Duskmourn: House of Horror is a wonderfully weird MTG set. No top of the surprisingly tongue-in-cheek tone, there are plenty of unique and interesting cards. Both Marina Vendrell’s Grimoire and Marvin, Murderous Mimic are wonderfully wild designs and they’re just the tip of the iceberg.
To amp up the weirdness, Duskmourn boasts a brand new type of enchantment: Rooms. These new enhancements can be played and unlocked at your leisure and are obviously very fitting for a haunted house. With many Rooms looking decidedly playable, there’s no doubt that many players will want to enjoy them.
Thankfully, for anyone looking to do exactly that, Marina Vendrell has just been spoiled.
Marina Vendrell
- Mana Value: WUBRG
- Rarity: Rare
- Type: Legendary Human Warlock
- Stats: 3/5
- Card Text: When Marina Vendrell enters, reveal the top seven cards of your library. Put all enchantment cards revealed this way into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.
T: Choose target Room you control. Lock or unlock one of its doors. Activate only as sorcery.
Right out of the gate, Marina Vendrell is a very strong card. In a deck with many enchantments, rooms especially, they can put in real work. Even if they don’t stick around on the battlefield, they can potentially load your hand with value. Worst case scenario, five mana sets you up for your future turns very nicely.
Should Marina Vendrell stick around on the battlefield, they become a huge threat. Able to unlock, or lock, any room simply by tapping is a great value proposition. Rooms like Warped Space are incredibly expensive, but Marina essentially lets you play them for free. Well, they can do it, provided you have Charred Foyer in play first, at least.
Despite this caveat, Marina Vendrell will still put in a lot of work, especially in a Room-themed MTG deck. You get to play all of your Rooms for cheap and then unlock them for free later on, what’s not to love? Currently, no such deck exists, but Marina is obviously going to change that once Duskmourn launches.
Even as good as half-free rooms are, Marina Vendrell doesn’t seem like a competitive powerhouse. While Domain may be popular, getting full WUBRG by turn five, is still no easy feat. In Limited, this will be an even bigger hurdle to overcome. As much as Duskmourn has two cycles of dual lands, Drafting enough of them alongside Marina and Rooms is a tall order.
A Surprisingly Colorful Commander Card
To put it bluntly, Marina Vendrell is very obviously a Commander card. Unless a Room-based deck really pops off in Standard or Alchemy, they’ll likely never see competitive play. This is completely fine as Marina isn’t just good in Commander, they’re built for it. This can most obviously be seen in their casting cost.
As a five-color Commander, Marina Vendrell allows you to play every Room card in MTG. Similarly, there’s no limit on which enchantments you can fill your deck with for added value. This is a rare treat as Wizards doesn’t often print five color Commanders, especially for new mechanics. That said, Rooms do need all the help they can get.
So far, 24 Rooms have been spoiled, with the majority in white, blue, and black. Couple these cards with the 21 other cards that support Rooms, and you’ve got the start of a deck. The only catch is that these rooms and accompanying support cards are spread across the full WUBRG spectrum.
Without a five-color Commander, this new mechanic would likely never get a typical deck to call its own. This is obviously why Marina Vendrell has been created. For the playability of Rooms, this is great news; however, it seems to be a flavor misstep somewhat. Following the reveal of Marina Vendrell, many MTG players were confused by her color identity, suspecting Commander has played an overbearing influence.
“The only thing throwing me for a loop here is that she turned out to be five colors. I did not see her being a five-color legendary.”
Aeschylus101
While her color identity is somewhat unusual, as dIoIIoIb later noted, some of her colors can be explained. As a teenager, one who fed Valgavoth no less, she definitely fits being red and black. Similarly, her book-learned innocence makes the addition of white and blue make sense, too. The only outlier is green, which doesn’t really factor into her story at all.
Better Than Almost Nothing
At the end of the day, while their color identity may be odd, it’s a good thing Marina Vendrell exists. Hell, it’s even for the better that they’ve been over-tuned into becoming a five-color Commander. Should this not have happened, there would be no perfect option to play every Room card in one deck.
So far, the only other possible Commander who cares about Rooms is Victor, Valgavoth’s Seneschal. While Victor is by no means a bad card, they do massively restrict your options. Since Marina does the exact opposite, they should be a lot of fun to play with. This was surely Wizards’ goal when creating Marina Vendrell, and we can safely say job well done on that front.
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