Well, gang, it looks like we've got another mystery on our hands! That's right, it's time to go on the hunt once more for the latest commons that will impact the Pauper format thanks to the latest Magic expansion Murders at Karlov Manor. The set is chock full of awesome new cards and presents a small change in design as well, thanks to the set being the inception of play boosters. Because of this shift, Wizards has begun to put less commons in the set and are compensating for that removal by making the average power level higher on these cards. Early player response suggests they feel like it's reflected well in this set and provides a lot of great cards for us to look at and examine.

There's a ton to look through, so let's put on our detective's caps and start our investigation, starting with a focus on the mechanics of the set!

Disguise

If you play Pauper actively, I'd like to ask you to take a minute and think of how many times you've seen cards morphed in the format? Can you remember which cards they were? Unless you've been around a long time, you probably haven't seen many as they're not usually the sort of thing you'd see played. If you did see something morphed, odds are it was either Birchlore Rangers, Fathom Seer, or Lumithread Field. Possibly a Gathan Raiders or one of the Disenchant/Naturalize creatures if someone's feeling spicy.

Generally, morph creatures aren't worth the cost of putting them face down in the first place in order to flip them back over again. That's even more true in a format where the upfront cost is 3 mana in a format where you optimally want to be paying not much more than 2 mana for anything unless it's really, really good. So, this begs the question then: are any of these cards good enough to warrant morphing, or rather, disguising?

There's a few I think might be decent. Most aren't what I'd consider to be great, but they're a bit better thanks to the ward Disguise adds that Morph lacks, giving you a better shot at setting up whatever play you're going for. A number of the multicolored disguise cards, for example, are actually fairly solid. Several - like Riftburst Hellion, Shady Informant, and Undercover Crocodelf - probably are too expensive and/or too low impact. Roughly half of them are low enough cost to turn face up that they could provide a solid impact. Cards like Granite Witness and Sanguine Savior which are fine, if uninteresting, cards on their front side are cost-efficient enough to cast face-down and then flip up later for a little extra value. Dog Walker and Gadget Technician offer some of the better value, though, as they're aggressive bodies that make more creatures as well.

Beyond those, most of them aren't great. Cards like Bubble Smuggler and Vengeful Creeper are great in theory, but in practice they're far too expensive to turn face-up and utilize effectively. Alley Assailant might be the only one of these expensive flips worth utilizing, but a lot of the decks that might want such an expensive drain effect will probably just opt for Vampire Sovereign due to the Ephemerate equity. In truth, the one other disguise card that seems reasonable is Nervous Gardener, as it's very reasonably costed, has a standard body, and gets you a land as well. It's not the most exciting and if cards like Sylvan Ranger and Civic Wayfinder aren't being played, the Gardener probably isn't either.

Suspect

Suspect is an interesting mechanic that I wouldn't be surprised to see get revisited in the future, as it's a simple mechanic whose only real downside is memory issues requiring a tracking method. As is, though, only six cards reference the mechanic at common, and only four actually make something suspected. Those four cards are Person of Interest, Reasonable Doubt, Repeat Offender, and Rubblebelt Braggart. Rubblebelt Braggart is too expensive to be useful so let's focus on the other three cards instead.

Person of Interest strikes me as interesting because it's a Red creature that makes a token. We've seen this sort of effect before in White fairly often, but never really in Red. Comparable White cards (see Gallant Cavalry) are too pricey to actually see play and those have additional keywords as well, making this less useful by comparison. Repeat Offender seems quite interesting because most creatures that put counters on themselves at common do so by doing something like sacrificing other creatures. This just lets you do it for as much as you have mana, which makes it a good little mana sink for games that go long, though you have to give up your ability to block to do so.

The suspect card I saw people talking about the most, though, is Reasonable Doubt. The big reason is that it gives you an ability to suspect any creature on the fly, and making it so you can give a big creature like a Tolarian Terror or - if you're feeling bold - Ulamog's Crusher menace while also countering spells is a solid deal. The problem comes from the utility of the counter side of the card. Neither Quench nor the more powerful Mana Leak see any play in the format. Lose Focus does, but the utility of Lose Focus is that you can scale it up in the late game or play it cheaply early on. Reasonable Doubt lacks that ability and often ends up feeling like just a Quench that will sometimes give you a more aggressive creature, which I'm not convinced is going to be enough to push this into the realm of playability people are hoping for.

