Fresh off a cozy fuzzy animal set, Magic: The Gathering is going full horror again

A ghost holding keys comes out of a mirror

(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast/Marco Gorlei)

Haunted houses are a horror staple, but how do you do one in Magic: The Gathering, where a typical expansion represents an entire plane of existence? Duskmourn: House of Horror answers that by having a haunted house spread beyond its grounds to take over an entire world. The backstory has it that a kind of fear demon imprisoned within the bounds of a single mansion found a loophole, expanding the grounds until everyone on the plane of Duksmourn was trapped within.

Where Magic has done body horror in Phyrexia and gothic horror in the Innistrad sets, Duskmourn has more of a 1980s horror vibe, with VHS static and chainsaws—a new kind of terror in every room of its infinite house. Think of Stranger Things, Hellraiser, House of Leaves, and Stephen King's It, or videogames like Anatomy and MyHouse.wad. (There's a little Silent Hill in there as well, and Team Silent legend Masahiro Ito contributed card art.)

Appropriately, a new card type in Duskmourn are called Rooms. Technically enchantments, each one has two effects you can choose from when playing it—the other effect remains locked until you pay the additional cost. This is represented by Rooms being played horizontally, an illustrated wall separating the two halves. When your opponent plays one you get a preview of what else they'll be able to do with it, creating a sense of dread.

Which is what Duskmourn is all about. A new mechanic called impending means that certain cards representing the house's most monstrous inhabitants are played with a stack of counters on them, one of which is removed at the end of each turn, coming to life only when the final counter leaves. Again, you know what's coming, and have to figure out how to stop it in time. No jump scares here.

Ghostly Keybearer — (Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

Other cards are designed to play off the Room cards, like those with eerie abilities which trigger when an enchantment is played or a Room is unlocked. Our preview card, Ghostly Keybearer (art by Marco Gorlei), is another, unlocking a Room when you deal combat damage to a player as it flies out of the house's nightmare mirrors on a cloud of glitching TV screen fuzz.

Duskmourn: House of Horror will be playable at prerelease events from September 20, and will be available in Arena on September 24 and in paper Magic on September 27.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.