Murders at Karlov Manor (MKM) Limited Guide: Blue

Note: This article was translated from Chinese by AI and may contain errors. Read the original Chinese version.

Murders at Karlov Manor (MKM) will hold its prerelease events on February 2, 2024, and officially release a week later on February 9, 2024. Want to learn more about individual card ratings in Limited and some interesting possible synergies? Then check out this series of MKM Limited guides!

For the mechanics overview, see this article: Murders at Karlov Manor Mechanics Breakdown

Rating Scale

5.0: Unconditional must-pick
4.0: Worth a first pick
3.5: Strong enough, but not necessarily a first pick
3.0: Above average (you’ll really want it in your final deck)
2.5: Average, maybe around the 6th to 7th pick in a draft
2.0-1.0: Below average (you’d rather not play it than play it)
0.5-0.0: Unplayable (basically don’t play it; playing it will only help you lose)

Blue

MiohitoKiri5474: 3.0

When it enters, search for a Magnifying Glass and a Thinking Cap to put onto the battlefield. If the conditions line up, it becomes a 5/5 flier, which is pretty impressive.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.0

Unless you have very few creatures or combat tricks, I’d almost never consider this card.
Although for just one mana it makes a creature or artifact a 4/3, that’s only a one-time effect.
Of course, you can also pay the collect evidence cost to make it a one-mana soft removal spell, but that depends on the graveyard, which makes it an unreliable removal spell.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.5

A creature with barely passable stats, but adding its ability to sacrifice an artifact to draw a card when it enters and when it attacks, it’s not bad, though you need to consider how many artifacts you have.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.5

It’s a tempo creature in both the early and mid game, and if you put it in with its disguise cost and it survives to the mid-to-late game, it becomes a big creature. A fairly decent filler card.

MiohitoKiri5474: 3.0

Without support from your own Detective effects, this is just a soft removal card, but paired with the large number of Detective effects in this set, it’s very good. It can serve as an Aura that boosts your own creatures, or turn an opponent’s creature into a 1/1 that can’t block your Detectives.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.5

A competent Equipment with low cast and equip costs, and when the equipped creature attacks, you can surveil 2 to fill the graveyard.

MiohitoKiri5474: 3.0

It makes a Clue when it enters, the difficulty of solving this Case isn’t too high, and for three mana, sacrificing it turns an artifact into a 4/4 flier, which is pretty good.

MiohitoKiri5474: 1.5

Basically it’s a three-mana Baral, Chief of Compliance, and casting more than four sorceries and instants on your own turn in Limited is still too hard.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.5

A creature with acceptable stats, and when it dies it also leaves behind a Clue.

MiohitoKiri5474: 0.5

It’s just a seven-mana 6/6 flier. Setting aside that you can’t always afford the cost of the second ability, it’s a question mark whether there’s any spell worth casting that way.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.0

A very standard high-risk, high-reward card. Basically, most of the time you’ll cast it face down with disguise, flip it face up next turn, give away a pile of permanents and draw a pile of cards, then take one of the given-away permanents back when you attack. But as with Worldgorger Dragon, if the thing you gave away can’t be taken back for some reason (for example, it gets killed before attackers are declared), you may come out behind.
Of course, the most conservative approach is to cast it face down first, then next turn flip it face up, give away one permanent and draw one card, and take it back during the combat phase.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.0

Although it’s a creature with acceptable stats and it has another ability, that other ability’s activation cost is rather harsh, and again it’s uncertain whether you’ll have enough resources to pay for it.

MiohitoKiri5474: 3.5

One of the few Equipment without an equip ability. When it enters, it cloaks the top card of your library and attaches itself to it. The equipped creature gets +1/+0 and can’t be blocked.
You can also pay two mana to return it to your hand, so even if the creature gets killed, trades in a block, or you have lots of mana late in the game and nothing to do with it, you can reuse it again and again.

MiohitoKiri5474: 1.5

A weakened Curious Obsession, and it makes a Clue instead of drawing a card directly.
Making Clues has its pros and cons: the good is that you can pair it with other cards to make different combinations, and the bad is that if we want to draw cards we need to pay two extra mana.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.5

Two mana to draw one and make a Clue; you can think of it as four mana to draw two.
Apart from the two mana being payable separately, Quick Study is better in every way (?
Also note that this set has some effects that trigger when you draw your second card in a turn.

Is this the interest on a loan…?

