Midnight Hunt: A Retro Review

Monster movie tropes and graveyard goodness — Innistrad: Midnight Hunt is one of my personal favorite Draft formats. Back in 2022, I wouldn’t say this out loud, since the set was famously unbalanced. One color pair was much stronger than the rest, warping everything else around it. And yet, it was precisely because of this quirk that I loved playing it.

Likewise, cube designers can learn from MID lessons that are hidden in a more conventional Draft set. Check it out on Scryfall, and follow along as we examine the witches and werewolves of Midnight Hunt:

set:'Midnight Hunt'

Macro Incentives

The Second Coming of Torment

Midnight Hunt was defined by one characteristic above all else: the decayed Zombie. These cheeky brain-munchers were everywhere on Blue and Black cards, and often at a price of less than a mana. In a normal set, a 2/2 flyer with a synergistic creature type might be nearly worth

by itself… but Falcon Abomination threw in an entire decayed Zombie, too. Nearly-free damage, a sacrifice trigger on command, and an extra creature until then.

Blue and Black had an embarrassment of riches alongside their decaying hordes. Flashback and Disturb doubled down on graveyard-adjacent synergy, premium removal at Common abounded to beat up on MID’s too-slow Werewolves, and a suite of killer Uncommons turned Zombie tokens into other forms of advantage.

All together,

was the undisputed king of Midnight Hunt. Esper commons occupied 26 of the 30 winningest slots on the MTG data aggregator 17 Lands. It was as if these colors had twice as many cards as the rest, as if Magic was returning to the Black-centric mania of Torment, twenty years later. Not necessarily a good thing for Wizards, but a unique source of insight for Cube designers.

A Clear Rule Of Engagement

Color imbalance set a clear rule of engagement in every draft of MID. Blue and Black contain the deepest pools of strong Commons, largely due to decayed Zombies, and that set the format’s stakes. If you’re not drafting Zombies, you’d better be prepared to beat them. The design implications are fascinating.

For example, if you began drafting

with zero MID knowledge besides what I’ve said, you’d already be able to guess that Eaten Alive is stronger in this set than the average Bone Splinters variant. You’d know that Eccentric Farmer is valuable partly because its 3 toughness blocks Zombies with ease, and its “enters” ability offers some residual value in the face of removal. You’d know that Crawl From the Cellar is a coming-and-going combo with Organ Hoarder, and could be a decent 23rd roleplayer. If someone told you that Festival Crasher was Red’s winningest Common creature, you might (correctly) predict that its ability to outrace Zombie armies and outscale Zombie-blockers contributed to its success.

With such clear parameters, a designer, too, can begin to predict successful synergies. A designer can say, “I’ll juice up a Green bomb like Tovolar’s Huntmaster because Green needs the help, and the plentiful Dimir removal will ensure that it’s not too dominant.” A designer can begin to game out the various board states. A 3rd toughness will beat the Zombies, so a 3rd point of power beats the Zombie-blockers, and a 4/4 token from Shadowbeast Sighting is unimaginably enormous. Card evaluation gets easier. You can theory-craft decks and pockets of synergies without resorting to time-consuming CubeCobra playtest drafts. Let me show you what I mean.

Micro Interactions

Simic is usually a troubled color pair in Magic. Green’s emphasis on creatures, and Blue’s on noncreatures, leave the pair feeling strategically adrift. The fact that both colors lack catch-up removal for onboard threats doesn’t help, either. But what if the average battlefield in Draft will include an average of 2+ zero-mana 2/2 decayed Zombies, with so much Black removal that people aren’t heavily building around their rares? Suddenly, Simic can find a unique niche as the Zombie-killer deck. Rise of the Ants is your silver bullet, crushing opposing Zombies and demanding four spot-removal spells. Shadowbeast Sighting and Eccentric Farmer are perfectly serviceable, too. Throw in Blue for Organ Hoarder, evasion, and just the lightest touch of bounce, and you’ve got a deck with 20+ creatures who are custom-built to attack a decayed format.

As another consequence of the average drafter prioritizing Dimir commons over many of their packs’ rares, savvy players could scoop up all the rares themselves, exploiting an otherwise unwanted resource. Dawnhart Rejuvenator, Eccentric Farmer, and Evolving Wilds provided the core of a five-color Green deck that snapped up other drafters’ underrated rares for cheap, creating unbeatable late-game power.

