MTG Arena artwork for Crimson Vow

[Update]: The vampire-infested Innistrad: Crimson Vow has now been unleashed!

I hope you're in the mood for a bit of a shakeup, because MTG Arena's Innistrad: Crimson Vow expansion is set to launch this November 11th. Crimson Vow will bring with it an assortment of vampires and werewolves to toy around with, as well as a variety of zombies, spirits and other nightmarish aberrations to really round out the whole horror atmosphere.

When it comes to the actual gameplay mechanics, Crimson Vow will follow in Midnight Hunt's footsteps and will heavily focus on sacrificing creatures and artifacts, transforming between two states, and bringing things back out of the graveyard for extra value. Here's a brief rundown of the six main mechanics:

Vampires are focused around Blood artifact tokens that allow you to pay one mana in order to sacrifice the Blood token, discard a card and then draw a card. Additionally there's a bunch of cards that want you to either hoard Blood tokens or sacrifice them, so the mechanic should be well supported in Limited formats.

 Werewolves are once again using Daybound and Nightbound to transform between two states which should once again encourage some creative strategies since you need to actively avoid playing cards in order to switch from day to night.

 Similarly, many cards are once again using Disturb to come back from the graveyard, but with a little twist. Instead of coming back as flying creatures, many of the Disturb cards will be coming back as enchantments and auras!

 Humans will be using an inverted Mentor mechanic from the Ravnica sets. Basically, whenever a creature with Training attacks alongside a creature with greater power, it will get a +1/+1 counter. While nothing too exciting, these sort of mechanics can snowball really quickly, so I'm curious to see just how viable the archetype will be.

 Continuing with the sacrifice theme from Midnight Hunt, Crimson Vow's zombies will be centered around Exploit that allows them to sacrifice another creature upon entering the battlefield in order to gain some sort of benefit. Very thematic, and likely to be very powerful in Limited as well.

 The final main mechanic is Cleave, which is essentially kicker with a few extra words. Basically, cards with Cleave allow you to pay extra mana in order to ignore text found within square brackets. So much like Kicker, I expect Cleave to be a Limited all-star due to the flexibility!

If you're wondering what all of this looks like on actual cards, you'll be happy to hear that Wizards of the Coast has now revealed all of Crimson Vow's cards! You can find the full list, all neatly sorted by color, over at the MTG website.

Once Crimson Vow goes live this November 11th I'll make sure to let you know. Until then, have fun thinking up new strategies to try!