Yes, sets recently have been very focused thematically, but that's been the intention a very long time, and has been stepped up since Ravnica. It's more appealing to players in general when the card's mechanics aren't completely separate from the story behind the cards. Whatever theme we see from Zendikar, it will be tightly entwined with what's going on the world they've built.
Note that you can play the cards in the current block as they are without even thinking about shards, but when you do think about them it makes a whole lot more sense. The same has been true for quite some time.
Broodmate Dragon doesn't need to be black - it combines a dagr0n with Ambassador Oak in a way, so green makes sense. But black? Why is Goblin Deathraiders black? 3/1s are very red, trample is rare is both colors, and of course rare in general on 2-drops. Why are Fire-field Ogre and Kederekt Creeper blue? There's absolutely nothing blue about the former, while in the latter one might aruge that "Goblin War Drums" is sorta blue (it's actually very red), but in that case it would get unblockable, period.
Not all cards need to typify effects in all their colors in this block as long as R&D wants to push down the CMC by making it more colors. As long as the card typifies the shard, it can get that shard's mana cost without having a damn thing about that particular color in the card. Note that this costs the same (CMC-wise) as Flame Wave to do 4 damage where most scalable effects cost way more than non-scalable ones.
Also, Flame Wave is a fine cite because it's in 9th edition; while you could say "Psionic Blast also was in Time Spiral, reprints don't count" it's quite clear that the Timeshifted set is what doesn't count. The better argument is the above: when it comes to all-shard-colors gold cards, things can bleed.
edit: slowly crafting a post in a fast-moving thread often leaves one far behind....
Remember that the deal with M10 is that its not supposed to be as "coreset-y" as in the past. I think that Akroma is certainly possible given that they're trying to up the power level of the coreset and also ACTUALLY introduce the game to people. The coresets of old didn't do a good job of that at all because they constantly only printed about 5-6 cards that mattered to the formats and you still ended up realistically learning magic with the expansion sets.
As stated by the post just above yours, Akroma would have too much reminder text. Hell, Lord of the Pit probably would too. I'm assuming that there will continue to be reminder text for nearly every keyword in the core sets (please don't capitalize those words any more, they no longer used in the product's name) due to the reminder text on Silence.
Now, it could be that Silence is an outlier and there's reminder text on it because there's a likely interpretation that isn't correct. However, that reminder text does not appear in the current Oracle text for Orim's Chant, while the full reminder texts for Time Stop and Tarmogoyf are in theirs.
A good deal of the decision about what's going to stay will likely be from what else they've created to put in the set along with whatever else they're cycling in. That said, here's some comments on a few of them:
Grizzly Bears - Printed in Shards. Even though had a different creature type, it was irrelevant to the block. While they will print cards slightly better than this, this is about the standard for green these days. Wild Mongrel is way in the past; Nomadic Elf is a much better example of things that would obsolete the bears (even if it is *older*). However, it's not nearly as "fantasy" as Cylian Elf. If they're going to include animal-like creatures, I think they're going to be more magical in nature than plain bears.
Howling Mine - Includes a very strange "if it is untapped" clause that may cause some confusion that was only tacked on due to how it worked for a long time. And generally casual players do *not* have a sense of the card disadvantage it creates; I see no reason why it should continue to get reprinted. Additionally, the flavor seems really odd.
Goblin King - I'd say this is almost certainly gone. As mentioned, "lords" will now only affect creatures you control. We might see the Portal Goblin General instead, but not this.
Card disadvantage for fixing your mana is an absolutely awful idea.
The best ideas I've seen are the category of "CIPT unless X", where X is probably revealing a card in hand. The best thing about a drawback of revealing a spell is that it's easiest to avoid when you need it: when you have cards in your hand you can't cast yet, either because the game just started or you're short on a color. For that reason, it might be a bit too powerful to require only a reveal of one of the two colors - and perhaps a bit too weak to require a land reveal. The latter might teach people that holding back a land you don't actually need to play is a good decision, but the revealing of a spell might be a big enough drawback due to the information it generates.
I was also leaning towards Nimbus Maze, but there's problems of being not able to cast spells with two of the same mana; the drawback seems ok when the environment has very few cards that have that sort of cost, but that's just what happens in multi-color blocks. It won't happen in normal blocks, and the core set in particular should be full of such cards.
Also, is there 100% confirmation that these lands will be able to produce either color of mana on a player's first turn?
I wonder if the ability of this equipment actually works given the similar one on Sword of Kaldra (Whenever equipped creature deals damage to a creature, remove that creature from the game) basically never triggered. This is because the creature normally was already dead by the time it triggered and the trigger doesn't find it since it explicitly says creature (which are not in the graveyard), not creature card (which are)..
