New and Returning Mechanics in Kaldheim bringing new life to Standard

So Kaldheim came out on MTG: Arena a few days ago on Jan 28th on MTG: Arena and will release Feb 8th on Paper. Kaldheim takes an MTG spin on Norse Mythology. Prepare for Runes, Elves, Vikings, Giants, and SNOW. Snow literally everywhere.

Foretell

With Foretell, you can pay 2 mana to exile the card on your turn and play it on a later turn. Don’t make the mistake of Foretelling a card you absolutely need to use that same turn.

Boast

It’s an activated ability you can only activate each turn after you select an attack with creatures with Boast. You can activate this at instant speed so you don’t have to wait ’till after your attack step. This can be great for combat tricks and/or getting a little extra value from your cards.

Dual-Sided Card

One of the great things about having dual-sided cards is that it makes them more flexible to play. You can play the cheap part early and pay for the more expensive part later. It’s really nice for them to continue to bring these out. These types of cards came out with Zendikar Rising, but now they aren’t just Lands to pick from.

Returning Mechanics

Snow Lands/Permanents

Snow Lands and Snow Permanents have been released in the past, and it’s nice to see that every new release brings back an already existing mechanic. So Snow Lands aren’t new lands, they are just like a sub-archetype of a land. Like you can have Mountains, but this time these are SNOW-Covered and so-on. That makes them Special and many cards and decks will be using these permanents to gain an advantage.

Changelings

Kaldheim is home to many creatures, and the Standard format reintroduces Changling creatures. These creatures and card types that are Changelings are all creature types regardless of where the card is. These cards fit into many archetypes because of that flexibility.

Poison

Basically, instead of doing damage to a player you put poison counters on them – after you put 10 Poison Counters on them, you win the game. It is an alternative win-condition and there are only a couple of ways of resetting the poison counters attached to a player in all of Magic; so once the Poison Counters are on a player, they are pretty much on for good except for the few exceptions.

Sagas

Many of the Sagas this time around are incredibly powerful. These things are brutal.

Final Thoughts

Standard, many would say, was getting stale and this is something the format needed. The release of the remaining Pathway lands will bring new variety into the format, as well as the new mechanics to play with. There are insanely powerful cards that can blow up a game in more ways than one, and adding a new Win Condition through Poison counters will allow players to explore new decks. The art and the colors used for this set are beautiful; almost like they tried to incorporate an Ice Blue color into every corner of the set.

I am very happy with the card variety, and my only concern is if Tibalt’s Trickery is going to get banned because that card is basically a rigged slot machine that spits out wins even though I love how chaotic the card is. I’ll try to keep posting – take care, everyone.