The Mechanics of Innistrad: Crimson Vow

Time to take a closer look at the mechanics, keywords and other unique aspects to Inistrad: Crimson Vow, so you can be as ready as possible to assess each card during pre-release and draft.

Quite a few of these mechanics were introduced in the previous set, Midnight Hunt, so I won’t cover them here. You can view all mechanics introduced in that set in our previous article here.

• Daybound / Nightbound

• Disturb

Training:

Training is a mechanic that thematically captures the idea of more powerful creatures ‘teaching’ weaker ones to be better fighters. Whenever a creature with Training and at least one other creature with greater power attacks, put a +1/+1 counter on the creature with Training. Simple way to pump up your weaker threats for the later stages of the game.

Cleave:

Or better known as “kicker, but stupid”, exists on cards that contain rules text in brackets. They also have an alternative, cleave casting cost. This is typically greater than the normal casting cost of these spells. You can instead cast a spell with cleave for its cleave cost in order to ignore all text in brackets in the cards rules text.

This typically allowes a card with a low casting cost and a more niche effect to be cast using a greater, cleave cost, for a more broad effect.

Blood Tokens:

This wouldn’t be a Vampire-centric set, without a bunch of blood everywhere, and for that reason, lots of cards create or care about having blood tokens. These are artifact tokens that you can pay 1 mana, tap them and discard a card to sacrifice the token and then draw a card.

This can provide some nice filtering during the late game where you can turn unneeded lands into better cards, or can be used for payoff cards that care about you having Blood tokens.

 Exploit:

This is a returning mechanic from Dragons of Tarkir. Whenever a creature with Exploit enters the battlefield you can sacrifice any one of your creatures (including the creature you just played) in order to trigger the Exploit effect of the card just played with Exploit.