And one more example: since Red was regarded as the format’s weakest color, it was pretty easy to get as many removal spells and Festival Crashers as you wanted, using your early picks to supplement with Blue powerhouses. Seize the Storm was the payoff for this aggro-control deck, another way to capitalize on warped Draft incentives and a tight core of low-rarity format pillars.

I love MID’s unqiuely transparent flowchart of Draft strategies. Listen to the era’s podcasts and strategy videos, and there will be more to learn. Designers can also zoom in tight on MID’s flagship mechanic for another lesson.

The “Seasonal Sapling Mechanic”

I have never known a Magic without DFCs, since I started after the smash success of original Innistrad. A card like Huntmaster of the Fells has always been cool to me, with its transformation mechanic inseparable from the story of the card. Midnight Hunt misses this resonance, for two reasons. First, its Daybound/Nightbound wolves are similar-but-distinct from our two prior Innistrad visits, muddying the mechanical space. Second, we are living in a post-MDFC world, ZNR having arrived a year earlier. All at once, DFCs don’t just work one or two ways, they work three different ways. These werewolves have lost the impact of being special stories, and the simplicity of being mechanically identical.

If some mechanics are “evergreen” and some ”deciduous,” Daybound/Nightbound is a Christmas-tree sapling, tall-grown but rootless. Day/Night is a hungry mechanic that provides 20-40 low-rarity effects and a few bombs with truly unique mechanical space. But the very fact of Day/Night’s novelty resists integration into the Eternal texture of Magic: if one Day/Night card carries the exact same rules and tracking overhead of forty, why play any at all?¹

I like some of the indiviual Daybound designs. I even like the idea of slamming ten or twenty instances of Day/Night into a single cube, using the repetition to create familiarity and justify the rules overhead. But the repetition is necessary, because otherwise, the hassle simply ain’t worth it.

Art and Flavor

Midnight Hunt is not unusual among Magic sets for focusing on spooky stuff, and in fact, it’s hard to outdo the original Innistrad on the Gothic basics. What made MID stand out to me in 2022, and still today, is its singular depiction of witchcraft.

Magic’s witches were nearly entirely Black-aligned² for the first three decades of the game’s existence. Generous heapings of brothers Grimm and Shakespeare flavored these cards — warts, knucklebones, blood sacrifices, festering newts. These spellcasters were ugly or sexy but always evil, mirroring the cultural narratives of modern, patriarchal Christendom.

Candlegrove Witch is different. Magic’s first mono-White witch, she engages in ritual for the sake of protection and safety. She is clearly fighting on the side of Good, with the Sigardan Cathars as her allies. Midnight Hunt depicts, for the first time in Magic, witches as benevolent wise women and folk healers, who draw their strength from the community of a “coven.”

Western witchcraft wasn’t always cauldrons and curses. Folk healers, for example, used their special knowledge of nature and the body to provide healthcare, pre-med-school style. Even in the early days of the Scientific Revolution, writes historial Ofer Gal,³ magicians sometimes outperformed academically trained doctors, especially when it came to treating women, since the medieval MDs were mostly upper-class European dudes. What an eleventh-century British peasant might call their “cunning woman,” we might simply call a midwife, armed with the best knowledge available at the time.

The infamous witch hunts of the Middle Ages, therefore, had the ultimate effect of ousting women from positions of medical access and socioeconomic independence. It’s a pleasant surprise to see Midnight Hunt represent an older, more nuanced vision of witchcraft in the Dawnhart Coven. As a consequence, the Dawnhart are the most visually striking cards in the entire set.

dawnhart or flavor:dawnhart or (kw:coven e:mid)

The endlessly compelling “imbalance” of Midnight Hunt directly inspired me to build a Black-centric cube, Pulp Nouveau. Its cards fit right alongside any Standard release from the 2020s, but they’ll likely overshadow low-rarity cards from the first two Innistrad visits. That said, if MID taught me anything, it’s that balance is overrated.

Thanks for reading, and may you find a coven of friends to protect you from werewolf attacks and evil vampires.