MTG Arena artwork for the Crimson Vow expansion

[Update #2]: MTG Arena's Innistrad: Midnight Hunt & Crimson Vow double feature draft is coming on January 28, 2022.

[Update]: MTG Arena's digital-only Alchemy format has now arrived, and with it a whole assortment of new and rebalanced cards.

Only a short while has gone by since Innistrad: Midnight Hunt arrived, and already MTG Arena has unleashed its follow-up expansion - Innistrad: Crimson Vow. As you might expect from the name alone, Crimson Vow has brought with it a wide array of vampires, zombies, werewolves and spirits, as well as all sorts of other nightmarish monstrosities that endlessly plague the poor humans of Innistrad.

In terms of actual gameplay mechanics, Crimson Vow has brought back transformations and disturb from Midnight Hunt, while also adding a couple of new ones like blood tokens that allow you to cycle your cards. Here's a brief rundown of the six main mechanics you'll want to keep an eye out for:

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 are 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 expecting it to be particularly powerful in Limited formats.

Continuing with the sacrifice theme from Midnight Hunt, Crimson Vow's zombies are 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 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!

What all of these mechanics look like on actual cards, however, that you can find out through the recently updated Crimson Vow card list. Wizards of the Coast has neatly organized it by color, so it should be pretty easy to get a good idea of just what each color and combination is all about.

It's also worth mentioning that, much like the previous sets, Crimson Vow has been released alongside a code that gives you three free packs. Simply head into the in-game store, enter "PLAYVOW" into the code field, and you should get the three packs as soon as you press enter.

Have fun with all of the new cards, and make sure to check out the various Limited formats as right now everyone is on equal footing since nobody has any real experience with the new set.