Original translation: Whenever a creature dealt damage by the equipped creature is put into a graveyard you can remove it from game
I'm not 100% on how the reference works, but if this is the actual wording the creature would still be in the graveyard when this ability triggers; the card in the graveyard is not the same as the creature in play. So just like SoK, the trigger would do nothing if the creature dies from the the damage. In the past cards changing zones became new objects with no memory of its previous existence so the trigger would probably be unable to find it unless it explictly said "that card" instead of "it".
A possible wording that would work would have it not be a trigger, but a replacement:
If a creature dealt damage by the equipped creature would be put into a graveyard you may remove that card from game instead.
This definitely works.
However, they may still want it to be a trigger so the card goes to the graveyard momentarily and I'm fairly sure changing "it" to "that card" would work. I'm too tired to look up other cards that might have similar wordings right now.
My absolute favorite pack in there was the one with the split cards. That's a lot of work to put into a joke; most of the others were images that could be obtained elsewhere - those required mock-ups and a lot of thought going into them. Plus they were quite funny.
One idea I've had for the dual lands is that you'll have to reveal a card in your hand of one of the two colors to get it to come into play untapped. (Edit: Perhaps to get it into play at all - the original suggestion might be a bit too easy, and though giving information to your opponent about your hand is always risky competitively it's quite often a card you play the same turn.)
I really don't like fetchlands due to the excessive amount of shuffling they entail. Probably half of the time in Extended games on up through Vintage is taken up by shuffling from fetch lands and other tutors. Ok, I exaggerate a little - for Extended it's maybe only a third. I think the Basic Landcycling (BLC) cards are fine since they seem a bit underpowered for constructed and work great in Limited - very few cards that require a mana expenditure to fix your mana without accelerating you ever have been played in competitive formats. Compare that to Mind Stone, which has gotten a decent amount of play even though it doesn't fix mana because it's both acceleration and never a dead draw. BLCs are often very close to dead due to their lack of actual cycling - you get your choice of two possibly weak effects
Anyway, I'm leaning towards something along the lines of revealing a card - but there are certainly other options. They could go with the Ravnica lands and just remove the "pay 2 life to make this come into play untapped". Or print a cycle of Grove of the Burnwillows style lands, or Ravnica style lands in that vein (give an opponent 2 life to have it cip untapped). A cycle of Nimbus Mazes might be interesting too. I really hope they come up with something new and interesting - but I suppose that's what Future Sight was about: showing new and interesting ideas available to be fleshed out at a later point.
I'm going to do a little work on this riddle; here are my thoughts:
The spaces have absolutely nothing to do with anything. The board software automatically inserts spaces every 50(?) characters without a space automatically. This has been seen to be a problem with really long URLs in the past.
The snow mana symbols represent something very different from the other 5 since they occur with much less frequency. The easiest assumption is that they are breaks between words, but it almost certainly somethign else since there are some very long spaces between snow symbols and there are 38 snow symbols and I can't make the spoiled card come out with that many words.
It'll be interesting to see if its all that trivial given we have a good idea what it says.
edit:
Initial analysis:
There are 1260 = 9 * 140 symbols in the riddle.
If you spell out the "one" in the mana cost but leave the mana symbols in the cost as 'bb', spell out "minus one" and "seven" but don't include the slashes, there are 140 letters in the spoiled card. I'm going to assume that this is not an accident for now.
Engineered Plague is far too powerful of a hoser. Though not on the same level as Perish, Dread of Night, or Chill that had been printed a year prevously, it's still far above their current crop of hosers like Flashfreeze and Deathmark. Current hosers strive to be more efficient at dealing with certain strategies, not be a complete invalidation of them.
Bitterblossom should possibly have made Elves (the other black tribe in Lorwyn) instead of Faeries, but the real problem was they presumably compared it to Phyrexian Arena and decided that a 1/1 flyer was worse than a card and lowered the cost, conveniently ignoring the whole not having to pay mana thing. It would still be powerful at 1BB, just not as ludicrous as it is now.
Vivid Lands were a great idea, and might have made 5-color control viable without Reflecting Pool, but the real problem was not only the Pool but the filter lands of Shadowmoor block. The drawback to the latter was that you already needed to be able to prudcee one mana in either color to get anything but colorless out of them. Reflecting Pool's drawback is you need to be able to already produce the color you wanted to get out of it, quite similar really. Put them both into play and their drawbacks are negated in a round-about way. Combine that with their apparent ignoring Vivids' interactions and impact in comstructed, and you have issues.
[...] it tries to bring back the creature from the RFG zone and still see's it there, and brings it back.[...]
