Battlebond: mechanics

Battlebond is the first-ever Two-Headed Giant-focused Magic booster set. It will be released on June 8. Let's lean on its mechanics

• Assist lets another player pay the generic mana cost of your spell, this way helping you to cast it. You don't choose the player until after you've revealed the card with assist and made all other required choices, including targets.
• Partner with [other card]. "When this creature enters the battlefield, target player may put [other card] into their hand from their library, then shuffle." Note that not all the partners in Battlebond are legendary. There are eleven of these pairs. Each pair of partners can co-serve as a deck's commander. This is largely the same ability as the original partner, which debuted in Commander (2016 Edition)
• Support is a returning mechanic from Oath of the Gatewatch.

Brawl

Brawl slowly conquered the players hearts - just as at the beginning of Tiny Leaders format did. Very slowly. Almost it would end up like Tiny Leaders - the format would exist, but be played only by the greatest enthusiasts. However, Wizards listened to the voices of public opinion, made a survey and took action. What is important, Wizards declared support for the format and introduced a number of changes:

• Baral, Chief of Compliance; Sorcerous Spyglass; and Smuggler's Copter make up the entirety of the Brawl banned list.
• That means Aetherworks Marvel, Attune with Aether, Felidar Guardian, Rampaging Ferocidon, Ramunap Ruins, and Rogue Refiner are all unbanned.
• The starting life total for one-on-one Brawl games is now 20. (Multiplayer is still 30)
• You can now use multiple copies of any one basic land in decks with a colorless commander (such as Karn, Scion of Urza).

History of Mulligans

A brief history of mulligan.


When the game was released and the first set Alpha saw the light of day.

“No land Mulligan”: At the beginning of the game, if your starting hand doesn't contain any land card, you may reveal it to your opponent, shuffle your cards in your library and draw another hand of seven cards.”

“All land Mulligan”: At the beginning of the game, if your starting hand contains seven lands, you may reveal it your opponent, shuffle your cards in your library and draw another hand of seven cards.“

You may only use a Mulligan once a game.

First change. Pro Tour Paris April 1994. (“Paris Mulligan”)

You would no longer need to show you hand to your opponent to draw another opening hand, you just had to shuffle your hand into your library to draw another one with one less card.

Second change. Pro Tour Vancouver 2011
A player gets now additonally Scry once after taking a mulligan.

Yield Until Next End Step

Some small changes to yield technology were introduced in the Dominaria build of Magic Online. Few words about them:

The old “yield through this turn” option still exists, which is the same as hitting 6 on your keyboard: it will ignore the stops you have set until the next turn begins.  However, a new functionality was released lately - “Yield Until Next End Step”. The game will ignore your stop settings and give you priority during the next End of Turn step, even if you haven’t set a stop there. This is going to be pretty popular, I suspect, given the utility of doing things in the opponent’s EOT step. What is more, you can set such a yield in any phase. You will see the phase ladder put in a yellow arrow. That yellow arrow indicates that you have a “yield until here” sett and all of your other stops are ignored.

This will hopefully prevent people from manually passing for most of a turn because they want to do something in a specific phase, only to accidentally pass priority through that phase. At least once it happened to each of us. It is a very good change.