Magic: The Gathering is set to continue its stay on the iconic plane of Innistrad with a wedding in Crimson Vow, the upcoming set release that will see legendary vampire Olivia Voldaren take center stage. Innistrad: Midnight Hunt saw the plane return to its gothic roots after a brief detour into eldritch body horror, and the result has been a vibrant Standard format - save, perhaps, Alrund's Epiphany decks and the disdain they've received from players - with plenty of eye-popping art and interesting mechanical iterations.
While Midnight Hunt was more focused on the werewolf tribe, however, Crimson Vow is shining a spotlight on vampires. Plenty of Crimson Vow preview cards have already inspired Commander brewers to start building around the blood-sucking tribe, and Blood Tokens as a mechanic offer a unique spin on adjacent concepts like Clues. Not all cards will revolve around the night terrors of Innistrad, and some of the mechanics coming to the set are exciting, with Cleave perhaps the most interesting of all.
Cleave is a first in Magic: The Gathering history: A mechanic that removes text from the card when paying an alternate cost. Screen Rant's exclusive Crimson Vow preview card is an intriguing spin on Cleave that presents a card that will be virtually impossible to understand the implications of without playtesting it thoroughly. World, meet Inspired Idea:
Inspired Idea's rate on card draw makes it an exciting Crimson Vow preview. For just 3 mana, players can draw 3 cards at sorcery speed - with an incredibly impactful drawback. Reducing maximum hand size to 4 (let's just assume no one is casting two of these without Cleave) is a dangerous prospect, and the natural home for card draw, control decks, will have no interest in that negative factor. Its flexibility is what makes Inspired Idea potent, however. 5 mana to draw 3 cards isn't the worst rate in the history of Magic: The Gathering, and when control decks have stabilized, they may have an interest in this kind of effect.
For combo decks, though, a 3 mana draw 3 with a drawback that doesn't kick in until cleanup step might be deceptively powerful. Something like the Modern Storm combo deck could have an interest in Inspired Idea thanks to that deck's cost reduction on instants and sorceries, and the potential for generating a victorious combination of cards in hand before the player using it ever has to worry about discarding. The drawback could be used effectively by Reanimator-style strategies too, reducing hand size to discard powerful, big creatures while filtering through cards to find the right reanimation spells.
Mechanics like Cleave in MTG Crimson Vow are exciting for the game's long-term viability, since they offer flexibility while also creating complex card designs that require players to really think about how they'll be implementing them in decks. Screen Rant's Crimson Vow preview card is a great example of the upside of printing a mechanic like Cleave, and Inspired Idea should be inspiring plenty of them for deckbrewers across formats once it releases alongside the rest of Magic: The Gathering Crimson Vow on November 11, 2021 on Magic Arena and November 19, 2021 in tabletop.