A month ago, Magic: The Gathering released its last set of the year (Avatar: The Last Airbender), and to everyone’s delight, it is a very good set. Whether you’re drafting, playing Jumpstart, building, or upgrading decks, there’s a lot of fun to be had with MtG’s Avatar. If you have seen the original animated show (not that movie, we don’t need to discuss that), Avatar is predominantly fantasy. I’m enjoying the set enough that I started a rewatch of the animated series. And while watching, I realized there might actually be some horror or horror-adjacent cards in the set for Fango readers to check out. So I picked up a bunch of booster packs and a bundle, then started ripping packs. Here’s what I found:
Bloodbending
If you have seen the show, you know there is a rare form of waterbending: bloodbending. Considered the darkest and most feared of all bending techniques, it allows a person to control an organism’s body by controlling their muscles. Using this ability may also endanger the users’ mental state. Seems pretty horrific to me! Like that scene where Freddy Krueger is controlling Phillip in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3.
In the Avatar set, we are given two bloodbending cards: Hama, the Bloodbender, an uncommon, and Secret of Bloodbending, a mythic card.
I pulled three of the uncommon, which target opponent mills three cards, and then you get to excile a non-creature/non-land card from their graveyard, and you can cast it by waterbending its mana cost. A pretty neat card, and if you have a way to flicker it repeatedly, it might give you an advantage to use cards from your opponents' graveyards. And messing around in other people's graveyards seems pretty aligned with horror to me.
Unfortunately, I didn’t pull the mythic Secret of Bloodbending. Costing four blue mana, it gives you the ability to control your opponent during their next combat phase. If you paid the additional cost (waterbed 10), you control their entire next turn instead, and then you excite the card. It costs a lot to cast, but damn, if you play that and it’s not countered, you can really change the direction of the game. Definitely a powerful card that I am still on the hunt for. I guess I need to buy more packs.
I guess there is technically a third bloodbending card, Bloodbender’s Rise, but that is just a reprint of Bloodchief Ascension from Zendikar.
Koh
Probably the only outright horror card in the set is Koh, the Face Stealer. When it was first announced, my Instagram feed was flooded with people excited to break it. A 6/6 shapeshifter spirit costing four and two black mana, and when it enters, you exile up to one other target creature, plus whenever another non-token creature dies, you may exile it. You can also pay 1 life and choose a creature card that was exiled with Koh, whenever you choose, and Koh has all the activated and triggered abilities of the last chosen card.
Easily one of the creepiest creatures in the series, this card showcases the centipede-like creature with really powerful abilities. I have already seen some combos people have set up to use Koh, but as time goes on, I hope to find a place for him in my mono-black deck, or maybe even build around him as a commander. This card is available in its normal treatment with art by Eduardo Francisco or as a borderless field notes card with art by Antonio José Manzanedo
In addition to the creature card, you can also find the land “Realm of Koh” in the set. A land that enters tapped, and after that, you can tap for a black mana or pay three plus black and tap to create a 1/1 colorless spirit creature token with “This token can't block or be blocked by non-spirit creatures.” So you have Koh on the board using their abilities to steal your opponents' creatures' abilities, while slowly building an army of spirits in the background that are most likely going to be unblockable. Pretty cool!
Jumpstart Your Nightmares
This set revived a popular casual format: Jumpstart. It's one of my favorite formats, and if you are new to the game, it's an easy way to learn mechanics. To play Jumpstart, you get two Jumpstart packs, open them, slap them together, and that's your deck. It has everything you need, including land. For horror fans, there is one Jumpstart theme for the genre, “Nightmares.” It includes some bizarre creatures, like the Canyon Crawler and Purple Pentapus, but the highlight of this theme is Koh, the Face Stealer.
Bizarre Creatures
We at Fango love bizarre creatures so much that they’re listed under the logo on the magazine. And this set has a lot of them, mostly in the form of common and uncommon cards. I don't see many of these making their way into a commander deck, but I do see them getting plenty of play in draft and Jumpstart. There's the Wolfbat, Mongoose Lizard, Saber-Tooth Moose-Lion, Hog-Monkey, Cat-OwlBuzzard-Wasp Colony, Cat-Gator, and more.
Honorable Mention
In the third episode of the animated series, “Book Two: Earth,” a scene shows people trying to escape their city by pretending to have a deadly illness, “pentapox.” Part of being a faux poxbearer involves a lot of moaning and groaning combined with a slow shuffle. Sound familiar? The fakers more or less act like zombies, and this scene is represented by the card Pretending Poxbearers.
As mentioned at the beginning, it's a fantasy set, so there's really not a lot of horror happening, but there are some cards leaning into the genre. Koh, the Face Stealer, is the highlight. As a fan of the game and the show, it's a well-crafted set, and if you are thinking of checking it out, you really should. In 2026, we have Lorwyn Eclipsed to look forward to, which has already debuted a Vampire Cleric, so I am hoping that set has some more cards in the genre we love.
