Mystery Booster 2 has the MTG community on detective mode. Now that all of the cards, and more importantly all the Playtest cards, are out in the open, players are analyzing them for clues. For hints of things to come. The ‘afraid’ mechanic from Creepy Crawler, for example, seems like something that would feel right at home on Duskmourn. A couple of days ago, a Reddit thread explored the possibility of a common MTG effect receiving its own keyword in Daunt. Based, of course, on one of the Mystery Booster 2 Playtest cards having such an ability. Is this the real deal, or just a red herring? Let’s take a look.
What Is The Daunt Keyword In MTG?
Before we take a look at the Playtest card in question, a bit of context on the ability it keywords. Because we’ve seen it many times before. This ability is the line “(This creature) can’t be blocked by creatures with power 2 or less.” Chances are you’ve seen this on one card or another, even if you only started playing MTG recently.
While it’s not the most common combat ability out there, it has made a total of 32 appearances so far. (Just ignore Delney if you check out that link) Perhaps most notably on Questing Beast, as one of that card’s 400 abilities. These cards have been printed from Kaladesh in 2016 all the way up to Bloomburrow last month. It’s a well-established ability, then, even if it hasn’t been officially keyworded as of yet.
In practice, it’s a fairly niche form of evasion, intended to prevent your opponent from ‘chump blocking’ your big creature. For creatures without Trample, this is actually a significant problem in multiple formats, so the existence of this ability makes a ton of sense. It removes blocking options from your opponent, forcing them to throw their better creatures in your way or take a blow to the face.
There’s certainly precedent for combat abilities like this having keywords. Check out Skulk and Menace for some examples. The question isn’t so much can WotC keyword it, so much as it is will they. Given that it has remained un-keyworded for eight years, you might assume the answer would be no. One of the new Mystery Booster 2 Playtest cards challenges that assumption, however.
Fun Joke Or Sneaky Hint?
The card in question is Hish of the Snake Cult, and it marks the first appearance of the Daunt keyword in MTG. Daunt is functionally identical to the ability we just discussed above. Flavor-wise, this is a win. The idea of a creature intimidating smaller creatures into not fighting it makes total sense, and Daunt is a great word to convey that. Ironically, it gets the idea of intimidation across far better than the actual Intimidate keyword. Which, bizarrely, cares about creature color rather than size.
Does the existence of this card prove that Daunt will be made an official keyword mechanic at some point? Not exactly, but there is a lot of evidence that supports that theory. First of all, unlike a lot of Playtest card innovations, Daunt is incredibly reasonable. It’s literally an existing ability in the game, just given a keyword. With the push towards greater text box efficiency in Magic, compressing the 10+ lines of text this ability needs down to one is a great move.
The other element that makes this feel like a legit hint and not just a joke card is Hish’s other ability. Similar to Ruff, Underdog Champ, it mentions a creature type errata. In this case, Nagas and Serpents being brought under the Snake umbrella. The errata mentioned on Ruff did actually come to pass, and so, in fact, has half of the errata on Hish. As of Modern Horizons 3, all Naga creatures are now Snakes.
With all of this in mind, it’s looking very likely that Hish is seeding Daunt for future Magic sets. and probably a Serpent errata too, though that feels less likely to me.
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