Sets (MKM) Murders at Karlov Manor Previews

[Seeker]

It's spoiler season again! A mystery-themed set, taking place on Ravnica but not multicolored. So far we've got...

...oh. Well okay then. Those of you who don't want to run customs but do like functional duplicates (like me), rejoice!

The code CLU is used for the Ravnica: Clue Edition cards like these:

e: beaten to the punch with some stuff I didn't have. feel free to delete this one!

 

[TrainmasterGT]

After a nice break from spoilers, here we have some cards from the new set for next year!

Another Thraben Inspector for singleton gamers (and another 4 copies for pauper?).

Lightning Helix with gorgeous new art (and in Standard, of all formats!?)

This is basically better Think Twice.

I'm showing these uncommons because Gleaming Drake specifically seems like a really nice artifact pile card for Cube.

Cool removal spell.

One last thing: a cool Dossier frame treatment:

All in all, this seems like a pretty exciting set. I hope they go deep on the Investigate stuff. I feel like Clue tokens are pretty fun to play with, but most of the cards that make them are not. Hopefully, this set fixes that issue!

 

[inscho]

Gleaming Geardrake looks really nice. There's a lot of artifacts to sacrifice these days, and this has a reasonable baseline.

I love Thraben Inspector, but don't know if I've ever wished for a 2nd one...doesn't hurt to have tho!

 

[LadyMapi]

Alquist Proft's flavor texts are legitimately hilarious.

 

[Velrun]

e: beaten to the punch with some stuff I didn't have. feel free to delete this one!

You were first. But you’re right; let’s keep the talks in one place:

https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/mkm-murders-at-karlov-manner-previews.3772/

 

[Velrun]

Nice to see more of the Ravnica frame. Also the Investigate frame is beautiful. And those Impossible full art lands wow!

 

[StrionicAdventurer]

Novice Inspector is a big flavor upgrade on Thraben Inspector, in my opinion. Gleaming Geardrake will probably replace Enthusiastic Mechanaut in my cube.

Very excited to see if there will be new Gruul and Selesnya cards playing in this space. Would love to see something like:

Hostile Witness -
Creature - Ogre Detective
Whenever Hostile Witness deals combat damage, investigate.
Sacrifice a Clue: Hostile Witness fights target creature.
3/3.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

This is a really, really cool common. Actual card draw, instead of impulse draw, and you can have your choice of saccing an artifact or discarding a card? Very neat!


The impossible full art basics Velrun was talking about!


A tapland that fixes and makes clues, neat! (This is from the Cluedo set.)

 

[Rusje]

So someone took a lead pipe and took the seeker out?
I demand an answer!

 

[Rusje]

Do not underestimate a land that draws cards. It will feel like the thing that does not win the game, but it does. Mtg is an atrocious game. (Yes autocorrect from attrition, too funny to correct)

 

[TrainmasterGT]

This is a really, really cool common. Actual card draw, instead of impulse draw, and you can have your choice of saccing an artifact or discarding a card? Very neat!

Demand Answers seems like a nice Cube inclusion, to be sure. I like how it works with both artifact tokens and artifact lands. The art is pretty cool, too.

 

[Brad]

These cards are really solid, but they feel a little off to me...

Thraben Inspector but a DETECTIVE?!
We know you LOVE Lightning Helix!
Think Twice BUT BETTER!
Did you think Witness Protection was cool? WE DID.
Investigate signposts for the most basic UB, UR, and RW decks.
Immolating Glare BUT BETTER!
What if your Clue was SPHINX'S REV?!
Thrilling Possibility BUT BETTER!

The designs almost feel like a custom card that wanted to add a little synergy. Which is nice for cube building and for draft in general, I'd assume, but this batch feels mostly stale to me already. That said, I'm probably going to use at least two of these so far.

 

[Seeker]

Investigate signposts for the most basic UB, UR, and RW decks.

Honestly, these seem about on par with every other set's uncommon gold card signposts these days? They're never exactly subtle anymore. People didn't get it when they were (allegedly.)

 

[LadyMapi]

I honestly wonder how much of that feeling of blandness comes from how we've recently had a ton of sets that were focused on artifacts in one way or another? Like, out of the ten sets that are currently Standard-legal, eight of them either had some flavor of "artifacts matter" as a draft archetype or were partially built around some kind of artifact token (the exceptions being MID and DMU).

On top of that, both LTR and WHO had a pretty big focus on trinket artifacts. UNF had a big focus on Attractions, 40k had a full-on whole artifact deck, and PIP is going to introduce two new artifact subtypes (if you include PIP, there have been seven new artifact subtypes introduced within the past two years, which doesn't sound that excessive until you realize that there were only eight artifact subtypes before that, of which only five were really explored — Fortification is on one card, Gold is produced by four cards, and Contraptions don't count because they're silver-bordered).

They've been doing a lot of "what if we cared about a density of artifacts/trinket artifacts?" designs recently, and there's only so much that you can do with that before you start repeating yourself.

 

[gaytransmulldrifter]

Wonder if this is part of them trying to bridge the recent standard sets mechanically.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

I'm always happy to revisit Ravnica

 

[StrionicAdventurer]

They've been doing a lot of "what if we cared about a density of artifacts/trinket artifacts?" designs recently, and there's only so much that you can do with that before you start repeating yourself.

