Magic: The Gathering’sKhans of Tarkir block is often seen as a golden era for the game, and the manifest and morph mechanics are seen as a big part of that. Secret information and bluffing your opponent with face-down cards is always fun, and it can work as a great way to get extra bodies on the board, too.

Duskmourn: House of Horror introduced a variant of manifesting, called manifesting dread. To fit with the frightening horror vibes of the set, this take on manifest added a graveyard twist that can be well worth using in a variety of ways.

What Is Manifest Dread?

Manifest dread isa keyword action, meaning it’s something the game tells you to do rather than something that happens, like an ability. When you manifest dread, you must do three things:

You can put any card onto the battlefield as a manifested creature– even nonpermanent cards like instants and sorceries. While it is face-down, everything on the front face is ignored, and it’s instead only treated as a 2/2. You are allowed to look at the front face of manifested cards you control whenever you like.

If you manifest a double-sided card, you won’t get the back side of it instead. You’ll instead get an imaginary ‘third side’ that is the face-down 2/2 creature and nothing else. If you pay to flip it face-up, it defaults to the front face of the card.

If the manifested card is a creature, you canpay its mana cost at any time to flip it face-up. For example, if you’ve manifested dread and put a Fear of Lost Teeth face-down, you may pay one black mana to turn it back to face-up and bring it name, stats, creature type, and abilities back into play.

How To Use Manifest Dread

Manifest dread is a powerful mechanic for a whole laundry list of reasons.

For graveyard decks, being able to pick and choose what you put there is always powerful. It’s why mechanics like surveil are so good as well: you cantactically pick the cards that enable other mechanics like delirium or descendwith ease.

There’s alsoa big political element to manifest dread, and an opportunity to play mind games with your opponents. Putting one card into the graveyard suggests that you’re keeping the other one for a good reason. Throw something scary away and your opponent will immediately be worrying about what you are keeping.

Turning a card face-updoes not count as it leaving or entering the battlefield. It’ll keep any Aura enchantments, Equipment, counters, or other buffs.

Even blink decks like manifest dread. Blinking a face-down card turns it face up, so can bea much cheaper way of flippingthem than paying their regular cost. This even applies tononcreature permanents you’ve manifested, giving you a way to get back your enchantments, lands, artifacts, or planeswalkers if needed.

Manifesting isinherently more unpredictablethan other face-down mechanics like morph anddisguise.Manifesting dread can put any card face-down, so not only are you not sure what you’ll be attacking into, youdon’t even know if it can flipat all in the first place.

you may use this to your advantage by beingslightly more recklesswith your attacks and blocks. Bluff your opponent by swinging in with a 2/2 and make out you’re gearing up for a devastating flip, even when you know it’s a noncreature card you can’t do anything else with.

The Best Cards With Manifest Dread

While manifest dread’s potential does largely depend on what exactly you put face-down, some of the cards that trigger it in the first place are worth keeping an eye out for.

Cursed Windbreakermanifests dread, and then goes ahead and gives it flying too. A 2/2 with flying that you can flip into something much scarier is very handy, especially if your opponent is lacking ways to deal with any kind of evasion.

Turn Inside Outfits very nicely in the mono-red aggro Standard decks, alongside older cards like Monstrous Rage. For one red mana you give something +3/+0 until the end of the turn, which is already great, and then if it dies that turn you get to replace it with a 2/2 face-down card instead. It’sextra valuefor such a small casting cost.

The face of one of Duskmourn’s commander decks;Zimone, Mystery Unraveler; gives you a reliable way to manifest dread each turn withits landfall trigger. To make it even better, if it’s the the second time or more a land has entered under your control, you canflip the cards face-up for free, potentially cheating massive creatures into play way ahead of schedule.

Finally,Hauntwoods Shriekeris fantastic. It only costs three mana, and has an attack trigger to manifest dread. As long as it’s a creature, you can then pay two mana to reveal it and flip it at instant speed. While it isn’t free like Zimone, there’s no limit to the amount of times you can do it in a turn, so you can build up your 2/2s and flip them all at once to take the win.