Magic: The Gathering The Lost Cavern of Ixalan Review — A deep dive into fun

Introduction – Glimpse the Core

We’ve reached the end of 2023 and with it the last Standard set for the year: The Lost Caverns of Ixalan. In this set we return to Ixalan to dive deep into the plane and discover what lays underneath in the unexplored depths. With the impending switch to play boosters Lost Caverns of Ixalan will be one of the last sets to use the now retiring draft booster. So, how does The Lost Caverns of Ixalan play as a Limited set and what does it hold in store for the players who venture within?

Overview – Confounding Riddle

Let’s begin by unearthing what new mechanics The Lost Caverns of Ixalan brings to Magic: The Gathering. The first new mechanic is Craft. Craft is an interesting design space as it allows you to take an existing artifact in play and use resources from on the battlefield or in your graveyard to “craft” it into something new. Craft is on transforming double face cards, but not all double face cards in the set are Craft cards. These cards are essentially two cards in one and the designers have done a good job balancing them so they aren’t immediately too powerful. The front sides aren’t usually very powerful with the real strength of the card being on the backside, requiring late-game crafting. The Craft mechanic provides additional options throughout a game and somewhere to sink your mana if you’re down to a few options.

This next mechanic is one of my new favorites, Discover. When Discover triggers you flip cards from the top of your deck until you hit a card with the listed mana cost or less. Then, you may either cast the spell for free or place it into your hand. Discover is an iteration on the long running Cascade keyword. Discover cleans up Cascade and adds an option to place the spell into your hand in case it’s not useful at that moment. Everyone loves casting spells for free and there’s no feeling like Discovering into another Discover card. There is randomness inherent to the mechanic and there are times your Discover trigger will be underwhelming or win you the game. Even with its randomness, Discover is an exciting mechanic for Limited and can really turn games around.

The last major mechanic found in Lost Caverns of Ixalan is Descend. Descend counts how many permanents are in your graveyard. Descend comes in three flavors: Descend X, “if you descended this turn,” and Fathomless descent. Descend X needs you to have that many permanents in your graveyard to activate “If you’ve descended this turn” wants you to have placed a permanent into the graveyard this turn, and Fathomless descent counts the number of cards in your graveyard. That’s a lot of variations for one new keyword. If you’re playing a game of Magic: The Gathering stuff is going to go into the graveyard and Descend rewards you for doing so. Descend feels like a good iteration on previous mechanics like Threshold.

As mentioned, regular transforming double faced cards exist too, but now each card has a unique trigger. Similar to the Craft cards, these cards are miniature goals to work toward in each game. The Explore mechanic returns from the original Ixalan, which allows you to power up your creatures or draw a land for free. The Lost Caverns of Ixalan also introduces a new artifact token type called the map token. These tokens allow you to spend one mana to have a creature Explore for you. The map tokens are a nice addition to the token artifact pool, but they don’t seem as powerful as other token artifacts. They remind me of the blood tokens from Crimson Vow in that they don’t seem like they will become a mainstay like treasure tokens have. On top of all this are a new counter called a finality counter expressing that a creature must be exiled if it dies. This has been a mechanic in Magic before, and here Ixalan once again iterates on this design. This isn’t even everything found inside Lost Caverns of Ixalan, just an overview of the major mechanics at play within the set.

Magic: The Gathering is a game with a long history and a lot of mechanics designed throughout the years. I mentioned that several of the mechanics within the set are iterations of previous mechanics and here you can really see the way the designers iterate on those older principles. Between Discover, Descend and the Finality Counter, The Lost Caverns of Ixalan really benefits from previous attempts at these ideas. Here the mechanics of the set are the best designed versions of an idea we’ve seen yet. This history and design iteration is part of what makes Magic such an interesting game throughout the years and it’s nice to see it come to fruition within Lost Caverns of Ixalan.

