A vampire wedding on Innistrad
Crimson Vow finishes the Innistrad pair with a vampire wedding, and it is the more focused half: fewer mechanics, and a heavier lean on one tribe.
Blood tokens are its lasting contribution. Pay one mana, tap the token, discard a card and sacrifice it to draw a card. Cheap looting attached to a permanent, which turns out to matter well beyond this set because a Blood token is an artifact you can also sacrifice for other things.
Themes
Blood tokens
Colorless artifact tokens with one ability: pay one mana, tap, discard a card, sacrifice, draw a card. Rummaging you can hold onto, and an artifact for anything that counts them.
Cleave
On instants and sorceries. Pay the higher cleave cost to ignore the words printed in brackets, which are always the restriction. The cheap mode is conditional, the expensive one is not.
Training
Whenever a creature with training attacks alongside a creature with greater power, it gets a +1/+1 counter. It rewards a curve with a big creature at the top rather than a flat one.
Exploit
When the creature enters, you may sacrifice a creature, and if you do you get a bonus. Back from Dragons of Tarkir, and it pairs with the set's disposable token bodies.
Daybound and nightbound
Carried over from Midnight Hunt, since the two sets are drafted separately but designed as a pair. Fewer cards use it here.
Where You Can Play It
Crimson Vow has left Standard, but that is the only format it left. Here's where each code is legal now.
Crimson Vow left Standard at the August 2024 rotation, the one Bloomburrow triggered, alongside the other three sets of its rotation year. A rotation only ever removes cards from Standard, so everything here is still playable in Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, Vintage and Commander. Commons from any set are Pauper-legal; that isn't listed per set here.
Limited
A full ten-pair format, and a more focused one than Midnight Hunt. Vampires and Blood run through the black and red end, while training and the wedding theme pull white toward creature-heavy curves.
All ten two-color pairs
Full ten-pair format
Blood tokens turn up wherever black does, training concentrates in white and red, and cleave is spread thinly enough that it is a bonus on a card you were playing anyway rather than an archetype of its own.
Commander
One per side of the wedding.
Vampiric Bloodline
Strefan, Maurer Progenitor
Black-red Vampires and Blood tokens.
Spirit Squadron
Millicent, Restless Revenant
White-blue Spirits, flying and going wide.
Building one of these into something of your own? The precon buying guide covers how to judge a deck, and the Commander deck template is the shape to build toward.
FAQ
No. It left Standard at the August 2024 rotation, the one Bloomburrow triggered, along with Midnight Hunt, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and Streets of New Capenna. VOW cards are still legal in Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, Vintage and Commander.
A colorless artifact token with one ability: pay one mana, tap it, discard a card and sacrifice it to draw a card. It is rummaging you can hold onto until you need it, and it is an artifact, so anything that counts artifacts counts it too.
It appears on instants and sorceries whose text has words in brackets. Cast it normally and the bracketed restriction applies. Pay the higher cleave cost instead and you ignore those words entirely, which removes the restriction.
Whenever a creature with training attacks alongside a creature with greater power, it gets a +1/+1 counter. It rewards a curve with something large at the top rather than a flat one.
No. The two sets were designed as a pair and share the daybound and nightbound mechanic, but they are drafted separately.
Two: Vampiric Bloodline, led by Strefan, Maurer Progenitor, and Spirit Squadron, led by Millicent, Restless Revenant.
All card names, art, and mechanics belong to Wizards of the Coast. Innistrad: Crimson Vow released on Nov 19, 2021; details reflect the set as published. Sources: Wizards of the Coast set pages and release notes, Draftsim, Untapped.gg.
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