Despite the deplorable use of an apostrophe, this is main reason why it works.
The key is that it is still the Blink that is removing the creature from the game. Unearth attempts to change where it goes, but ends up not changing anything. Since the card is still in the RFG zone, it can find the card later to put it back.
If an effect replaces a zone change with RFG, that effect does not (in itself) remove the card from the game - the zone change is still "done" by whatever did it originally. This is why a rule was added (currently numbered 407.2b) to make Shared Fate (and others) work correctly - previously the cards removed "with" Shared Fate were really removed from the game by the rules of the draw step or whatever the card draw effect was, *not* with Shared Fate. Replacement effects by themselves can never cause zone changes events - they can only modify them.
The reason this is relevant is that even though Unearth is creating a replacement, it is still the Blink that is causing the zone trigger that removes the card from the game. As long as the card remains removed from the game (ie, isn't wished for), the delayed trigger of Blink will be able to find it because the card is exactly where its own ability put it.
That's more than probably needed to be said about that subject.
4B
3/2
Flying
B or 1B ?, sac a creature: regenerate
Not even close to trash in Limited. 3 power flyers 4C mana are never awful, and regenerating ones are insane. Yes, that regen cost might be somewhat prohibitive, but it's obviously made to be played in Jund and eat Goblins. The creature in Lorwyn block with Kinship and the same cost + P/T was good even if you only had Changelings to dome them; it doesn't seem better than this.
1B
1/1
When this comes into play give a creature -1/-1 until eot
Friend of Sparkmage Apprentice, especially for Mental Magic.
1R
1/1
Haste
Tap: give target creature with power 5 or more haste until eot.
Yes, the Hybrid guy is almost certainly better, but that guy couldn't give mono green fatties haste which is where the real power of this ability is. Ok, it's trash since it won't be nearly as useful as its previous incarnation.
I'm fairly sure Chain of Plasma + Swans works as well as people think, but there's some weird rules intricacies that I had to work through in order to confirm it for myself.
Swans will trigger during the resolution of Chain, and that trigger will go in a "waiting hut" until a player would receive priority. Before a player gets priority though, Chain copies itself, putting a new copy on the stack. Now, before the chain copy resolves, the Swans trigger finally gets its chance to go on the stack, and since its on top of the Chain copy, it will resolve before the copy. Thus you will get to draw before you are asked to discard again, allowing you to go through your entire deck and put most of it in your hand.
So far this set is so fat and bloaded for constructed. looks like its shaping up overall to have about 25 good cards in the set with a bunch of unplayable crap out side of limited.
How does this differ from every other set?
You pay a price in order to be more flexible in terms of what colored mana you need. If the cost isn't full of hybrid symbols, it probably means 1 generic mana more than you'd really be willing to pay in order to get an effect in a color you normally wouldn't.
Typical casual and limited filler. The burn spell looks to be very solid but not ridiculous; it has the ability to blow board positions wide open at a cost that will leave you slightly hindered in your ability to take advantage of it.
I find it odd that 2/b is only coming up with 1 hit, given that we have confirmed a card with 3 of those in the cost. That pretty much says it doesn't look at the mana cost, but I have to assume that it looks at the type line to get all those creature type hits. edit: never mind, 2/b 2/b 2/b is apparently one word in the orb!
And does it or does it not include flavor text? Perhaps people could try putting in some more esoteric words to see if they show up - although they might be *card titles*, which we're assuming are included as well.
Note that you can play the cards in the current block as they are without even thinking about shards, but when you do think about them it makes a whole lot more sense. The same has been true for quite some time.
Not all cards need to typify effects in all their colors in this block as long as R&D wants to push down the CMC by making it more colors. As long as the card typifies the shard, it can get that shard's mana cost without having a damn thing about that particular color in the card. Note that this costs the same (CMC-wise) as Flame Wave to do 4 damage where most scalable effects cost way more than non-scalable ones.
Also, Flame Wave is a fine cite because it's in 9th edition; while you could say "Psionic Blast also was in Time Spiral, reprints don't count" it's quite clear that the Timeshifted set is what doesn't count. The better argument is the above: when it comes to all-shard-colors gold cards, things can bleed.
edit: slowly crafting a post in a fast-moving thread often leaves one far behind....
As stated by the post just above yours, Akroma would have too much reminder text. Hell, Lord of the Pit probably would too. I'm assuming that there will continue to be reminder text for nearly every keyword in the core sets (please don't capitalize those words any more, they no longer used in the product's name) due to the reminder text on Silence.
