Enough of Duskmourn has been revealed for me to safely write this set off as garbage. The cards are pure FIRE Design nonsense, but that's more or less expected at this point so it's not worth dwelling on it. But the world design...holy shit, I thought they couldn't get any worse than OTJ, but the real horror here is...they did.
A lot of people have criticized the stupid Stranger Things tech stuff, so I won't beat that dead horse. But man: this plane has been through what is essentially the end of the world, how are all these survivors so well-dressed and clean? Where are they bathing, shaving, doing their laundry? Getting knifed while you're showering is a classic slasher trope so there's no way the locker rooms that still exist are safe enough for someone to do a whole grooming routine.
And as for the survivors themselves - why are they all so Current Year People? You've got the dorky Jewish guy on Reluctant Role Model, the Women's Studies major on Cautious Survivor...if this is supposed to be the 80s Horror Copy-Paste, where are the giant perms, the spandex, the parachute pants and fuzzy legwarmers? At least Winter wouldn't look out of place in a hair metal band.
Some of the nightmare creatures look neat, especially Fear of Lost Teeth, but way too many of them are just Generic Spindly Screaming Skeleton Thing. That's the best the creative team could get with the whole of 1980s creature design to draw from, really? Even Vulvagoth or whatever is just kind of...bland. Oh no, he's gotten so big and powerful his design has become mushy and indistinct but is still vaguely moth-like because the box art from the Silence of the Lambs VHS is iconic! Very...scary?
The origin for the House is stupid too. They've already established that 1) pre-Mending planeswalkers could and did create artificial planes (Mirrodin, Rath, Old Phyrexia, Serra's Realm, etc.), 2) that these planes could last after the Mending (Mirrodin), and 3) that the planes didn't need to operate on normal physical laws (Serra's Realm). They could have had Duskmourn be the creation of a mad - and now long dead - pre-Mending planeswalker, but instead they went with Amityville Horror times ten thousand.
Hell, here's my version: Duskmourn was originally a maze created by a nameless oldwalker who had gone insane. He eventually died in this maze, but his consciousness lingered on, and over time it manifested as a demon that devoured the psychic energy of others to fuel itself and stabilize the plane. This feeding would inevitably reduce its victims to a state of madness themselves, at which point they were no longer useful as food and were left to wander the plane as twisted monsters. Prior to the Omenpaths, the plane would occasionally brush up against other planes in the Blind Eternities, which allowed the demon Vulvagoth to suck in new victims, but these had to be carefully kept alive and farmed because these encounters were random and you couldn't predict when the next would happen. Now that the Omenpaths exist, though, Vulvagoth can draw in denizens from all over the Multiverse in unprecedented numbers and is gorging himself on their psychic energies while growing Duskmourn to ever greater size. This makes him a huge threat and requires the intervention of the Jacetice League (or whatever the planeswalker superhero team is called).
See, it's already better, no weaponized VCRs required.
