This was going to be tricky because the last block, Battle for Zendikar, had gone full throttle with the Eldrazi and we wanted to do something different. Eldritch Moon had to show the influence of what happens when Emrakul finally arrives. That something sinister was Emrakul, who was drawn to Innistrad by Nahiri in her plan to get revenge on Sorin and his home plane. And with her out of the way, something truly sinister was making its way to the plane. It turns out, though, that Avacyn was not only not the problem-she was, in fact, the one thing protecting Innistrad. Jace and Tamiyo were unable to defeat Avacyn, but Sorin showed up at the last minute and, with great regret, unmade his angelic creation. With help of Tamiyo's journal and eventually Tamiyo herself, Jace came to believe that the cause of the madness was the angel Avacyn. He quickly realized that something was wrong with Innistrad-many of the denizens were going mad and slowly changing due to some unseen influence-and set out to solve the mystery of what was happening. Shadows over Innistrad found our protagonist, Jace, showing up on Innistrad in search of Sorin.

To understand what choices were made in Eldritch Moon's design and development (I should note that both new mechanics I'm going to be talking about today were created during development), we first have to take a step back and look at what the set was responsible for. (No, not the legendary Werewolf, we previewed that last week.) Since I have a lot to talk about, let's get to it. I even have a new preview card, something that certain players have been wanting for a long time. Eldritch Moon has a lot of other things going on in it, though, so today I'm going to talk about the many other cool things in the set. There was a lot of history behind the creation of the meld cards, so I used all of my column (other than the part where I introduced the design team) to talk about how meld came to be. Last week, I talked about the new meld cards (the double-faced cards that transform into a card made up of two different cards-go check out last week's article if you don't know what I'm talking about). Welcome to the second Eldritch Moon Preview Week.

Mtg eldritch moon meld angels