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The best cards in MTG’s Murders at Karlov Manor will have you dancing around suspicion, slipping away from accusations, and condemning your foes to judgement in the Graveyard.
A few cards from Murders look perfect for the Commander / EDH format: Doorkeeper Thrull and Anzrag, the Quake-Mole for example. It’s going to be interesting to see how draft decks and Commander decks respond to the paranoia and betrayal that Murders at Karlov Manor is due to inflict on Magic.
13. Krenko’s Buzzcrusher
Krenko’s Buzzcrusher isn’t anything special as a creature on the battlefield. It’s simply a 4/4 with flying and trample. While these effects aren’t anything bad, they aren’t the main attraction of the card.
What makes Krenko’s Buzzcrusher so good is its enter-the-battlefield effect. It lets you destroy a nonbasic land for every player. They do get to replace it with a basic land from their library, but some decks run zero basic lands which means Krenko’s Buzzcrusher can put them behind on mana. Notably, Krenko’s Buzzcrusher doesn’t target, meaning it can destroy lands with hexproof, the prime target being Lotus Field.
12. Red Herring
A big flaw of aggro decks is that they can run out of steam if they go to a grind game. Aggro shines at winning the game as fast as possible before your opponent can get a board going. Red Herring helps to get around this downside.
Red Herring is a 2/2 with haste, letting it attack the turn it hits the battlefield (in fact, it has to). What makes Red Herring great is that if you know you can’t get through your opponent’s defenses with it, you can sacrifice it for card draw instead to get into more cards that can impact the gamestate better.
11. Pick Your Poison
Forcing your opponent to sacrifice a permanent is great, as it gets around protection like indestructible, hexproof, and ward. Pick Your Poison, while a sorcery, only costs one mana so you can ensure you force your opponent to sacrifice something important.
In formats like Pauper that have widely played artifact lands, Pick Your Poison is especially strong since it can be used to for your opponent to sacrifice them. Most decks don’t play many creatures with flying, but Pick Your Poison is an easy way to deal with them.
10. Lightning Helix
Lightning Helix isn’t a new card, and has been around since the first Ravnica set all the way back in 2005. However, Murders At Karlov Manor is the first time it will be Standard-legal since its original release, meaning it will also become Pioneer legal.
Lightning Helix is a fantastic burn spell that helps you keep up with your opponent if they are dealing too much damage by gaining life as well. It only costs two mana, and three damage is enough damage to remove most creatures early in the game, and dealing a decent chunk of your opponent’s life to get closer to bringing their life down to zero.
9. Leyline Of The Guildpact
Leyline Of The Guildpact is a card you do not want to draw late-game, and one you ideally start with in your opening hand since it lets you cast it for free. If it hits the battlefield, all of your lands can tap for any colour, and all permanents are all colours, which lets them take advantage of colour-specific cards.
One thing that puts Leyline Of The Guildpact at the forefront of power in the set is that it can be cast easily. Even if you don’t cast it for free, you can use just green mana to pay for its mana cost.
Bring Up Your Devotion
Leyline Of The Guildpact has four blips of green in its casting cost, meaning Leyline Of The Guildpact will raise your devotion to green by four when it hits the battlefield. If you cast it for free, this lets you use Nykthos, Shrine Of Nyx much earlier to generate a ton of mana since that land can add mana equal to your devotion count.
8. Frantic Scapegoat
Giving something menace is strong, and a big part of why Frantic Scapegoat is such a good card releasing in Murders At Karlov Manor. Suspect is a new mechanic that makes a creature unable to block and gives it menace. Frantic Scapegoat comes into the battlefield suspected, but lets you trade this off to any other creature.
Frantic Scapegoat is great in aggro decks as it gets in for damage early, and can give your more powerful creatures menace once they hit the battlefield. A 1/1 with menace isn’t anything too special, but giving menace to a 4/4 creature with a good ability can help push you to victory in a game and break through stalled-out board states.
7. Demand Answers
Card draw is something that red appreciates, and Demand Answers is one of the best ones available now. Discarding to draw two cards is not a new effect, but being able to also choose an artifact to sacrifice instead is not.
There are many artifacts that want to be sacrificed, such as Ichor Wellspring, and many decks that make an excess of artifacts you can sacrifice to Demand Answers. Even if you aren’t sacrificing artifacts, you can always rely on discarding a card to get the effect of Demand Answers. It is especially strong in Pauper decks that don’t have access to Deadly Dispute, with Boros Synth being the prime user of it.
6. Archdruid’s Charm
Archdruid’s Charm is a card that is amazing in ramp decks that rely on a specific land. For three mana, you can tutor out for any land card and put it directly onto the battlefield at instant speed. Some of the best targets for Archdruid’s Charm are Field Of The Dead and Nykthos, Shrine To Nyx, as decks playing these cards tend to rely on them.
