I’m a pre-release weekend and a few Arena drafts into the new format. Add to that, we have the first 36 hours of Arena play to provide some — emphasis on some — quantitative backing to my seat-of-the-pants reactions, so I thought I’d take this time to share my early reactions to Murders at Karlov Manor retail limited in the context of curating a Cube.

MKM’s Early Winners

Cryptic Coat is already being viewed as the Pack Rat of MKM, a singular rare at a low mana value that demands the game revolve around it from the time of its casting. According to 17Lands, the premiere research tool for online limited performance, Cryptic Coat has an incredible 67% games-in-hand win-rate in the earliest days of the format. Admittedly, though, most rares and mythics do not have the reps in for statistically significant numbers to measure against.

The card’s ability to provide both inevitability with a constant stream of 3/2 unblockable creatures is not quick — it’s a five mana investment each time you need to replace your creature or protect your Coat — but its flexibility and low cost to protect it makes it an easy contender for “biggest groan test” of the format. With enough mana, you can even generate an army of 2/2 mysterious creatures, any of which with the potential to flip up into an even bigger creature.

During spoiler season, I thought it was a powerful card, but made the mistake of comparing it to Cloudform from 2015’s Fate Reforged, a card that lasted for about a year in a much earlier rendition of my Cube. While I knew it was significantly better than that with its ability to return to hand, I didn’t give it credit for how oppressive it could be.

I’ve seen comparisons to True-Name Nemesis, and I think that’s wrong — it’s possible to catch your opponent with their shields down or respond to the activated ability when they don’t have enough mana to use it twice, and more than that, it’s much easier to race. As someone who likes to players to be able to always interact with their opponents’ haymakers, even if it’s very costly, I prefer this kind of “protection” to full-on hexproof or “protection from x”, but it doesn’t really make for fun gameplay all the same in my opinion.

I don’t think it quite gets there for the smaller power-max Cubes, but there’s probably a reasonably large swath of power-curious lists that would enjoy Cryptic Coat.

Some of the other most-winning cards according to 17Lands data are very much of-the-format, and I don’t think would broadly apply to most Cubes. Buried in the Garden is the kind of good-stuff card I don’t necessarily like to dedicate a gold slot to, even in rarity-restricted environments, but could easily justify a place in the right list. Many of the set’s best cards would ask you to build in a synergy that would require far too many slots; Private Eye makes a lot less sense when the only detective you’ve sleeved up prior to 2024 is the excellent and underrated Sarah Jane Smith.

Due to her mythic rarity, Delney, Streetwise Lookout has snuck into just over 100 decklists on 17Lands — below the number needed to provide meaningful win-rates — but in my experience so far, the card has more merit than I’d given her credit for. Providing buffs to the main theme in the Orzhov color-pair, Delney has performed admirably, making disguise creatures have an impossible double ward and letting Neighborhood Guardian attack as a 4/4. However, the value of the card doesn’t end there: I think commenters on my last article were right, and that she may have a solid home in many Cubes as well.

Trostani, Three Whispers is a house. In limited, the card captures the feeling of playing Selesnya midrange in my Cube perfectly: it’s the most powerful fair Magic around. It threatens unbelievable damage and is almost impossible to beat without removal…but it is still possible. This was on my list for consideration ahead of the set, and it’s played so well that it’ll certainly make it into my on-deck binder if my heart changes on any of my current GW lineup. 

Assemble the Players is much better than I gave it credit for. The card advantage is insane in retail limited for just two mana, and there are enough incredible cards in most Cubes with 2-power or less that I may have been premature in poo-poohing the card during spoiler season. My thought was that half of my white two-drops had three power, but that doesn’t consider how many cards at higher mana values and in other colors you can build around this card with. I still don’t think Assemble the Players gets there in my list, but I won’t be nearly as surprised to see it in others’.

Rating My Predictions

My biggest category of predictions for the set was not dissimilar from the biggest voices in the Cube community: most of Murders’ mechanics were too insular or complicated for an unrestricted Cube. 

1. Cases are too confusing: Check! On streams and in podcasts, I’ve watched and heard some of the game’s best players make mix-ups in how they functioned. They’re reasonably straightforward to play in an auto-enforced environment like Arena, but a card needs to be really special to justify the additional cognitive load brought on by potential misunderstandings and questions asked of a fiddly new card subtype, particularly in a playgroup like mine that’s not keeping up with every new release. I do love Case of the Stashed Skeleton and would be swapping it in without this issue, but it does not justify its complexity like Fable of the Mirror-Breaker does.

2. Disguise is fun in retail but too weak for most Cubes: Playing a French vanilla 2/2 for 3 in my Cube is not ideal when so many of the current eras most popular cards provide unending value at that price. Even in rarity-restricted Cubes, most disguise cards seem to be a hard sell, and no one wants to play with just one or two: you lose so much of the surprise equity that way.

Concerns over the imbalanced information between players based on Cube knowledge are valid, as are complaints about how this mechanic can be messy to play alongside earlier morph cards, not even calling into question the gap in power-level.

