Introduction

As you all probably know, Murders at Karlov Manor has been out for about a month at this point, and with its release, surveil lands has been unleashed on a variety of different formats. While they see some amount of play in Standard and Pioneer, their impact is most significant in fetchland formats, more precisely in Modern. For a price of a single tap land, you can have upwards of ten virtual Temples (that’s a reference to the Temple cycle from original Theros that scried on ETB), or rather that many ways to access the first copy, and with more copies you can get the extra card selection multiple times. At this point, virtually any deck with fetchlands that can afford to play at least a single tap land runs some number of surveil lands - even Murktide, a deck built to utilise every last drop of mana available that normally abhors taplands, has flirted with this idea a bit - according to MTGGoldfish, at the time I’m writing this article, 46% of Murktide lists in the la...