Collect Evidence

Collect evidence is the one new mechanic that's a little tricky to gauge without actually building around it and playing with the cards. For many decks, it might surprise you that it's way more difficult or at the very least far less reliable than one might expect when trying to exile cards from your graveyard. The two Blue and one Black card here might be best at this, as there's already self-mill strategies for fueling Tolarian Terror and Gurmag Angler. Unfortunately, though, to use any of the collect evidence side of the cards, you'll likely need to exile 4-6 cards given average mana values, which can be difficult when trying to utilize your graveyard to benefit Tolarian Terror and the like.

Conversely you have the two Green cards, which both don't cost much to use, but most of the time Green decks aren't filling up their graveyards. There are certainly exceptions, given stuff like Tortured Existence, but in more aggressive decks, it's harder to get the reduced cost of Bite Down on Crime or the extra power bump on Vitu-Ghazi Inspector. Most of these Green decks fill up their graveyard by getting creatures removed from the board, so it's tougher to utilize these as a result.

Given all of this, I'd expect Extract a Confession to see the most play. It's reasonable enough on the front end as an edict, though being a Cruel Edict is way less exciting than something like Diabolic Edict or Chainer's Edict. The fault of those edicts is that if your opponent has a small creature to sacrifice instead, it minimizes the impact of those spells. If you can pay the collect evidence cost, it automatically guarantees you hit the biggest creature instead, proving extra potent against decks like Bogles to ensure you take out the most problematic creature.

Now that we've had a chance to brush up on how the mechanics might impact Pauper, let's look at some individual cards as well.

Deduce

Deduce is interesting because of how similarly it plays to Think Twice while also generally being (arguably) better. This is because you can just cast Deduce and not need to exile it to get the second draw, which helps cards in a variety of situations. Think Tolarian Terror and Gurmag Angler - and that's not just in regards to Pauper either. The problem is that Deduce doesn't play quite as well with the playstyles of those decks given how much they prefer to mill cards, meaning if you mill a Think Twice, you still have an opportunity to use it in a pinch. As it stands, Think Twice doesn't see much play, which makes it a bit hard to justify running Deduce at all, especially when it's direct competition is Pauper's classic cantrip suite of Ponder, Preordain, and Brainstorm.

Demand Answers

This was one of the first cards previewed from Murders at Karlov Manor and immediately Pauper players felt worried. There was concern over Red getting more card advantage following Reckless Impulse and Wrenn's Resolve as well as comparisons to Deadly Dispute and similar cards. Here's the thing: in what decks do you want this over the Impulse (or Bottle Two) cards over this where you need to get rid of something to make it work? And then when would you want this over Deadly Dispute, Reckoner's Bargain, and Fanatical Offering? In actuality, there aren't too many spots. It'll certainly show up at times and some players will argue its uses, but if I'm in Red looking for draw two options, I'm playing Reckless Impulse and/or Wrenn's Resolve over this instead and almost certainly not playing all three together.

Escape Tunnel

Evolving Wilds and Terramorphic Expanse get power crept out of the game with this one simple trick. When it comes to actual utility, I'm less certain on how good this is actually going to end up being. As is, Evolving Wilds isn't used in most decks and often only shows up in decks playing Brainstorm as a way to shuffle the deck afterwards. Escape Tunnel begs the question: what kinds of decks want it?

The first immediate and instinctive thought I had was to use it on a small creature and then suit that creature up with an All That Glitters. The problem is that the Affinity decks playing All That Glitters don't play enough basics to justify this and Bogles has its own forms of evasion and will often have creatures that are untargetable anyways. Faeries probably upgrades for a little extra Ninja equity, but it's not great for a small poke. The biggest gains on this are probably Kiln Fiend (particularly in the Izzet Blitz builds) and Tireless Tribe, but neither are quite as impactful now as they were in the past.

All of this leaves Escape Tunnel in a weird spot in Pauper. I'm landing on this being currently by and large unplayable. You do play it in decks already running Evolving Wilds because this is just better, but 99% of the time you'll be getting the land anyways. Despite this, I wholeheartedly believe that we'll eventually see a deck that makes some real use out of this and will leave a large impact on the format when it does.

Galvanize

This is a pretty easy bit of creature removal to activate the higher level in many decks. It isn't hard at all to draw that second card for most decks. However, most Red decks have much better ways of dishing out high amounts of damage and oftentimes those cards can hit players as well. You might see this pop up on occasion in specific decks in specific metas, but not enough to be generally useful.

