Amonkhet and Hour of Devastation: A Retro Design Review

As promised several months ago, MTG’s onliest Egyptologist has finally written her article about the mechanics of Amonkhet! (If you’re interested in my professional opinion on Amonkhet’s flavor, check it out here.) While you may know Amonkhet for polarizing enchantments and big aggro finishers, it’s got a lot more to offer cube designers than that.

Follow along on Scryfall here:

block:Amonkhet

Designing for Speed

Amonkhet and Hour of Devastation are remembered by Limited grinders for their blistering pace. This isn’t the fast ending of Storm, where a deck can end the game all at once out of nowhere, but a format where you always feel under pressure, always watching your life total tick down and hoping your opponent’s goes down faster. This isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, of course, but if it’s what you’re looking for in Cube, Amonkhet is a great guide.

Aggressive Mechanics

The most obvious reason that Amonkhet block is aggressive is Exert. This mechanic makes great attackers out of mediocre blockers. While White’s Exert creatures are the best for pure aggression, Red’s options are no slouch, and Green’s can even help your draws. Even non-exert common creatures tend to do well on the offensive.

While Embalm may not seem aggressive at first blush, the reality is different. Losing your 1/1 creatures for marginal combat advantage feels better when you can buy them back. Even a vanilla 2/1 can be appealing when you get two of them. Trading back and forth defines Amonkhet’s games, with both players trying to eke out incremental advantages in life and in cards. Much like Raid in its several appearances, the mechanics of Amonkhet incentivize attacks and naturally drive games towards resolution. (The similary mana-sink ability to cash in lands doesn’t hurt either.)

Aggro, Even In Blue

We tend to associate particular colors with particular play patterns, especially in Retail Limited. Red leans aggressive, with White usually close behind. On the other hand, Blue is typically the controlling role, with counterspells, the highest concentration of card draw, and more defensive creatures.

But the lapis-dyed Blue of Amonkhet has no interest in playing the pure control game. In fact, Blue has perhaps the most aggressive (and coolest!) common creature in the entire base Amonkhet set, Slither Blade, a humble creature that created an entire deck strategy. Hour of Devastation adds another unblockable creature in Cunning Survivor. Pair them with Galestrike for a tempo-heavy aggressive deck, or why not Open into Wonder and end the game out of nowhere?

To pair with Blue, Green's big creatures or Red's burn spells fill our later turns as our army of blue snakes chips in damage. And if we have a high enough concentration of noncreature spells, why not staple Lightning Bolt to them all? While it’s not in Blue, I’d be remiss not to mention Firebrand Archer, an all-star Common that rips through life totals with incredible speed.

Meanwhile, Amonkhet’s position of control is taken by Black. Without Exert or Embalm, Black gets to play a very different kind of game. Thanks to some historically-dubious curses and realistic defensive creatures, Black is happy to wait out attacks and make trades. It can get back anything it loses anyway, even life - so long as it doesn’t get run over in the meantime. Death-trigger creatures like Doomed Dissenter and Wretched Camel give yet more incentive to leave up blockers and generate value.

White-Black is a Zombies-matter deck with all the usual strengths and pitfalls of a typal archetype (intuitive synergies that get stale for repeated drafts). The other three Black pairings have some unique texture, though. Red-Black has a small Minotaur theme but is mostly about discarding cards for offensive value. Blue-Black is a very interesting take on cycling. Instead of linear, infinite-growth Ikoria, Amonkhet offers incremental value through tempo plays. It’s here that Blue’s ample countermagic shines best, complementing the suite of Black control cards to form a true control-aggro deck (not that we’d turn down an unblockable snake on the side, of course).

Green-Black is truly unique, one of the coolest takes on the color pair in recent Limited memory. The pairing of life and death is accomplished by weakening our creatures only for them to shrug it off. Flavor-wise, it’s about overcoming limitations to become unstoppableExemplar of Strength - or just throwing some little guy under the bus to get some undercosted threat. Very Green and very Black, but also immensenly fun to play (in moderation - be careful about counter tracking issues!) Unfortunately, it’s a space that’s seen little play outside of AKH-HOU, but I hope someday we’ll see more use of this design space.¹

Enchanted Egypt

b:akh t:enchantment

Enchantments are, in a word, weird. They’re conceptually cool - spells that last forever, not just one-time instants - but in practice they tend to be kinda janky. This is especially true in Limited, doubly so in a high-speed format, triply so for creature Auras. Unless there’s a dedicated theme, Enchantments are rarely worth drafting except for the odd removal spell. But Amonkhet has, in my opinion, some of the best Draft enchantments to date. How’d Wizards pull it off?

Making Enchantments Into Something Else

Theros sets exemplify Wizard’s most-explored solution to making enchantments work: enchantment creatures. This solves the enchantment problem by making enchantments cards you would already play instead of unhelpful memory issue-generators. This is great when you want enchantments to be a core theme of the set. But what if you want a light sprinkling of enchantments, just enough playables to make an impression? Well, why not combine them with another card type: sorceries?

Remove the enchantment text from Amonkhet’s five trials and you get five perfectly-playable (if not exactly incredible) Limited cards: Kytheon's Tactics, Sift, Diabolic Edict, Ghostfire (minus the upsides), and Alpine Grizzly. (Well, maybe Trial of Zeal is the best one.) You’re never particularly upset to include them in almost any deck, particularly those that function as removal. But the quality that separates the Trials from “normal spells with weird typing” is that they aren’t actually one-time effects. If you play a Cartouche, you can pick up the Trial to re-cast – and that changes everything.

Solving The Aura Problem

It’s sweet to add new abilities and stats to existing creatures, and Auras are historically the best way to do that. The trouble with Auras in Limited (and particularly in Cube) is that they set you up for easy two-for-ones. If you cast Colossification on your Brushwagg and it gets Fatal Pushed, you just spent 7 mana to discard a card! That’s a pretty miserable experience.

Amonkhet’s answer is to make its Auras two-for-ones by default. Every Amonkhet Cartouche Aura gives +1/+1 and a color-relevant keyword to its enchantee, of course, but it also has another one-time effect. Blue’s Cartouche draws a card, the most obvious instance of card advantage. Other colors offer similar upsides, from the -1/-1 counter for Black or the fight spell for Green. Red alone lacks a permanent advantage on its Cartouche’s ETB. Instead, Red gets to Panic a creature; paired with Haste, it can easily close out an AHK game for a single mana.

Add in the ability to pick up your Trials, and AKH’s Cartouche Auras go from new-player traps to all-stars. The Cartouche dream is a Black-based control deck, sequencing a forced sacrifice into a permanent shrink, a lifelinking stabilizer, and another sacrifice. All this incredible dream needs is one common, one uncommon, and some creatures.

For a block with relatively few traditional cube all-stars, we designers have much to learn from Amonkhet block. It tweaks Magic’s color pie to bring games to a quick but satisfying end, and gives us enchantments actually worth using. Many of its cards are weak by contemporary standards, sure, but most Amonkhet cards are interesting - and I rate that much more highly.