vs Rune-Scarred Demon which gives you a tutor and a 6/6 flyer for . It's much more expensive.Temple Bell more or less a Howling Mine; the symmetrical draw effect has a long history in artifact.
Vedalken Orrery is from a block that did a lot of damage to the environment by making too many effects accessible without color, so I wouldn't take it as precedent.
I think "the proper adjustments" for this card would have to do something to express its artifact identity; for instance you could have its effect be, "If an effect would put one or more artifact tokens onto the battlefield under your control, it puts twice that many of those tokens onto the battlefield instead.
If an effect would place one or more counters on an artifact you control, it places twice that many of those counters on that permanent instead."
This still allows you to get multiple creature tokens out of it, as long as you have artifact creature generators like Precursor Golem or a correctly configured Progenitor Mimic, and it doesn't have a harmful interaction with planeswalkers.
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I'd rather see capital sin choose from the library. Also, since you can't cast anything once you've gone epic, this literally does nothing other than lock you out of the game and kill you. It needs to say nonland, by the way, because you can't play a land during your upkeep even if something tells you to play a card. I can't think of a phrasing that would allow this card to work.
Treacherous tutor gives black better land fetching than green, fetching Cabal Coffers or Urborg at instant speed for one mana, while giving one opponent a land to play. The closest green has is Sylvan Scrying. Oh, this also is infinitely more flexible and an instant. Yikes.
Temporal Necromancy might be okay. Maybe. I'd rather see it grab creature only though. That would be perfectly fair at three mana. Black has no reason to be reanimating enchantments or instants or sorceries or planeswalkers or artifacts. Maybe at five mana you could justify that as a different Sins of the Past, but definitely not at three.
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The white one seems considerably better in practice. Both (typically) require attacking every turn to get their effect. The blue one is a dice roll as to whether you get anything, and whatever you get is not vulnerable to enchantment removal. There are no enchantment sweepers in the block, but there almost certainly certainly will be one in the same standard. The white one doesn't care if the things you find die, because it will just bring them back again. Sphinx synergizes with things that tap/untap him. White guy synergizes with enchantments.
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Precipice is good--a limited No Mercy.
I'd like to see the lantern at 3WW so that you don't get the stupid simple play of T1 creature, T2 creature, T3 creature, T4 lantern, T4 wrath and get all of my dudes back. It's an interesting card, but that's how it would be used quite often.
Glow seems fine. It's a lot of life for a single mana, but it's conditional. Reminds me of Sun Droplet in that respect.
Ghoulhallow is probably okay. I think it could even come in untapped (Gemstone Mines as reference). Gaining six life for no mana investment seems pretty good though.
Grace is oddly worded and just comes off as a different version of the lantern. I'm trying to come up with a good wording for this but am failing completely. Maybe it just needs something like.
BW: Put a redemption counter on ~.
At the beginning of your upkeep, remove any number of redemption counters from ~ and return that many target creatures from your graveyard to the battlefield. If no redemption counters are left on ~, sacrifice it."
I think Guilt could have you gain that much life as well.
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As a 4-color card, it's not half bad, especially considering how tough it can be to do 4-color cards. The white and green aspects are a bit stretched and it would be nice to see it as a legend, of course. I could see it as something like...
Avatar of Blood and Nectar BRGW
Legendary Creature - Avatar
Double strike, trample.
Whenever you gain life, put a +1/+1 counter on ~.
Whenever you lose life, put a +1/+1 counter on ~.
0/4
This puts it very solidly in all of its colors--black and red for life loss, white and green for lifegain, red/white for double strike, greed/red/black for trample. It's got a taste of Ageless Entity, Ajani's Pridemate and Blood Hound, all rolled up into one big ball of ass-beating. Interestingly, gatherer says there are no black cards that trigger on your own life loss (outside of Lich effects)--I think the closest black card here would be HAtred. This guy loves Sun Droplet and Pyrohemia.
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In fact, it seems like there are about three total people who are excited about this. Everyone else seems to be having a fit over the fact that Wizards isn't printing out $500 bills for them to buy in real life.
Yes, it really is. Everybody's whigging out about how Wizards is somehow screwing them by printing this online and not in paper. This release hurts, quite literally, nobody. If you don't want to buy it, then just don't buy it. Why try to spoil it for those people who will actually enjoy it? Would you rather Wizards just released nothing so that nobody would get to be happy?
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I would probably go 5-color Karona, False God (minotaur lord!) with a Maze's end package. Because you know, minotaur in the labyrinth and all.
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DO NOT PLAY CATHAR'S CRUSADE IN A TOKEN DECK
Do you have any idea how miserable it is for other players to sit and wait while you spend fifteen minutes updating and tracking your counters on each and every token every turn? It drags the whole table down and nobody has fun. There's just no good and expedient way of doing it with dice/counters/cards, and I know this out of experience.
I know it's a powerful card, and it seems like a natural fit in token decks, but it just adds so much maintenance to the game that it's really not worth it unless you really revel in making the rest of the table watch while you ******** for fifteen minutes.
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Sliver Legion, Child of Alara, and similar cards don't bother me at all. There's no need (from a technical standpoint anyway) that it has to have an article if its truly unique, plus it adds a bit of variety to the names of legends. I'm sick to death of the "Name, Vague Description", so its refreshing to see things like Emmara Tandris or The Mimeoplasm. Progenitus and Experiment Kraj are proper names--it's an experiment called Kraj, just like my friend Trucker Dan is a trucker named Dan.
Additionally, it does make some sense that things like Child or Wanderer don't have truly unique things--these are entities born of the Maelstrom, and that's not someplace that people tend to go to see them. If people don't see them, nobody is naming it or spreading its mythology.