Hello and welcome to Shadows Over Innistrad Prerelease Week! Today we’re covering the first of two returning mechanics in SOI: Double Faced Cards, or DFC. They were originally printed in Innstrad, and have been brought back by popular demand! First, a quick crash-course: every pack of SOI will have one of these double-faced cards in it; they start out “Sunny Side Up”, with the sun-symbol and mana-cost-having side showing. You need to either use COMPLETELY opaque sleeves, or use a handy Checklist card for each of your DFCs, so that you can’t tell it apart from normal cards, so double check your sleeves! All of the DFCs are able to transform somehow; by fulfilling some criteria, they’ll transform, which means you’ll take the card and flip it around so the Moon-symbol side is showing. Most of them get notably stronger on the night side, with some completely changing what kind of card they are!
The vast majority of your interaction with the DFCs will be simple; they spell out how they transform, and the “night side” literally does not exist anywhere but the battlefield. In every other zone, you just look at the front side, and if you copy a DFC (with, say, Altered Ego, the Judge Spoiler card!) you only copy the side that’s showing; a non-DFC can’t Transform, so if your Altered Ego TRIES to transform, it just doesn’t. There are three new things about DFCs starting with this set, though! The first is that unlike in the past, the back side of a DFC has a Converted Mana Cost other than 0! If the front side costs 3BB, then both the front AND back sides have a CMC of 5. The exception to this is with copies- if you copy a DFC that’s showing the night side, the CMC of your copy is 0. A little wonky, but unlikely to matter in SOI Limited! It might in Standard, though.
Second, entering the battlefield transformed. Several of the new cards do this, such as Accursed Witch, which is pretty simple normally! However, if you copy someone else’s… your copy won’t come back. Previously, if you were to use something like Clone to copy an Accursed Witch, and your Clonewitch died, it’d come back as a regular Clone. However now, the Clone won’t do anything! It’ll just stay in the graveyard, dead. This is also going to come up with the Origins Planeswalkers: if you copy someone’s Jace, your copy will exile itself, then stay there! Beware!
Third, and possibly weirdest, is the change that WOTC called “No flippy floppy”; If a DFC has a triggered or activated ability that transforms it, it’ll only transform if it HASN’T since that ability was put on the stack. In other words, if I end up with multiple “Transform me!” triggers or activated abilities on the stack at once, only the first one will transform that object. For example, if I control an Archangel Avacyn and you kill 4 of my other non-Angel creatures, she won’t transform 4 times; 4 triggers go on the stack, she transforms from the first to resolve, and the remaining 3 do nothing. This isn’t likely to come up much, though!
So, that’s Double Faced Cards! Tune in tomorrow when we go over what to expect from the prerelease, as well as Skulk, a sort-of-new mechanic!
Today’s Prerelease Tip was written by Trevor Nunez