Since the end of the Phyrexian invasion, it's basically been the Avengers: Since the end of Magic: The Gathering's Avengers/Endgame, card game expansions have gone back and forth between several different genres of fiction. Some sets have been based on fairy tales and legends, others on pulp adventures in jungles full of dinosaurs and pirates. Next, back indoors, is a set themed around a crime novel called The Murders at Karloff Manor. This is like Agatha Christie's take on magic, only Hercule Poirot is not a benevolent Belgian, but a wizard and maybe even an elf.

Mystery is an excellent choice for a postwar tale. The detectives, who spend sleepless nights, drown in alcohol, and have no ability to shoot a gun, only the ability to survive being knocked unconscious, make more sense when we learn that none of them have just returned from World War II. When Kaya, a planeswalker, returns to her hometown of Ravnica after her battle with Phyrexia, instead of being hailed as a hero, she is blamed for Ravnica's suffering in her absence, and the guilds of Ravnica are at each other's throats again now that the war truce has ended.

For the less mechanics-oriented sickos, the structure of the murder mystery is represented in the new mechanics of disguise and cloak, as seen in the preview card above: the Evolved Mystery, Vaniphar. Both simply allow you to cast a 2/2 with "enigmatic creature" and a 2/2 with "warding" face down, forcing your opponent to pay an additional two mana to target the cloaked creature. The cloaked card can be flipped over at its casting cost, and the disguised card has another (possibly cheaper) cost to pay to dramatically reveal its true identity.

Another new mechanism is "suspect," which can designate a creature as a potential killer. You may want to suspect your own creatures to make them harder to block, or suspect your opponent's creatures when they are particularly good at defending themselves. Personally, I think "Amaranthine Wall" looks quite suspicious.

The last new mechanism is "Case," a card that gains an additional effect when it "resolves" under certain conditions, and "Gather Evidence," which triggers the effect when you exile a certain value of discards from your graveyard. It's as if digging up clues, autopsying corpses, unearthing files, and ultimately reaping great rewards. Speaking of clues, the returning "Investigation" mechanism allows us to create new clue tokens, which we can then use to draw cards.

You are not alone in thinking of the board game "Clue" (or "Cluedo" depending on where you are from) when you hear this. Magic's designers came up with it too, and came up with a new format called Ravnica: land cards like Library and Secret Passage, items like Knife and Candlestick, and magickified versions of Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, and more. The game can be won by correctly guessing who did what, where, or by defeating another player in a regular Magic game being played at the same time.

"Murder at Karloff Manor" will be available in Magic: The Gathering Arena on February 6 and in paper Magic on February 9. Pre-release events will be held at Wizards Play Network stores from February 2 to February 8.