MiohitoKiri5474: 3.0

A Pacifism-like card. If just stopping that creature from taking part in combat isn’t enough, you can pay two more mana to shuffle it into its owner’s library, making it a soft removal spell.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.5

This is another soft removal card. -2/-0 across the board reduces the damage from the opponent’s attacks, or lets your lower-toughness creatures survive a block, and it also adds a Clue as a way to refill resources later.
Considering this set has quite a few suspect mechanics, making all of the opponent’s creatures lose suspect is also an indirect way of reducing their evasion.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.5

It can’t be blocked by creatures with power 3 or greater, which gives it a chance to become a winning source of damage during a mid-to-late-game stalemate. Its disguise effect is also good: when it’s turned face up it bounces a creature to hand, so depending on the situation you can choose to recover your own creature or try to punch a hole in the defense.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.0

Feels familiar? That’s right, Cradle of Safety from VOW had almost exactly the same effect. Both have flash and give the enchanted creature hexproof when they enter. The only difference is that this Fae Flight gives +1/+0 and flying instead of +1/+1, which is a kind of upgrade.

MiohitoKiri5474: 3.5

When you cast an artifact spell, investigate, and the activated abilities of artifacts cost one less to activate (it can’t reduce an activation cost to 0). That greatly lowers the cost of drawing with Clues, and making every artifact a resource refill is also quite good.

Basalt Monolith: Do I have another infinite mana combo now?

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.0

It doesn’t feel very good in Limited, but it can make your other big creature a fake vigilance creature, which may be a decent pairing.

Also worth noting: two Forensic Researcher + LCI’s Deeproot Pilgrimage = infinite 1/1 hexproof Merfolk tokens. Add the fact that Agatha’s Soul Cauldron and a bunch of creatures with explore effects are still in Standard, are we about to see another infinite combo that breaks Standard?

MiohitoKiri5474: 3.5

A very strong tempo creature. As long as you’ve sacrificed an artifact, it can’t be blocked (turn your head toward that pile of Clues), and when it attacks you can loot to filter resources. As both a graveyard-filling and filtering engine, it’s very strong.

cephille: 2.5

A six-mana 4/4 isn’t particularly impressive stats-wise, but bouncing a blocker to attack with an advantage, or bouncing one of your own creatures with an ETB ability to draw an extra card, are both quite good choices if used correctly.

MiohitoKiri5474: 3.5

An effect similar to Fact or Fiction. Although it costs five, you split the piles yourself, and it makes an extra flying creature on top.
When the opponent’s life total is low, you can get very tricky by putting all five cards in the same pile, forcing your opponent to let you gain five cards in hand. Likewise, early in the game you can use this approach to force your opponent to give you a 5/5 flier.

cephille: 0.5

A two-mana defender with only 2 toughness is completely failing in an MKM environment full of creatures with disguise, and as an attacker it’s even less reliable. I don’t recommend putting it in your deck unless you really need a two-mana blocker, and you can always find something better than it.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.0

By itself it’s a card for the very, very, very late game. The draw effect doesn’t trigger when your library has no cards, and it becomes a 10/10 flying vigilance creature.

Although it has hexproof itself, still watch out for it possibly getting sacrificed to Pick Your Poison.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.0

When it enters, it taps X target creatures and puts a stun counter on each opposing creature tapped this way. It also gives hexproof to your own tapped creatures, so it can also serve as an instant-speed protection card.

cephille: 3.0

Right creature type, very low cost to turn face up after disguise, and during a well-timed attack it can make quite a few Clues, letting both the artifact theme and blue’s draw-a-second-card mechanic pay off in the mid to late game.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.0

A blue soft removal card that can’t be countered, and it puts a stun counter on the tapped creature and investigates. It’s one of the more usable blue soft removal cards from the last few sets.

cephille: 4.0

On entering it draws a card and triggers the third ability to put at least one +1/+1 counter. The more cards you can draw before combat each turn, the bigger your creatures grow, which is an important boost for blue, whose creatures tend to be on the smaller side.

cephille: 3.0

This should be the most important common creature in blue. It can proactively trigger drawing a second card and works well with Detectives, and once you go into the Detective theme you’ll want to get several copies of it!

cephille: 2.0

Considering when you’d use a counterspell, this suspect is hard to use profitably, and a counterspell that’s useless in the late game only deserves this score.

MiohitoKiri5474: 3.0

An instant-speed rescue card, though it can only rescue cards that entered the graveyard this turn.
Or you can kill the opponent’s creature or counter their spell and then dig it up to use your spell is my spell.

MiohitoKiri5474: 3.5

A very typical blue creature, with acceptable stats that earns you a card in hand when it enters.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.0

I don’t have a counterspell, I just bounce it back into your library!
It can dodge some spells that can’t be countered (for example Out Cold, which also appears earlier), and it can also be used as soft removal.

MiohitoKiri5474: 3.0

Without collect evidence it’s basically quite a tempo loss, but the tokens it makes have flying, which isn’t bad.
If you can collect evidence a second time to make an extra token, that’s very nice.

MiohitoKiri5474: 2.0

Another blue soft removal card, and it comes with surveil 1.

Afterword

This is the first time I’ve written Limited card ratings, and I normally play Limited less, almost entirely constructed, so there may be some misreadings of cards.
If you see a card you think is underrated or overrated, please leave a comment to let me know. Thank you to all the readers who made it this far.