Spoiler Highlight: No More Lies in Standard & Pioneer

Preview season for Murders at Karlov Manor has finally begun!

Over the next weeks, cards from the new Magic: The Gathering expansion will be gradually revealed as its launch date approaches, until the game's official website delivers the full image gallery of the set.

Here, at Cards Realm, it also begins the season where we review cards for certain formats and, when the complete set gallery comes out, we make our full review of it for the main competitive and casual Magic formats.

In today's article, we delve deeper into No More Lies for Standard and Pioneer, the new blue and white counterspell refers in several ways to one of the most desired cards by Pioneer players - Mana Leak, and can impact the range of Control and Tempo decks to deal with troublesome spells!

With the closure of countering a spell - any spell! - unless its controller pays , No More Lies resembles an instant that was once a Modern staple and had a big impact on its Standard times during the Zendikar-Scars and Scars season -Innistrad, Mana Leak.

However, if comparisons begin with this closure, they end the moment we look at mana costs: with , No More Lies is noticeably less splashable and less usable for most archetypes that don't fit into this color composition, since it doesn't seem impactful to the point of demanding splashes and/or making it irreplaceable in the Metagame of formats with no access to its predecessor.

In these formats - Standard and Pioneer - No More Lies competes in space with more conditional counterspells in the colors, with the most notable being Make Disappear.

While the Streets of New Capenna counterspell offers greater color flexibility and, consequently, will be more played in the general scope, No More Lies offers excellent versatility in not needing to offer more resources to amplify its effect, making it a little more comprehensive when it comes to Tempo plays and/or when countering low-cost threats.

However, this math isn't as simple as just deciding whether you want to sacrifice a creature to improve Make Disappear, or whether it's worth keeping as the standard extra mana your opponent needs to resolve a key spell: in decks with more creatures, Make Disappear bypasses other counterspells, like Dovin's Veto because its ability creates a copy of the card instead of just increasing the cost to be paid, allowing one of them to resolve even if the other is countered.

On the other hand, the Murders at Karlov Manor spell has a second line of text that makes it a little more interesting than just a copy of Mana Leak with an extra color: the possibility of dealing with recurring threats and spells that force a two-for-one to be countered, since they will be countered by the second closure of the spell's effect - this amplifies the value of No More Lies by, for example, countering Memory Deluge in a Control mirror, or by removing Dennick, Pious Apprentice with this effect, as this will prevent the opponent from extracting value from these cards later.

As I mention in my article about the Standard Metagame, the counterspells are at a strange moment due to the insertion of Cavern of Souls in Lost Caverns of Ixalan, from which has become a staple in Big Mana archetypes, especially in the best deck in the format today - Domain Ramp.

This addition hasn't prevented Make Disappear from showing up in Standard, especially because there are a dozen archetypes where the spell is still great, in addition to effects that a Cavern of Souls cannot protect against, such as Sunfall and some of the most powerful enchantments in the current Metagame - Wedding Announcement and Virtue of Loyalty - not to mention that we are still talking about four Cavern of Souls against four counterspells.

Its exile clause, however, makes some difference in an environment where there are ways to resort to some of the format's main bombs, such as using The Cruelty of Gix on the turn following a Trumpeting Carnosaur, countering a Haughty Djinn without giving him the opportunity to return with Helping Hand, or against Dennick, Pious Apprentice and other options, such as Tenacious Underdog - No More Lies also gains importance if we have more recursion effects in future sets.

But what about decks that might want to run the new spell?

In this regard, the cost of is much more restrictive when we think about the mana flexibility of some archetypes.

For example, Esper Midrange has too greedy a mana base to guarantee access to for No More Lies and to Deep-Cavern Bat with the same consistency without making concessions on the mana base by amplifying the number of Raffine's Tower instead of taking advantage of a Restless Anchorage set, in addition to many of its lists also require for Raffine, Scheming Seer while aiming to guarantee to do a follow-up between Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor and Sheoldred, the Apocalypse between turns 3 and 4, two plays that reward a more proactive stance.

As the game goes on, it becomes easier for Esper to use No More Lies, but between Preacher of the Schism and Wedding Announcement, the deck can still get more out of Make Disappear.

This is also a problem in Azorius Soldiers, where its proactive creature shell makes allows amplifying Make Disappear as much as necessary without compromising your strategy too much, especially through Resolute Reinforcements and Wedding Announcement - both spells that produce small tokens in play that we can sacrifice if necessary.

On the other hand, Azorius Soldiers have invested in complementary disruption packages. While today, it has been composed of a mix between Tishana's Tidebinder and Invasion of Gobakhan, it is possible that the Metagame will undergo changes to the point of making No More Lies a more appropriate answer to the Metagame. The new instant might improve and replace Make Disappear if Soldiers need to be more aggressive as well, since the gap between two or three mana will make more difference in this case.

Other variants like Azorius Midrange should opt for No More Lies given how relevant its creatures are to their game plan. Even a Spyglass Siren can make a huge difference when crewing a Subterranean Schooner or activating Warden of the Inner Sky's ability, opening up space and efficiency in the mana base to cover the mana costs with no difficulty.

No More Lies is certainly more efficient for Control or when the Metagame demands punishing interactions with the graveyard.

In Standard, Control decks have been declining since they can't overcome the Domain Ramp's inevitability, leaving them out of the main competitive archetypes today - but the inclusion of this spell could be just the first of a few steps that Murders at Karlov Manor and future releases have to put this strategy back into Standard.

No More Lies has a sure home at Pioneer in one of the format's most popular archetypes today, Azorius Control.

Taking the list ran by Ignotus97 in the Pioneer Challenge as an example, Azorius Control has some slots dedicated to more conditional counterspells, such as Change the Equation and Make Disappear to respond to the needs of the current Metagame - No More Lies belongs to these slots and has its own range of flexibility as well.

While its competition with Make Disappear is fiercer in Standard, the advantages of No More Lies overlap in Pioneer even in blue and white archetypes with a dozen creatures, both due to the faster nature of its environment in which it values more comprehensive Tempo plays and the fact that archetypes like Azorius Spirits or Azorius Flash run so many quality cards with specific functions that we hardly want to sacrifice them to increase the scope of a counterspell.

Take, for example, my current iteration of Azorius Flash.

Despite having adopted a more aggressive stance in the deck after Smuggler's Copter was unbanned from Pioneer, with the inclusion of Thraben Inspector and the reduction in mana values, every creature on the list has some specific effect and, except for Thraben Inspector, they add more value when they are on the battlefield than off it - therefore, Make Disappear will certainly lose space in Azorius Flash and other tempo shells in this color combination when No More Lies comes out.

The only time when a deck might want Make Disappear or another counterspell instead of No More Lies in Pioneer is when a Meta Call is needed.

For example, some lists are running two maindeck copies of Change the Equation to deal with Abzan Amalia while it still has uses against Rakdos and other archetypes with red and/or green cards, or with lower mana values.

If the Metagame requires these calls Control or Tempo decks, it is natural that more conditional effects are replaced by more accurate pieces against the dominant strategies - even when this stance doesn't always indicate just a momentary need, but rather the symptom of an environment shaped by a specific strategy.

That's all for today.

No More Lies presents itself as one of the most impactful cards for Pioneer and has a lot of potential in some Standard strategies, where it competes for space with Make Disappear due to the scope of creature-based archetypes in the current Metagame.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment!

Thanks for reading!