During the First Look for Nauctis: The Sunken Realm at MagicCon: Atlanta, Wizards reconfirmed a curious detail about the set. For the second time in Magic’s history, this new set won’t have any cards with Flying at all.
Instead of using this mechanic, Wizards cooked up a new evasion ability, but they deliberately didn’t show it on stage. We were meant to wait until the set’s spoiler season began, but it turns out we don’t need to be that patient.
Thanks to the newly released Nauctis Commander Party event materials, the new mechanic has been revealed months ahead of schedule. For better or worse, the new Dive mechanic is definitely interesting, but that may be a touch difficult to keep track of…
MTG Dive Mechanic Revealed Early
At its core, Dive is a new evasion ability for MTG that lets a creature attack as though it were unblockable, but only once. After it deals combat damage, it loses Dive, allowing it to be blocked as normal by anything.
On its own, this is a pretty interesting ability, and it should really mix up Limited gameplay. Since you can hold this ability for as long as you want, you can theoretically build up a big Dive board before one final swing.
Potentially, while we haven’t actually seen any cards with Dive yet, this will be a really fun design space for Wizards. High power but low toughness creatures could have a real edge here, though notably Dive doesn’t give Hexproof or Shroud.
While Dive does look like a really fun MTG mechanic, it does seem like a headache to keep track of. Using tokens as reminders will be vital with this mechanic, as forgetting what does and doesn’t currently have Dive would be a nightmare. After all, unlike normal mechanics, things that get Dive don’t lose it at the end step, but when the creature deals combat damage.
Thankfully, considering basically anything can be a counter, having some kind of reminder shouldn’t be too difficult, but it’s still not ideal. For Prerelease events in particular, not everyone is going to have a ton of counters ready and waiting just in case.
Hopefully, since Wizards of the Coast surely knows this, punch-out reminder tokens, or similar, will be readily available. Ideally, there should be a bunch of these in a Prerelease pack, but that’s just hopeful speculation right now.
Diving Into 2027
Unfortunately, since Wizards wanted to keep Dive under wraps, we’ll likely have to wait a while for more info. The spoiler season for Nauctis: The Sunken Realm isn’t expected to start until January, so we’ve got over a month of waiting till then.
In the meantime, we do at least have the MTG Star Trek set to enjoy. That said, this set isn’t exactly off to the best start, so maybe we’ll stick to playing Reality Fracture instead…
Stick with us here at mtgrocks.com: the best site for Magic: The Gathering coverage. Be sure to check out our deckbuilder for your next big brew, and our MTG Rocks Podcast!
MTGRocks’ editorial and corrections policy lets us create content you can trust.