In my experiences with the format so far, I’ve found great delight in the surprises and bluffs that come with the disguise mechanic, but I’ve yet to see one that’s tempted me to test it out, with the exception of Hunted Bonebrute, a card I would never seriously consider as the singleton disguise representative due to its lack of reminder text as to what “disguise” even means. 

3. “Suspected” is somewhat suspect: A suspected creature shows no sign of being suspected. Memory issues are abound in Magic already, but of all mechanics that seem like they were made with Arena’s nannying of the game rules in mind to ease execution, this seems like one of them.

I do have one card with the mechanic sleeved up: Reasonable Doubt. I’m not going to have my players accidentally communicate their sweet counter to their opponents by forcing a reminder icon on them during deck construction; remember, being “suspected” is not a counter/token/icon, it’s just a status! Memory issues aside, I love the card already, and it’s played well, but my opponents at every prerelease would constantly forget exactly what it meant to be suspected. It’s easy to wrap your head around once you’ve played with the set, but that’s just not going to be the case for everyone you Cube with and makes this mechanic easily skippable. 

Prior to freeing even a single piece of cardboard from its glossy MKM booster pack prison, I found 17 cards that were worthy of a pre-testing inclusion in my Cube, which may sound like a lot, but nearly half of the list is surveil lands. From my view, and validated by player interest in these lands in all sorts of formats, they sit somewhere between the 6th and 8th best dual land of each color pairs. In a 720-card Cube that sets aside room for 7 of each, that means most guilds were going to receive one, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we opt to complete the cycle after playing with them more.

It may seem odd to some, but Aftermath Analyst was my most-anticipated card from the Murders main set. Self-mill is a favorite archetype of mine in Cube and otherwise, but what impressed me most is how practical the card has already been. A 1/3 for 2 mana continues to over-perform expectations in terms of keeping aggressive starts at bay, and I’ve even been able to use the card’s Splendid Reclamation ability in sealed to good effect. Mimicing Stitcher’s Supplier’s enter-the-battlefield trigger is solid value in both retail limited and my Cube, and playing with this card has only solidified my love for it. It’s no haymaker, nor is it the most essential glue card around, but I’m very happy for its printing and think I’m somewhat slightly less oafish for my hype during spoiler season.

The rest of my inclusions of the set have seemed fine. I can’t say any of them are all-timers but I can imagine Forensic Gadgeteer, Demand Answers and Proft’s Eidetic Memory to have long, happy lives in my Cube box — all of them punch just above their weight classes, and have been as impressive as expected in retail drafts. 

Similarly, Anzrag, the Quake-Mole has had the exact reaction from friends at my LGS as I anticipate my Cube playgroup will have when they open him: the biggest smiles available. While just a touch below the power-level I’ve come to expect from 4-mana gold cards, its story equity is off the charts, and it does have raw power…albeit in a very Gruul, devil-may-care way. I think we as Cube curators should always make the extra effort to pursue cards that delight where we can, and Anzrag is quite the people pleaser from what I’ve seen.

Another comment I made ahead of the set’s release was that the pushed “can’t be countered” spells would make for poor gameplay. And they absolutely do. What’s the point of giving the set mechanic Ward 2 if so much of the set’s premiere removal gets around it without a thought? I’m not the only person to discuss this, but I feel vindicated in my eye-rolling at cards like Long Goodbye no matter how much I dearly love the movie the card’s name references. In the same way, I don’t have any interest in including cards that limit interaction in my own Cube without good reason.

Lastly, as discussed above, I was wrong about Delney. Incredibly popular in the community for Commander reasons, Delney surprisingly does a lot of what tempted me to play the Phyrexia: All Will Be One version of Elesh Norn. As with morph/disguise, asking my players to spend 3 mana on a 2/2 creature in an unrestricted Cube environment is no small thing. Add to that, white’s 3MV creatures are some of the best in the entire game, translating to one of my Cube’s most competitive slots. However, I can’t help but dream of a world where Karmic Guides and Mulldrifrers turn into insane value engines. Not doing much on its own and being a squishy creature, in addition to the concerns I just laid out, make this the kind of card I would normally skip, but playing against this card on Arena and hearing how thrilled people at my pre-releases were to theory-craft with it has changed my tune.

Overall, Murders at Karlov Manor is not the most impressive set around for the typical Cube curator, but there are plenty of gems to be uncovered by actually playing with the cards. Which ones have you second-guessed since pre-release weekend? Let us know in the comments here or on social media!

Thanks so much for reading. We have basic land coverage on the regular as well as new Magic: the Gathering infographics and analysis every week, so if you’ve enjoyed this article, sign up for our newsletter and be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Threads!!

Miles Atherton is the editor-in-chief of “Cardboard by the Numbers” and has been playing Magic since 2006. Since studying Agricultural Economics at UC Davis, he’s built a career as an award-winning marketing executive in the entertainment industry with a love of data journalism. He’s also written for Anime Buscience, Anime News Network, and Crunchyroll News, serving as Executive Editor of the latter from 2016 to 2021.