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After reminding us of what the city has to offer in Ravnica Remastered,Magic: The Gatheringis taking us back to Ravnica again, but not quite as we’ve seen it before. A set that moves past the guilds and instead pounds the streets on the trail of a serial killer, Murders at Karlov Manor gives us sleuths, suspects, and stabbings galore.
A murder mystery-themed set needs new mechanics to go with it, of course, and so Wizards of the Coast has lifted the lid on everything Murders at Karlov Manor will provide when it launches on February 9.
Story
Set after the Phyrexians completely upheaved Ravnica during the March of the Machine, Murders at Karlov Manor follows detective Alquist Proft, planeswalker Kaya, and this arc’s main protagonist Kellen, as they try and hunt down a killer targeting the elite of the guilds.
The ten-part story on the Magic sitesets up the case, as well as a few key suspects like Ertrata, Rakdos, and Massacre Girl. However, the culprit was none other than Obra, the central part of Trostani, using their ability to create flowers to spread mind-controlling poison throughout Ravnica.
However, that’s only one of the mysteries. Why did Teysa Karlov have a Phyrexian note, for example? Starting today (January 16), theRavnica Detective Agency websitewill start an alternate-reality game (ARG), using clues spread throughout the set, with your first clue coming in the Prerelease kits given out at events starting February 2.
Though the ARG will officially start with the Prerelease kit, we’ve already seen plenty of clues throughout the story and in marketing materials. We’ll find more of them within Play booster products and bundles, and so we’ll hopefully see the case come together quite quickly once the Prerelease kits are out in the wild.
Mechanics
Ravnica is known for its huge number of different mechanics, thanks to each of the ten guilds using its own in each set they appear in. Fortunately, Wizards has decided to ignore most of that for Murders at Karlov Manor, and instead focuses on a handful of new and classic returning mechanics instead.
Returning: Investigate
You don’t have to be Poirot to have guessed investigating would be back for Murders at Karlov Manor. Whenever you investigate, you make a Clue artifact token that allows you to pay two generic mana and sacrifice it to draw a card.
Plenty of cards will let you investigate, like Auspicious Arrival, which tacks it on to a simple enough combat trick. We’ll likely also see cards that use artifacts and particularly Clue tokens in other ways. If not, this’ll still be great for the many artifact-or-token sacrifice tools we’ve seen recently in Standard sets like Wilds of Eldraine and The Lost Caverns of Ixalan.
New Mechanic: Disguise
Whether you’re a detective tailing a suspect, or the suspect trying to shake suspicion, a disguise is always a good thing to have. In Magic, disguises are a rework of the massively popular morph mechanic, which we only recently saw in MTG Arena’s Khans of Tarkir release.
If a card has disguise, you’re able to pay three generic mana to play it face-down as a 2/2 creature, just like morphing. The difference here is that the creature is also given a ward cost of two generic, making them strictly better than a morphed 2/2.
By paying the disguise cost listed on the card, you can then flip it face up. Like morphing, this can be done whenever, and so makes combat when a disguised creature in play a massive gamble. Plenty of disguised creatures have effects that trigger when they’re flipped face up, like Aurelia’s Vindicator, which exiles creatures from the battlefield and graveyard until it leaves the battlefield, then dumps them all into their owners’ hands.
There is another keyword that pops up in the set, “cloak”. Whenever you cloak, you put the specified card into play as a 2/2 creature with a ward cost of two generic, just as if you’d paid the disguise cost. If it’s a creature card, you may pay its usual mana cost to turn it face up. Otherwise, it has to stay face down until it leaves the battlefield, or when a card like Ertrata, Deadly Fugitive exiles it.
Flipping over a disguised creature, like morph, is a special action that doesn’t use the stack. This means you can do it whenever you have priority, even if someone has cast something like a split-second spell you normally wouldn’t be able to respond to. A creature flipping face-up doesn’t leave the battlefield either, so things like enchantments, counters, and whether a spell is targeting it, will continue being applied to it.