Negatives – Get Lost

So, it took me multiple paragraphs to describe the new set mechanics in The Lost Caverns of Ixalan and this tells you a bit about the set. This set is complex. As a Limited environment there’s a lot to building a good deck. The new mechanics are complicated and between the three Descend variants, Craft, and transforming double faced cards there’s simply a lot of text on these cards. Is this a bad thing? Not really, but this is something I want to mention as I felt Wilds of Eldraine was a good starting point for new players. The Lost Caverns of Ixalan being the next set feels like a big leap in complexity. Discover, Explore, and Scry are all within the set and I’ve seen people get themselves confused on which one they are doing at the moment. More than once players stop to reread the back of a transforming double faced card to remember what the backside does. With Descend you also have to keep an eye on the number of permanents in your and your opponent’s graveyards. There’s just a lot to keep track of during a game.

Positives – Another Chance

Even with all its complexity The Lost Caverns of Ixalan is a fun set. There’s a lot to discover (heh) and the more you play the more familiar you will be with the cards within. While this is the case of every set, for me this felt more rewarding than usual. There’s just so many fun different play styles within Lost Caverns of Ixalan. You can play big dinosaurs, make a ton of little creatures, or synergize your artifacts. Each one of these different draft archetypes felt like they always had something to do. The core of any game of Magic is trying to figure out your best play and here that’s an interesting puzzle to solve. Player’s don’t lack choice during their games of The Lost Caverns of Ixalan. With the move to Play Boosters coming up, I’ve read that The Lost Caverns of Ixalan was the first set designed with the doctrine of making commons more playable. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sure feels like it. Normally there are cards that were easy to sideboard knowing that you weren’t going to play them. This time around it felt like you wanted every card to make it into your deck and making cuts was harder than usual. If this is where the design of Magic: The Gathering is going, it seems like a good direction. The core of The Lost Caverns of Ixalan is a set filled with difficult decisions and tons of interaction between players.

Once again the artwork for Lost Caverns of Ixalan is beautiful. The artwork across the set is alive and vibrant. From dinosaurs, cave goblins, conquistador vampires, and merfolk the set showcases its historical influences in its detailed artwork. The showcase treatments feel like tiny lost scrolls and the borderless treatments might be the most colorful Magic cards ever made. The artwork of Magic: The Gathering has always been held to a high standard and as someone who knew very little about Ixalan the artwork really drew me into the setting and the real world cultures it draws from. Every time I look at a new Magic set I am always amazed by the wonderful artwork. The Lost Caverns of Ixalan is no exception.

Commander Set (LCC) – Charismatic Conqueror

I have a hard time evaluating Commander precon decks. If you’ve been around Magic: The Gathering for any amount of time, you have a sense of what most regular set Commander precon decks contain. They usually feature around ten new cards and offer decent value for their contents. With Lost Caverns of Ixalan Wizards has released a full pod (four) decks featuring pirates, vampires, merfolk, and dinosaurs as their themes. Perhaps I just like these themes, but I really enjoyed these Commander precons. They each showcased a respective strategy for their theme/colors whether it was sacrificing creatures, recurring creatures from the graveyard, or turning big dinosaurs sideways. They are still precons; the lands inside are just ok and they run a little slow, but they’re a good starting point for anyone wanting to build into particular colors/themes. The Commander precons have usually been a good buy and I can recommend them for those looking for some Commander gameplay.

Summary – Hit the Mother Lode

The Lost Caverns of Ixalan is a complex set with a lot of keywords and abilities on cards making it complex. Despite this, Lost Caverns of Ixalan is a lot of fun to play in Limited. Lost Caverns of Ixalan rewards players through rich drafting and deep gameplay. The artwork for this set is as always stunning. In addition to that, the Commander decks offer good value and gameplay, and I hope that this trend continues for the Commander decks. I can recommend Lost Caverns of Ixalan to anyone looking to dive into some Magic: The Gathering games.

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