Even if you aren’t using Archdruid’s Charm for a land, you can get any creature into your hand rather easily, remove an artifact or enchantment, or boost up a creature’s power and use it as fight-based removal. Three mana is not a high ask, and even though it requires specifically three green mana, even multi-coloured decks can cast it easily.
5. Proft’s Eidetic Memory
If you are drawing multiple cards a turn, Proft’s Eidetic Memory is a great way to turn that into stat boosts for all of your creatures. Even without the triggered ability, having no hand size limit is great, so you never have to worry about discarding to hand size limit. It’s especially nice since Proft’s Eidetic Memory is built around drawing as many cards as possible.
Proft’s Eidetic Memory can hit the battlefield early and replace itself in the hand right away to keep your card advantage up. There are plenty of cheap draw spells in Magic: The Gathering, letting you put many +1/+1 counters on any creature. It’s best to toss it onto a creature with evasion or trample to make the most of its boosted stats.
4. Incinerator Of The Guilty
Incinerator Of The Guilty is the set’s obligatory strong Dragon, with this one capable of wiping your opponent’s entire battlefield of creatures. It does require a bit of setup, as you need cards with a high mana value in the graveyard to take advantage of Incinerator Of The Guilty’s effect. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to accomplish this such as landcyclers that discard themselves to put lands into your hand. They often don’t do anything in the graveyard, so Incinerator Of The Guilty can turn that into damage by exiling them through collecting evidence.
Incinerator Of The Guilty has both flying and trample, making it likely to be able to get in for damage even if it does get blocked. So long as one piece of damage gets through, you can activate Incinerator Of The Guilty’s effect to deal a ton of damage to all creatures and planeswalkers your opponent controls.
3. Lost In The Maze
Giving something hexproof is fantastic, especially since many combo pieces require the tapping and untapping of creatures. Even if you don’t pay any mana to the “X” cost to tap and put stun counters on creatures, Lost In The Maze is fantastic for its static ability on its own. The stun ability is just an added bonus. Since Lost In The Maze is a card with flash, if you are using it for its ability to tap and put stun counters on creatures, you can wait until the end step before your turn starts to cast it and load all your mana into it so that you can attack in for damage when you untap with your creatures.
Lost In The Maze has flash, letting you stop your opponent from playing any removal on all tapped creatures. In Commander, many infinite combos rely on creatures to generate infinite mana, and Lost In The Maze is a way to guarantee they resolve since it makes it nearly impossible to interact with them.
2. Doorkeeper Thrull
The ability to shut down triggered abilities from creatures is nothing new, but shutting them off from artifacts is. Doorkeeper Thrull lets you prevent triggered abilities from both of those from triggering. It has flash, letting you surprise your opponent when they cast a spell that would cause the trigger to happen before it ever hits the battlefield.
The effects that prevent creature abilities are already widely played, and the addition of artifacts to that makes Doorkeeper Thrull so good. There are many artifacts with strong abilities that trigger when they enter the battlefield, such as The One Ring’s protection effect among many others.
Best Home for Doorkkeeper Thrull:
Doorkeeper Thrull is great, but it does affect both you and your opponents so it’s important to play it in a deck where you don’t have to worry about your triggered abilities being negated (as you won’t be playing many, if any at all). As such, Doorkeeper Thrull is best in a Stax deck – decks that are built around preventing your opponents’ decks from functioning properly by slowing them down and negating their effects.
1. Delney, Streetwise Lookout
Delney, Streetwise Lookout does a whole lot for just three mana. It’s a payoff for decks that play creatures with power two or less, as it makes them unblockable by stronger creatures or lets their abilities trigger an extra time.
While Delney, Streetwise Lookout does not fit into every deck, it’s a slam dunk in combo decks as it lets you get closer to your combo quicker. Stacking abilities is a great effect, especially when it comes from creatures that have powerful triggered abilities. White decks tend to play plenty of cheap creatures with low power, flooding the battlefield with them to get in for a ton of damage quickly, making Delney, Streetwise Lookout a great top-end for those White Weenie strategies.
Those were the best cards in Murders At Karlov Manor. There are plenty of strong cards in the set, and ones that are especially good in Limited formats like Draft and Sealed, although this guide didn’t look at cards under that lens and instead at the wider Magic: The Gathering formats.
The cards here all have value across multiple formats, with commons affecting Pauper and others such as Doorkeeper Thrull affecting Commander for certain strategies. The best cards out of Murders At Karlov Manor have a lower casting cost, letting decks be aggressive with their curve if they opt to use them.
Every colour in Magic got some strong new toys, though Black was the most lacking hence its absence on this list (discounting the black pip in Leyline Of The Guildpact). However, even though some cards didn’t make the cut to sit at the top, they still have their own niche uses such as Forensic Researcher being a part of a Standard-legal infinite creature combo or Conspiracy Unraveler in big-mana Commander decks.
