It was Ravnica that brought me to the concept of the set skeleton, that which has a lot of cycles that together from a soild structure for a draftable set to be, a comparison to highlight each color’s strength and purpose, an abstract story to be inferred from, overall one of the things that made Magic stand out from other card games, or games for that matter (like for example Pokemon cards, is there any rhyme a reason for how some sets can have Dragon types and others just don’t?)
Weird way to say guilds are important to Ravnica I know. So what’s to do in Ravnica if you can’t have the guilds? Either putting a good riddance ending on the story arc with the most generic characters and art direction Magic has ever seen (with the worst pair of novels to coincide may I add), or do whatever this murder mystery set do.
Ravnica also taught me to read MaRo’s articles on design lore and therefore gets really invested in it. There’s a ton of reading or listening material on Ravnican designer lore, frankly because Ravnican is probably the most “designed” plane in Magic, with the set skeleton and everything.
It taught me that the inspiration for Ravnica was actually this Dominarian story block named Invasion came 4 years before hand. That block was silly, it had allied pairs and shards for the first two sets, then enemy pairs and wedges for the last, therefore only some cycles were complete and most just aren’t even to this day, it introduced kicker (even put them in off colors) and also domain (just implied, not keyworded back then). Sounds familiar, because that’s somewhat like what Dominaria United became, another set I do like to be honest.
Then comes to Ravnica, they saw to fix three big mistakes of Invasion: Play exactly two colors instead of the most fitting amount for the draft pool (you know DMU drafts), Allied pairs are equal to enemy pairs instead of favoring either and lastly colors don’t matter instead of having a 1 mana 1/3 that taxes your cards by 1 white mana. And instead of just having the color pairs as is, they put them in context by designing each of them to be a guild with characters, motivations, leaders. Suddenly you got something to side with in a competition much more nuanced than just heroes versus villains.
And that saved Magic, not once but twice. Being multicolored landed all these cards right between too weak (the block that ended in Prophecy or original Kamigawa, arguably later on original Ixalan) and too strong (Urza’s Combos and affinity Mirrodin, arguably later on Caw-Blade Mirrodin and Kaladesh) and Ravnica went on to prove MaRo knew something about game design, and went on to be the blueprint for many multicolor heavy sets going forward, sets that I might like to review some day much more than some “Characters we made sound cool in this color so we put it in” top down mess (cough cough Commander precon sets).
NotC has made a mystery set before, it’s called Shadows over Innistrad. Actually it’s just slightly mystery themed. But now they want a new variant of it, murder mystery, and now make an entire set about it. Actually do they really want to do it, or just because they want to cash in a certain “red sus” game only to obviously miss the train by like 3.5 years? I’m not sure if you can translate the suspicious feeling people get in that game to a card game, let alone any other things, so what do you replicate here, just the things that exists in murder mystery, like the act of a creature being a detective?
Also why does it have to be on Ravnica? Allegedly because the characters in the murder mystery has to matter and resonate with people. So some place like New Capenna wouldn’t fit, despite the obvious fact that that place likes their suits and trenchcoats much more than Ravnica ever would. But no, would you really care if Errant kills off Raffine and Jetmir, in fact do you know what those characters are without searching on Scryfall or just personally playing them as your commanders? That would be an even bigger problem in a brand new plane.
Deeper reason is probably the fact that they want to show how these planes got affected after the Phyrexian invasion, what they lost and what they gained. Then just do that, you don’t really need to make up this new ill-fitting story. So let’s say now you want the guild sets again, 2 of them. How many guilds are still existing, with existing being defined as still having their leaders in there leading things? The answer: Not all guilds fought the Phyrexians equally, so not all guildleaders exist the same way anymore. But who am I to say you can just make up backstory for new characters to take over? I guess that would be lame, so here’s to a more interesting solution someone smarter than me can actually come up with.
Fun fact: It took 7 years from original Ravnica to RTR, then another 6 from RTR to GRN, then almost exactly 5 from RNA to MKM. Considering how this set did I don’t expect the next logical steps to be 4, 3, 2 and 1 and Magic is dead due to Ravnican overload. Maybe consider how it took 4 years from INV to RAV, that’s just a wave…
Gonna be obvious, Murders at Karlov Manor sucks as a name. First word gets you flagged by the stupid copyright bots. Third word gets really easily confused with Markov Manor, a place more known for goth vampires than a certain woman with boob windows. And it all shortens to MKM, the name of a certain MTG retailer and channel, well maybe NotC doesn’t care because they wish one day everything is just direct to consumer like Secret Lairs, no need for those pathetic sellers.
The first thing that stands out about this murder mystery set is the questionably huge number of Detectives. Most of us would assume that generally, the average detective in their lifetime would be able to detect more murders than the average amount of murders a murderer can land. Which would mean there really isn’t that much of a need for the organization of RAMI to be as big as it got, yeah, after the 10 guilds why do there need to be this additional thing? It just isn’t as cool or well built as the guilds, and actually do all detectives belong there? Are they hunting for a big bounty for being able to find the murderer?
To add to the theme, there’s not only Clue tokens, there’s a new Saga frame type named Cases. Suddenly doesn’t sound as cool as a Quest, through in terms of being able to function it functions, if you can actually understand what “If unsolved, solve at the beginning of your end step.” means. Just that like anything in the Saga frames, it didn’t got any showcase versions. And also there’s collect evidence, a form of delve that counts mana value instead of amount of cards, so delving lands is a no go. Honestly why does this exists, it doesn’t synergize with any of the other mechanics at all.
And now to the disguise and cloak rant, a version of morph so good Duskmourn didn’t even bother to reuse. So these things came about because Morph was balanced for 2002’s MTG where draft cards were way, way worse and suddenly a Grizzly Bear for 3 mana seems tolerable for all the trickery depth it provides through the turn up cost. Tarkir have already seen that fact, so NotC back then tried a playtest where Morph starts at 2 like a proper bear, and got knows how much playtesting it took for Megamorph to exists and still fail. Also it brought Manifest which I still find really dumb how it works with permanents other than creatures, like you really telling me this thing can never transform into a permanent at all, like I get it if you don’t want this rules nightmare during combat but outside?
The solution they came back with was the fact that these 2/2s now has Ward 2. So removals on them early would be really expensive, except like 2 exceptions in the MKM draft set, they weirdly spelt “I can’t be countered.” And with that along with a certain Naya commander raises peoples’ awareness on Ward, especially how Ward 2 is just too far. Also what’s up with the fact that’s there’s only a single token named “A Mysterious Creature” for both disguise and cloak?
Also there’s suspect, it’s a menace counter that’s 1. Also doubles as a way to get it out of blocking 2. Only one can exist per player, so instead of having a second one it has to move. Sounds like it could adds some layers of depth as to which creature is best to have menace and which one is best to block, but in reality it feels like bloat to the set.
Overall definitely a set of mechanics to set the expectations for how little the guilds mattered anymore and that will be to the set’s downfall, these things can’t drive the set well.