The new Magic: The Gathering set might have a subtitle mentioning a building, but there’s so much more to Duskmourn: House of Horror than one single locale, as MTG execs explained during their PAX West 2024 panel Saturday afternoon. Well… more than one single local and not more than one, as it turns out. It’s complicated.

“We [were] talking about doing this in a mansion,” said senior art director Ovidio Cartagena. “’This has to be a haunted house,’ yes, house house house… but what’s the twist? What if the house never ends? Great! What if it’s a whole plane that is a haunted house? Now, that’s awesome. Even if you feel you’re in a wheat field, or you’re in a forest of something, you’ll see a floating door or a window — curtains, carpet, lamps, chandeliers hanging from the fog above you, letting you know: actually, you’re still stuck in the house. You did not escape. There is no escape.”

So how does this new plane actually work?

“This used to be a regular plane with happiness and people in it,” Cartagena continued. “But a demon that was locked inside a house took over it, and his way of taking over was growing the house until there was nothing else but him and the house, and you’ll feel his presence everywhere. The name of this demon is Valgavoth.”

Valgavoth has his own card, of course, one that senior game designer Annie Sardelis described as “super hard to interact with,” because he’s such a threat. “If you even want to touch this guy with a spell, you gotta be making a huge sacrifice,” she promised.

Valgavoth didn’t just take over the plane, however; he also changed the inhabitants of it, with Cartagena saying that one of the design rules for the Duskmourn set was “don’t have anything that looks streamlined by evolution, make it feel designed, to call back to practical effects of [horror movies of the] ‘80s.”

The callbacks to classic horror movies don’t end there. New mechanics for the Duskmourn set include “Manifest Dread,” “Impending,” and “Survival,” with much of the play centering around… well, magic. (Lower case, I mean.) “Here on Duskmourn, we’re all about enchantments,” Sardelis promised, calling the new set “a top down modern horror set.” Even existing characters will be recast to fit classic horror tropes such as “Final Girl,” “Jock,” or “Nerd.”

The new set is clearly a big deal for Magic: The Gathering — to the point where MTG is even bringing back Welcome Decks to help bring new players into the fold. “We love Magic and we want other people to love Magic,” explained senior game developer Mike Turian.

Duskmourn: House of Horror will launch September 27. PAX West 2024 runs until September 2 at the Seattle Convention Center.

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