Upcoming Magic: The Gathering release Innistrad Remastered is just 11 days away, and we’ve now seen all the cards from the set. That means we can confidently state that Wizards of the Coast has dropped Daybound/Nightbound, one of the central Innistrad mechanics of recent years.
Many players will not be sad to see Daybound left on the cutting room floor. This keyword was an important part of the last two Innistrad MTG sets, especially Midnight Hunt, but it proved divisive with fans.
While it provided an innovative way to represent the changing nature of Innistrad’s gothic horror creatures (especially its werewolves), the problem with the mechanic is that the Day/Night cycle it added was a fiddly extra element to keep track of during gameplay. You always needed to pay attention to how many spells players cast each turn to know whether it was supposed to be Day or Night.
That’s not such a problem by itself, and we’ve seen Wizards experiment with other mechanics that add extra elements (like Dungeons and The Ring Tempts You) both before and since Midnight Hunt.
However, the problem with Day/Night was that you had to continue keeping track of the cycle, even when there were no cards left on the battlefield that cared about it. Just a single Daybound or Nightbound card in a deck meant the game would bounce back and forth between Day and Night forever, and, if there were no other cards that used the mechanic, it would do so completely uselessly.
This makes it more annoying to just have a sprinkling of the mechanic in a set than a load of it. That’s probably one reason why it’s been left out of Innistrad Remastered entirely. For it to be worth having, you’d need to have many cards featuring it, which isn’t ideal for a Remastered set.
On the other hand, Magic’s lead designer Mark Rosewater is on record saying R&D considers Daybound/Nightbound a mistake, and recently admitted Wizards staff are “not big fans of the mechanic”, so perhaps it was never a contender.
One interesting side effect of leaving out Day/Night seems to be a lopsided color balance in Innistrad Remastered draft. Specifically, there is no ‘signpost uncommon’ for Red/Green decks. That’s because the only options Wizards could have chosen are Daybound werewolves from Crimson Vow or Midnight Hunt, or else Immerwolf, which is a massive non-bo with Eldrazi Werewolves which are never human.
This might lead to some strangeness in Draft, with Red/Green decks being more difficult to build. On the other hand, the original Innistrad set came out before signpost uncommons were even invented, and it’s considered one of the greatest limited environments of all time, so we won’t count INR out just yet.
For more Magic: The Gathering news, check out the MTG release schedule for the next year.
Source: Wargamer
