ranks of Royal Guard sent by the Queen.

Tensions hit a fever pitch when the Blind Berserker cleaved a path of ruin through the center of town. Our heroes, including Gin returning at last, arrived just in time to help Tomas and his local deputies fight back against the combatants on both sides of the smoldering crater!

After the conflict was settled, Fable, the catfolk cleric, cast Create Water to fill in the crater and extinguish the flames. And so Kittypaw Lake was formed!