Shadows Over Innistrad: A Retro Design Review

My only Magic hiatus began when I left for college, and ended in the summer of 2016, during the preview season of Shadows Over Innistrad. Only five years had passed since Magic’s gothic smash Innistrad, so Shadows was the fastest planar revisit yet seen. It was also the first set fully under the Gatewatch status quo.

Historical significance aside, Shadows is also just a really slick graveyard set, on my personal Mount Rushmore of elegance and intuitive novelty. Our goal today as present-day cube designers is to learn why the set worked so well. Follow along on Scryfall:

set:"Shadows Over Innistrad"

Macro Incentives

Graveyard Done Right

At first glance, Shadows Over Innistrad appears to remix the mechanics of Odyssey block, Magic’s first heavy focus on the graveyard. Delirium puts a card-type twist on Threshold, Madness returns untouched, Wild Mongrel reincarnates as a snake, and Torment provides Fiery Temper and Ghostly Wings as reprints.

However, SOI’s take on the graveyard is much more restrained, and that makes all the difference. For instance, the fastest way to hit Threshold in ODY was to discard our entire hand, or sacrifice all our stuff. Fun once; boring once we realize that we don’t get to actually play with 90% of our cards. Delirium in SOI is much more textured because its requirements are both specific and color-pie-dependent.

e:soi (o:mill OR o:discard OR o:sacrifice)

Three card types go to Magic’s graveyard fairly naturally, so Delirium’s trick is finding a fourth. Enchantments, for example, might lead us to White, but how will we get them into the grave? With some exceptions, most of SOI’s discard outlets are

. Self-mill is another option in. Sacrificing permanents is, but in low density. Moreover, though White has an abundance of creatures and enchantments, it might be tricky finding enough sorceries and instants. Pairing with Blue can solve some of these problems, but now we need to ensure that our control-leaningdeck has discard effects that align with our deck’s gameplan. And who knows if Blue is even open in our draft seat! Every color offers similarly unique incentives and enablers for Delirium, ensuring that no two graveyard decks will ever look alike.

I’m frankly amazed how one lone graveyard mechanic weaves endless texture into the tapestry of SOI. Though every color cares about the graveyard, each offers a unique twist. It’s a lovely way to structure a set, and the cherry on top is that each color is equally fun when it isn’t built around the graveyard.

A Varied Menu

My greatest aspiration is to be a café regular, known by name, my usual ready before I walk in. My only problem is that I always get sick of the usual long before anybody’s bothered to memorize it.

A lot of drafters have a usual. Mono-Red maniac, control sicko, graveyard gal, combo á la mode. A strongly thematic set like SOI mustn’t oversaturate its menu with a single dish or flavor,¹ in case that flavor clashes with a drafter’s preference, or in case they’re a restless customer like me.

Shadows Over Innistrad is a perfect case study of a varied menu, blending graveyard-adjacent discard strategies, resonant creature-type-matters decks, and a celebration of the brand-new Clue (what a flavorful name!). Delirium offers excellent gameplay, but just in case anyone gets bored, they’ll have plenty of opportunities to focus elsewhere.

On top of the commons and uncommons that comprise most drafts, SOI’s rares provide a range of even more exotic spices, like tokens-matter and much wilder build-arounds.

e:SOI r>=r

Reinforcing each individual mechanic is a single paranoid game-narrative of mystery and madness. The flavorful mechanics help sell SOI’s story, and SOI’s story justifies the choice of mechanic. (More on this later!)

Micro Interactions

Discard That Works (Despite Itself)

e:soi (o:discard OR o:madness)

Discarding cards is usually a bad thing. In general, Magic only bucks this trend while filtering card quality, cheating mana or earning one card's value elsewhere. See exhibit A: Madness, which combines mana-cheat and card advantage, and throws in Flash for good measure.

It shouldn’t work. Instant-speed blockers and on-board tricks are extremely lame. Madness is also a classic “A+B” synergy, where it’s nearly impossible to get any payoff without drafting two distinct categories of card. The sober parts of my brain know that Unearth or Scavenge or Flashback are probably healthier discard payoffs, allowing straightforward counterplay and putting the joke face-up for both players.

