New MTG card could be final nail in coffin for irritating deck

MTG’s latest stream revealing cards for the Murders of Karlov Manor introduced “Long Goodbye”, which might have just wiped out a previous top deck.

Magic’s latest set, Murders of Karlov Manor, is centered around a murder mystery involving residents on the plane of Ravnica. During the set’s debut stream, a card included in promotional packs – and the wider set – was highlighted.

Long Goodbye is an instant card costing one colorless mana and one Black mana (1B). It allows you to destroy a creature or planeswalker with a total cost of three or fewer. It also cannot be countered, meaning that Blue decks with counterspells have no way to protect their board state.

One deck that’s been persistent for quite some time now is a mono-Blue deck that focuses on quick, cheap cards to extract the benefits out of two creature cards.

Haughty Djinn is a flying creature that gains power depending on how many instant or sorcery cards are in the graveyard.

The other, Tolarian Terror, is a creature that costs six colorless and one blue (6U) that gets reduced by one for each instant or sorcery in your graveyard. It features Ward 2 forcing people to pay an additional cost on top of any spell that targets it, as well as boasting 5/5 stats. It quickly becomes a cheap, heavy hitter to block attacks or round out games.

Mono-Blue MTG decks might not be around for much longer

The mono-Blue deck became popular after Reid Duke placed in the Top 8 of a tournament, and its cheap price to buy all the pieces also made it very accessible.

However, Long Goodbye skirts around the deck’s two major creatures in such a way, that it could render the deck entirely useless.

Magic’s last two sets have seen to it that the irritating Haughty Djinn and Tolarian Terror combo doesn’t infiltrate the game’s meta anymore than it has. Even with the deck’s fast pace of drawing cards to fuel the creatures and protecting them with counterspells, Long Goodbye sees to it that nothing could survive.

In Lost Caverns of Ixalan, Cavern of Souls was reintroduced to the game’s Standard format. This is a Land card that allows the player to choose a creature and completely prevent it from being countered.

This has been seen as a piece of the puzzle to prevent mono-Blue from taking off any time soon. It seems to have such a good effect that mono-Blue isn’t appearing in recent top deck lists anymore.

Community reacts to Magic’s Long Goodbye card

In competitive forums, like the r/spikes subreddit, it was already divisive on its utility in the game’s current meta back in November 2023.

Elsewhere, users on r/MagicArena and r/MagicTCG are celebrating it. One user added:

“Between this and [Cavern], RIP counterspells.”

Another speculated that Black cards might be too powerful right now:

“Ah yes, exactly what the game needs – even more super-efficient black removal.

“This is going straight into a bunch of Timeless decks/sideboards I’d wager.”

Now with a cheap spell that can’t be countered directly targeting the main crux of the Blue deck, and even getting around Ward (which acts as a counter-spell), it would appear that the recommendations to move to Blue/White or Blue/Black decks has never been louder.

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