Curating an artifact-heavy cube has been like drinking from a firehose this year. I'm collecting the cards to put my pet project at the 720 level, and after that I need a break!

Between the transforming Sagas from Kamigawa and the Role tokens from Eldraine, they seem to be carving out some cool design space for enchantments recently. Hopefully they'll lean into that and I can finally see some new Bestow cards.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

These cards are really solid, but they feel a little off to me...

Thraben Inspector but a DETECTIVE?!
We know you LOVE Lightning Helix!
Think Twice BUT BETTER!
Did you think Witness Protection was cool? WE DID.
Investigate signposts for the most basic UB, UR, and RW decks.
Immolating Glare BUT BETTER!
What if your Clue was SPHINX'S REV?!
Thrilling Possibility BUT BETTER!

The designs almost feel like a custom card that wanted to add a little synergy. Which is nice for cube building and for draft in general, I'd assume, but this batch feels mostly stale to me already. That said, I'm probably going to use at least two of these so far.

I honestly wonder how much of that feeling of blandness comes from how we've recently had a ton of sets that were focused on artifacts in one way or another? Like, out of the ten sets that are currently Standard-legal, eight of them either had some flavor of "artifacts matter" as a draft archetype or were partially built around some kind of artifact token (the exceptions being MID and DMU).

I would go further and say that the "blandness" of these cards actually comes from their simplicity more than anything else. We've seen a ton of very novel uses of artifact tokens as a theme in the past couple of years. By contrast, these are all fairly basic effects that simply investigate or pay you off for having some clue tokens. WOTC has been really swinging for the fences lately with their designs, so it's a little bit jarring here since they're not doing that. As such, I think these cleaner, simpler designs have a bit of a "custom card" feel to them because these are mostly things that an amateur could come up with fairly easily.

The rares also have a "late 2010's" feel to them. Aurelia and Rakdos especially feel like rares from before the Guilds of Ravnica sets, such as
Azor, the Lawbringer or Multiform Wonder. Obviously, I don't think a set with Lightning Helix is going to suffer from the mediocrity of that era, but they definitely give me that same energy.

 

[Brad]

I would go further and say that the "blandness" of these cards actually comes from their simplicity more than anything else.

I think these are all nice cards, but they suffer from being shown alongside a bunch of other basic cards and/or cards that are jamming "Investigate! Get it?! Because of the MURDER!!!" I'm sure it'll level out across the set and be great to have these basic effects at common and uncommon.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I think these cleaner, simpler designs have a bit of a "custom card" feel to them because these are mostly things that an amateur could come up with fairly easily.

Looking at amateur designs, coming up with simple designs is certainly not their forte. If anything, a string of elegantly simple designs is a sign an amateur was definitely not involved.

Edit: We’ve had several years of complaining about wordy cards with too much complexity, it puzzles me that we are complaining about getting actual readable cards that probably play very well.

 

[Velrun]

We are not complaining!

 

[Nemo]

We are not complaining!

Agreed - I hope there will be lots of simple clue things for cube designers to pick from. Keep 'em coming.

 

[landofMordor]

Also a huge fan of the cleaner designs. Getting pretty big SOI vibes from this so far.

I don’t know why I hadn’t realized this possibility before, but between the urban setting and the noir-adjacent flavor (not to mention those dossier showcases!), MKM is likely to be a “winter rotation” in Pulp Nouveau. That’s only possible if the designs are clean/simple enough to work for my intended audience of “people a little overwhelmed at drafting their basic lands”.

also, I think these simple clue designs will enable WotC to spend their complexity budget elsewhere — the WGR commander deck says “disguises” are one of its themes, and I wonder how that will come into play here (2-mv 2/2 Morph, maybe?)

 

[TrainmasterGT]

also, I think these simple clue designs will enable WotC to spend their complexity budget elsewhere — the WGR commander deck says “disguises” are one of its themes, and I wonder how that will come into play here (2-mv 2/2 Morph, maybe?)

I think two-mana "Borph" is a likely possible mechanic. I think it's a little bit suspicious to me that the MTG arena team is bringing the entire Khans of Tarkir set to the arena platform all at once instead of doing a "best hits" remaster for the block like they did with previous sets like Amonkhet, Kaladesh, and Shadows Over Innistrad. Morph especially seems like a lot of work to code, and it feels like something that I wouldn't expect them to implement until they need to. However, if they already had to code a mechanic that works exactly like Morph except it costs less, that would make implementing the rest of the Khans set pretty easy. After all, Prowess, Ferocious, Outlast, and Raid all exist on arena already, and Delve shouldn't be too difficult to implement. The only problematic mechanic is Morph. The fact that Dragons of Tarkir and Fate Reforged cards aren't being brought to arena at this time also support this theory– both Manifest and Megamorph work differently than normal Morph, and as such would require a ton of new programming beyond copying "Borph" and increasing the mana cost.

Food for thought!

 

[LadyMapi]

I honestly don't think that Morph would be that hard to implement, given that they've already implemented Prototype. Most of the rules headaches for Morph aren't actually stuff that'd be that tricky to code.