And yet… Madness is my personal catnip. Maybe it’s because SOI’s Madness effects lean aggressive, mitigating the worst surprise blocks. Or how Madness contributes to the set's overall story and unites the set's Vampires. Maybe I’m the mad one. Either way, SOI has the best implementation outside of Ultimate Masters.

Cards I like

As 2025's Standard indicates, cheap cards can be dangerously powerful. At worst, they compress a game’s worth of impact into the earliest turns, creating ever-higher stakes for our opening sequences and hands.

I appreciate, therefore, when a one-drop provides clear incentives to cast later in the game. Traverse the Ulvenwald can cheaply search any creature, but the Delirium requirement implies that we’ll have to play some good old-fashioned Magic first. Its basic effect of hand-smoothing is technically playable on Turn 1, but only in emergencies, and that makes me love it all the more, because mana screw is its own bummer. Traverse is the rare one-drop that is both high impact and low pressure.

In a similar vein, Thalia's Lieutenant is another cheap threat with complex tactics. Imagine playing her on Turn 2, then attacking Turn 3 after playing several cheap Humans, like Elite Vanguards. Two or three extra damage ain’t so bad, but if we’d played our Vanguards first, we’d get the same buff spread across multiple bodies – possibly a better play, depending on our opponent’s cards and the rest of our hand! (For what it’s worth, I also find Humans one of the easiest creature types to support at a variety of cube power levels.)

Separately, SOI block contains many of White’s modern-day unrestricted sacrifice effects, like Bound by Moonsilver. At the right power level, this kind of twist can create entire cubes’ worth of fresh archetype space, and the 2020s’ emphasis on trinket-text permanents gives sacrifice outlets new context, too. (Ideally we can leverage the unique flavor of these repressive effects, as well as their mechanical synergies!)

Art and Flavor

Shadows was printed in a Magic era of heighened ludonarrative, or storytelling through game mechanic. While Scars of Mirrodin revealed an infected world, and Tarkir depicted a clash of khanates and dragonlords, Shadows over Innistrad embroils its players in a web of conspiracy.

Monsters From Within

In SOI, the

pair takes a villainous turn unseen since The Dark, ideals of justice and protection curdling into a paranoid witch hunt. These cards are brutal and repressive, mirroring the growing corruption of Avacyn and her church. Even her clergy and militia have been corrupted by demonic influence, and they begin a counter-inquisition against the angels.

Meanwhile, Innistrad’s classic movie monsters are strangely backgrounded and sympathetic. The Voldarens, for example, see their reputation improve from an evil clique of elites to a justifiably vengeful frenemy, and other types are also somewhat rehabilitated. In fact, one of Innistrad’s werewolves, Arlinn Kord, hides a double life as a planeswalking hero!

Perhaps the muted monsters are due to SOI’s looming human violence. Mobs of everyday people litter SOI’s cards, with all the McCarthyist betrayal and extrajudicial violence they imply. When I turn back the clock to 2011, I see that Innistrad always had revolts and vigilante justice and even mob killings, but Dark Ascension’s everlasting Night of the Living Dead makes the human vigilantism feel like plausible self-defense.²

Five years later, the same mob violence feels unjustified, and much darker. Eventually Eldritch Moon will reveal that Emrakul is responsible for the madness and mutations, but ends do not justify means. Right now, the Lunarch inquisitors aren’t catching werewolves anymore; they’re just violating our neighbors’ rights under false pretenses. Of course, an inquisition’s true purpose is never to catch monsters, but to instill fear in everyday citizens and consolidate antidemocratic power. If we allow so-called “monsters” to be hunted in our neighborhoods, if we allow sacrifice other humans’ dignity to protect an unjust status quo, then we will have no moral standing to protest when the inquisition knocks on our door.

In the real world, there are no monsters in the moon, only self-serving stories told by would-be kings.

Applying Shadows’ Lessons

From Shadows Over Innistrad I take the following lessons: first, mechanics and aesthetics can unite to tell stories much more powerful than either tool alone. Second, a varied menu of draft experiences can be much more effective than tripling down on a single kind of Magic.

Thanks for reading. Happy new year, and remember: The cleverness of foxes counteracts the mischief of devils.