Gearbane Orangutan

Uktabi Orangutan is that you? This clearly represents a nod to an all-time classic of Magic but in Red. 3 mana is a lot, but I think there's sneakily a lot of utility to be had here. If you land it, it's a guaranteed bit of artifact destruction. Conversely, you can use it to sacrifice an artifact of your own and make it a three-mana 4/4, which is a great rate - especially if you also draw a card off of the artifact sacrifice. The best thing about it, though, might be the card's secret reach. Most people won't register that it's there, and if you get this on the board against a Faeries player, there's decent odds they'll attack into it without realizing. The big hurdle is the cost, but if decks can swing it for a couple slots, this has a lot going for it in all the right ways.

Jaded Analyst

Drawing extra cards in Blue is downright trivial, and as such, this card is great if you want to be rocking an aggressive Blue strategy. I don't think this necessarily fills into any current decks and we've seen other similar cards in the past playing in similar design space (Wishful Merfolk quickly comes to mind here for me). If we do end up with a truly aggressive Blue deck, though, it's almost certainly going to want to be playing this.

Loxodon Eavesdropper

I'm extremely torn on this card. A four-mana 3/3 isn't great. Heck, you can get 4/4s for four-mana with upside no problem. The fact that this gives you an artifact, effectively an extra card draw, and gets buff when you draw your extra cards is pretty solid. The problem, though, is that the setup is too difficult to make it effective enough in most situations. It's a good value package and will probably be great for something like a Pauper Cube, but in classic Constructed Pauper? I doubt it has much of a shot at all.

Macabre Reconstruction

A double Raise Dead for 2 mana is solid, but it feels like we've been seeing more and more of these lately. I feel like this would be way better if it were an instant, but too often this is going to feel like it won't do enough and getting stuck with having to cast it for 4 mana will never feel great.

Makeshift Binding

As long as Journey to Nowhere is played, that will always see play over this. However, there are going to be times and metagames where the two life is relevant enough to run alongside if not sometimes over Journey. 3 mana is quite a hurdle, though, and at some point you'd rather just save the mana because getting to cast Journey earlier will often save you from losing two life anyways.

Make Your Move

This card is so close to being good. I thought it was kind of underrated at first because it just hits so many things. The closest comparison was and is obviously Destroy Evil, which does much of the same thing. As it happens, the big problem is that most of the relevant artifact stuff you want to hit with this also gets hit easily by Destroy Evil. Think Myr Enforcer or a creature with an All That Glitters on it, for example. Beyond a big key threat like that, what kind of artifact would you need to be up against to make this reliable as a versatile option? Maybe something like Prophetic Prism to break down Tron lists a little while also having answers to some of their big creatures, but at that point you could probably be doing something better. Eventually, something will probably come along to make this good enough, but for now, it's just not there.

Novice Inspector

Thraben Inspector has been a mainstay of Pauper for years. You've seen it in various Boros decks, Pestilence lists, and most recently Azorius and Jeskai Affinity lists just to name a few. Now we get a functional reprint of the card, allowing you to play up to 8 copies. At some point, though, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. There's no doubt this will be utilized, but the question here is simply how many copies does each different deck want?

Pick Your Poison

The problem with edict cards is you need to rely on your opponents have minimal options to get a good hit in. That's why Chainer's Edict and Tithing Blade // Consuming Sepulcher is so effective against decks with few creatures such as Bogles and Tolarian Terror but not a lot of other decks. If your opponent has multiple artifacts, they're going to pick the one of least consequence. Same with enchantments and fliers. If you can get your opponents into situations where you're always hitting something good, this card is great. If you can't reliably do that, though, then Pick Your Poison is going to feel really rough in practice. The versatility is going to make it a great tool in the toolbox, but in reality it's probably going to play a lot more narrowly than people hope it will.

Red Herring

The days of Valley Dasher being actively good in Pauper are long gone. You'll see it show up once in a blue moon in some Red Deck Wins list, but for the most part it's a card from a bygone era. It's easy to remove, block, and to just play around in general. This variation provides some extra utility in that it's an artifact and also that even if you can't get a good hit in, you can still play it and immediately sacrifice it for the draw effect. In reality, though, you'll often find yourself in a situation where you don't have the mana to sacrifice it and in Red Deck Wins lists, you then open yourself up to artifact hate as well.

Is it playable? Yeah, probably. Is it going to a big player in the Pauper landscape? I personally doubt it.

Rubblebelt Maverick

I saw a fair amount of hype around this card when it got previewed and I'm going to be honest: I just don't see it. We've been down the track of surveil cards in Green like this (Seed of Hope quickly comes to mind here) and they're often not quite as useful as players would like. Beyond that, it's basically a worse Slitherhead, which already doesn't see any play despite being a neat card. Maybe we'll see some interesting utility, such as being an early play for Slime Against Humanity decks, but for the most part this one just feels overhyped to me.

