Here's David Morgan Mar's first pre-release card.

Bad Wolf will only seem bad if you're facing him from across the table. He's tough for 2 mana, even if both are coloured, but the power isn't quite up there with Ravnica's Watchwolf. He does, however, have the ability to come back from death to fight again. This fits black and green's theme of life regenerating from death. It's not quite as good as full-on regeneration, in that you have to draw and recast Bad Wolf, but has the advantage that you don't need to keep a black or green mana handy to pay for the regeneration.

The cost, however, is denying yourself a new draw. Would you rather draw something unknown, or would you rather know that you're drawing a big Bad Wolf? Depending on the situation, either one might be preferable. That's where the strategy of this card comes in - knowing when to make use of its ability. If your opponent can kill it every turn, let the wolf rest in peace, and find something else to deal with the threat. But if a guaranteed creature is going to help you press an advantage or turn the tables in the battle, pop Bad Wolf on your library and rejoice. And who knows... it might just save you from being decked too...

Mr Shellshear has a strange and wonderful mind.

This sorcery creates an extra player (named Bruce), who you control. Bruce, unfortunately for him, starts a wee bit behind in this game. He only has 5 life and 3 cards in hand, and will usually start on turn 6. Most opponents should be able to steamroll him quite quickly, but the good news is, they'll have to divert resources from attacking you to do so. And there are things you can do to make sure he survives a bit longer! A Spectral Searchlight can give Bruce a quick boost of mana - useful when he doesn't have any land in his opening hand. You can target Bruce with other abilities, too, just not anything that requires "target opponent" (so no naughty Hunted Dragon tricks). Prosperity will work just fine. Bruce would definitely appreciate a Howling Mine - for a short time, anyway! And, of course, a deck stacked with cheap green creatures wouldn't go astray either.

Here's the first pre-release card from Loki. It's called "Indoctrination", and it's an Aura (Enchant Creature) card. It simply gives +2/+2 to whichever creature it enchants, but here's the trick: it can enchant multiple creatures. In fact, it's an "enchant X target creatures" card, letting you pump a whole creature horde into a potent army.

One important point to note is that an enchantment which enchants multiple creatures doesn't go to the graveyard when one of the enchanted creatures leaves play. Instead, it simply becomes unattached from that creature, but remains attached to all the other creatures it was enchanting. It's only when the last enchanted creature leaves play that the Aura goes to the graveyard.

Indoctrination is part of a cycle of Auras in Loki's set which enchant more than one creature. Those which are more powerful are restricted to only enchanting "up to two target creatures", which helps balance their effect on the game, and also provides better game play (too many enchant X creature effects would make it difficult to keep track of which creatures they are attached to).

Let's compare Indoctrination with its close cousin, Glorious Anthem. For , Glorious Anthem gives you a global enchantment which pumps all your creatures by +1/+1. In early play, this lets you drop small unimportant creatures and do meaningful damage quickly. Once those creatures are stopped, in mid-game you can drop 3/3 creatures and they come into play as 4/4 creatures, which become hard to deal with by direct damage. Glorious Anthem is a fantastic card. How does Indoctrination measure up?

For a start, Indoctrination pumps to a greater level, +2/+2. That puts even a humble 2/2 creature out of range of a Lightning Bolt. It can be used in the early game to put pressure on: imagine a 4/4 creature by turn three. But it's risky using it that way, because if that 2/2 creature gets Bolted as you are casting the enchantment, you lose both the creature and the Aura. And you're not letting the card live up to its full potential, as an army creation mechanism. If your opponent destroys your small creatures, your large ones become very dangerous when you play this Aura on them. But if instead your opponent destroys your large creatures and relies on blockers to hold your small creatures at bay, you can suddenly make them all a lot bigger in the end game. Because it suits a creature horde deck well, such as might be seen in white weeny or red goblin decks, this spell is red/white.

As an Aura, this card has many of the disadvantages inherent to enchantments. It can be disenchanted, potentially wiping out your new army at a critical moment during combat. It must be played after you have some creatures to play it on, so creatures which come into play after it has been cast get no advantage from it (unlike Glorious Anthem, which is useful to cast even without any creatures in play, and when you do cast some creatures, they get the Anthem's benefit). Also, it must target the creatures it enchants, which means they can be Bolted by fast effects, bounced, or made untargetable (again unlike Glorious Anthem, which pumps creatures even as they are coming into play).

The main purpose for delving into this variant of enchantment mechanics is to try to make Auras a bit more useful. Wizards dabbled with bounce-able Auras to let players get more than one use out of them, but if you run out of mana to bounce them, they're gone. Auras have been neglected a bit by players since re-usable Equipment was invented, but an Aura which enchants multiple creatures gives you something not even Equipment can give you: an effect which can't easily be stopped by destroying the creature it is attached to, because the effect will still be attached to whichever other creatures it was played on!

A split-colour card has been used, because the effect is suited to both its base colours, red and white. Loki's set has many split-colour cards, and they all conform to the unwritten rules seen in Ravnica: a split-colour card always features only colourless or split-mana symbols in the casting cost, and always the same split-mana symbols, never mixed with other normal or differing split-mana symbols. A split-colour card is thus always signalling that you may spend either one colour, or the other colour, or both. This is the opposite of gold cards, which signal you must spend all the colours required.