[Update #2]: The vampire-infested Innistrad: Crimson Vow has now been unleashed!
[Update]: All of MTG Arena's Innistrad: Crimson Vow expansion cards have now been revealed.
Only a short while has gone by since the Innistrad: Midnight Hunt expansion, and already MTG Arena is getting ready for a brand new influx of cards. The vampire wedding themed Innistrad: Crimson Vow will be launching onto MTG Arena and MTGO on November 11th, bringing with it a whole assortment of vampires, werewolves, zombies, and other nightmarish horrors.
When it comes to the mechanics, it should come as little surprise to hear that they are once again themed around sacrifice, resurrection and transformation. There are six main ones that are worth keeping an eye out for, so allow me to share with you a brief description of what each of them is about:
• 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, while flavorful, doesn't exactly make much sense given that at this point in the story Innistrad is stuck in permanent 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!
As for what exactly all of this looks like on actual cards, that you can get a little bit of a sneak peak at through the recently launched official card gallery. Wizards of the Coast hasn't revealed many of the cards just yet so it's a bit sparse, but it should still give you a pretty good impression of what Crimson Vow is going for.
Once the full list of cards gets revealed I'll make sure to let you know. Until then, have fun brewing up new ideas for the upcoming cards!