New Mechanic: Suspecting
Pointing the finger at a suspect can be risky. Sometimes it’ll pay off and you’ll get the right target, but sometimes it can come back and bite you right in the behind. When suspecting a creature, be very careful what you pick.
When a creature is suspected, it can’t block, but, in exchange, it has menace, meaning it can’t be blocked by less than two creatures. This is a permanent change to the creature that remains in effect either until it leaves the battlefield, or if another card effect says so.
Though suspecting might not be as flashy as disguising, it could be a really scary mechanic to play with, especially in limited. Use it on your own creatures to give them menace if you’re on the attack, or use it against their annoying chump blockers to slip past their defences. Of course, menace on any creature can be a threat if you don’t have a good enough board state to deal with it, but the flexibility suspecting provides makes it really powerful.
New Mechanic: Cases
When they debuted in 2018, Sagas were one of the most popular new mechanics in decades. Since then, Wizards has tried to follow up that success in a few different ways, like Class enchantments and now, Cases.
Cases are enchantments that offer an initial effect, such as Case of the Filched Falcon’s investigating. Then, when you solve the Case by meeting its solution condition (in the Filched Falcon, it’s controlling three or more artifacts), you unlock a second effect as well.
Cases are a bit more binary than Sagas. They’re either solved or they’re not, and they stay in play once they’ve been solved. It may take some doing to jump through the hoops to solve the case, but as long as the effects are worth the effort, or at least the solution something your deck already wants to do, Cases could become a mainstay in a lot of decks.
New Mechanic: Evidence
You can’t go around throwing out accusations without some evidence, and so the new evidence mechanic is perfect for any graveyard-loving decks wanting to get a bit more value out of it.
Collecting evidence is an additional cost found on some cards, like Axebane Ferox’s ward ability. Whenever you’re asked to collect evidence, you exile cards from your graveyard with a total combined mana value of the number specified.
“Mana value” just means the icons in the top right corner of the card. For example, Axebane Ferrox’s mana value is four, as it needs two green and two generic mana. If paying the evidence, you could exile another Axebane Ferrox from your graveyard, four one-mana creatures, two two-mana creatures, or any other combination as long as it totals four or more.
So far, we’ve only seen evidence be used as a ward cost. However, it’s easy to imagine it being used for other additional costs, like playing a card out your graveyard or as a pseudo-kicker effect, later down the line.
Every Card Revealed In The Debut
Magic: The Gathering Arena
MTG Arena is getting Murders at Karlov Manor a few days before the official tabletop release, on February 6. With it, there will be a few Karlov-y themed additions, as well as big changes thanks tothe introduction of Play boosterscoming with the set.
Like other sets, Murders at Karlov Manor will include a new battlefield theme, based on the halls of Karlov Manor itself. It’ll also feature a new companion, a delightful detective mole checking his case notes. Is he a Ravnican native, or has he slipped through an Omenpath from Bloomburrow?
The big thing, though, is the arrival of Play boosters. Murders at Karlov Manor will be the first set in this new post-Draft-and-Set-booster world, and Arena is changing slightly to adapt to this.
Like tabletop limited, Arena’s limited games will use the new Play boosters, meaning it’ll be three packs of 14 cards, rather than the previous 15. You’ll also have a chance of pulling Special Guests and List cards in Arena, though Wizards has confirmed some cards will be changed from the tabletop version to better fit the Arena environment.
The good news is that the cost of events isn’t increasing like it is in tabletop play. Events that use Play boosters, like Karlov Manor, will cost the same as events for the older sets that will still use Draft packs.
No changes will be coming to the packs you can just outright buy or earn through the Mastery Pass. These will still include the same number of cards and will cost the same (1000 gold each) as before. Considering these are already essentially their own, unique sort of smaller booster pack anyway, this was to be expected. It hasn’t been revealed whether you can find cards from The List and Special Guests in these regular boosters.