Seasoned Consultant

It's time for the obligatory shoutout to White Weenies! This one looks quite a bit like Boros Elite in a lot of ways, though it's a bit more resilient at the cost of being 2 mana vs. one. That card hasn't shown up at all yet since the recent downshift in Ravnica Remastered and given how this plays such a similar role, I wouldn't expect it to make an impact either. Both cards hit like a truck if they get to hit, but they require a little too much setup to be reliable and when they're not on, they're just bad.

Slice from the Shadows

Removal in Pauper - particularly in Black - is so good there usually isn't a world where you're going to want it. The one clear spot for it, though, is dealing with Faeries to make sure you can push through removal in key spots, either to help combat Spellstutter Sprite or take out a troublesome Ninja without the looming threat of counter magic. It's narrow, and most of the time you'll want the removal that's better in a broader sense, but this card still has its role to play from time to time.

Slime Against Humanity

The various cards that say "a deck can have any number of cards named" always get the brews trying to put together some nonsense. If you've played Pauper in a variety of spaces, over time you're bound to run into someone running a Relentless Rats/Rat Colony deck or someone on a Persistent Petitioners deck. Slime Against Humanity provides the same kind of deck-building challenge and does so with a surprising amount of potency to it in the process. Brewers have already been hard at work trying to find ways to get copies into your graveyard as quickly as possible to cast a copy of this on turn three and get a 5/5 or perhaps even better. That only gets better as the games go on, meaning that with the right setup, you could easily be getting 8/8s or better out of the deal which many players will have difficulty dealing with.

There's two problems I see with this card, though. The first is that simply put the removal is so potent in Pauper, it's going to face a real uphill battle. Not only do the tokens just die to conventional removal like Cast Down and Snuff Out, but it's not hard to get got by a bounce spell like Vapor Snag or Snap. It's even worse if you run afoul of Echoing Truth which acts as a full board sweeper. The second major issue is simply the sheer speed of some of the format's decks. When Affinity decks playing All That Glitters can smack you around with an 8/8 attacking on turn two with more powerful creatures waiting in the wings, how are you combatting that? So many cards in your deck have to focus on Slime Against Humanity itself that you don't get many options to fight back while simultaneously setting up your game plan.

It's a great card that will definitely see some play - particularly in the early weeks after the set drops as players try to see if they can make it work. Even if it doesn't make the cut on a large scale, the fact of the matter is that players will be doing what they can to make it work for years to come.

Snarling Gorehound

It is so easy for a lot of decks to trigger Snarling Gorehound multiple times and get some rock solid value out of it. The big question becomes what decks do you want to be repeatedly surveilling with, as it can be a bit lacking without the graveyard utility, and how much do you want? There's a lot of great stuff going on here, but also you get a very vulnerable creature in the package as well, so you really need to be able to make the most out of it. As it is now, I don't think most decks are the types that they necessarily want to run it.

Suspicious Detonation

The big thing about this is that it's an uncounterable removal spell that costs 2 mana if you sacrificed an artifact in the same turn. There's a lot of decks that do that, but I can't imagine most of those decks want a dull creature removal spell like this that is way too high cost if you can't sacrifice anything. It's notable for how much uncounterable stuff came in this set thanks to disguise, but isn't in most other ways.

Unscrupulous Agent

Yup, it's another one of these cards, but like Skullcap Snail in The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, this one exiles. Making opponents discard cards in critical mass isn't always great because of the uses of graveyard utility. Getting opponents to exile cards en masse instead though? That's way better. If we keep seeing more of these, there's a potential for them to be a more real player but with the amount now, probably not. This is also notable in being an Elf for Elves decks, as the archetype has occasionally relied on Black mana as well from time to time. I wouldn't say it's super likely, but there is a possibility this could be useful to have in the toolbox there.

Thus concludes our investigative Pauper review for Murders at Karlov Manor. It's going to be a few months before we get another solid release with Outlaws of Thunder Junction but all signs seem to be pointing toward that being one heck of an epic release. We may have a few cards to discuss in Universes Beyond: Fallout but I think that's unlikely. I hope you make great use out of these new cards and if you want to talk to me about them, I'll be at MagicCon Chicago all weekend from February 23-25, so let's talk commons there if you see me!

Paige Smith

Twitter: @TheMaverickGal

Twitch: twitch.tv/themaverickgirl

YouTube: TheMaverickGal