Now, it could be that Silence is an outlier and there's reminder text on it because there's a likely interpretation that isn't correct. However, that reminder text does not appear in the current Oracle text for Orim's Chant, while the full reminder texts for Time Stop and Tarmogoyf are in theirs.
Grizzly Bears - Printed in Shards. Even though had a different creature type, it was irrelevant to the block. While they will print cards slightly better than this, this is about the standard for green these days. Wild Mongrel is way in the past; Nomadic Elf is a much better example of things that would obsolete the bears (even if it is *older*). However, it's not nearly as "fantasy" as Cylian Elf. If they're going to include animal-like creatures, I think they're going to be more magical in nature than plain bears.
Howling Mine - Includes a very strange "if it is untapped" clause that may cause some confusion that was only tacked on due to how it worked for a long time. And generally casual players do *not* have a sense of the card disadvantage it creates; I see no reason why it should continue to get reprinted. Additionally, the flavor seems really odd.
Goblin King - I'd say this is almost certainly gone. As mentioned, "lords" will now only affect creatures you control. We might see the Portal Goblin General instead, but not this.
The best ideas I've seen are the category of "CIPT unless X", where X is probably revealing a card in hand. The best thing about a drawback of revealing a spell is that it's easiest to avoid when you need it: when you have cards in your hand you can't cast yet, either because the game just started or you're short on a color. For that reason, it might be a bit too powerful to require only a reveal of one of the two colors - and perhaps a bit too weak to require a land reveal. The latter might teach people that holding back a land you don't actually need to play is a good decision, but the revealing of a spell might be a big enough drawback due to the information it generates.
I was also leaning towards Nimbus Maze, but there's problems of being not able to cast spells with two of the same mana; the drawback seems ok when the environment has very few cards that have that sort of cost, but that's just what happens in multi-color blocks. It won't happen in normal blocks, and the core set in particular should be full of such cards.
Also, is there 100% confirmation that these lands will be able to produce either color of mana on a player's first turn?
Original translation: Whenever a creature dealt damage by the equipped creature is put into a graveyard you can remove it from game
I'm not 100% on how the reference works, but if this is the actual wording the creature would still be in the graveyard when this ability triggers; the card in the graveyard is not the same as the creature in play. So just like SoK, the trigger would do nothing if the creature dies from the the damage. In the past cards changing zones became new objects with no memory of its previous existence so the trigger would probably be unable to find it unless it explictly said "that card" instead of "it".
A possible wording that would work would have it not be a trigger, but a replacement:
If a creature dealt damage by the equipped creature would be put into a graveyard you may remove that card from game instead.
This definitely works.
However, they may still want it to be a trigger so the card goes to the graveyard momentarily and I'm fairly sure changing "it" to "that card" would work. I'm too tired to look up other cards that might have similar wordings right now.
I really don't like fetchlands due to the excessive amount of shuffling they entail. Probably half of the time in Extended games on up through Vintage is taken up by shuffling from fetch lands and other tutors. Ok, I exaggerate a little - for Extended it's maybe only a third. I think the Basic Landcycling (BLC) cards are fine since they seem a bit underpowered for constructed and work great in Limited - very few cards that require a mana expenditure to fix your mana without accelerating you ever have been played in competitive formats. Compare that to Mind Stone, which has gotten a decent amount of play even though it doesn't fix mana because it's both acceleration and never a dead draw. BLCs are often very close to dead due to their lack of actual cycling - you get your choice of two possibly weak effects
Anyway, I'm leaning towards something along the lines of revealing a card - but there are certainly other options. They could go with the Ravnica lands and just remove the "pay 2 life to make this come into play untapped". Or print a cycle of Grove of the Burnwillows style lands, or Ravnica style lands in that vein (give an opponent 2 life to have it cip untapped). A cycle of Nimbus Mazes might be interesting too. I really hope they come up with something new and interesting - but I suppose that's what Future Sight was about: showing new and interesting ideas available to be fleshed out at a later point.
The spaces have absolutely nothing to do with anything. The board software automatically inserts spaces every 50(?) characters without a space automatically. This has been seen to be a problem with really long URLs in the past.
The snow mana symbols represent something very different from the other 5 since they occur with much less frequency. The easiest assumption is that they are breaks between words, but it almost certainly somethign else since there are some very long spaces between snow symbols and there are 38 snow symbols and I can't make the spoiled card come out with that many words.
It'll be interesting to see if its all that trivial given we have a good idea what it says.
edit:
Initial analysis:
There are 1260 = 9 * 140 symbols in the riddle.
If you spell out the "one" in the mana cost but leave the mana symbols in the cost as 'bb', spell out "minus one" and "seven" but don't include the slashes, there are 140 letters in the spoiled card. I'm going to assume that this is not an accident for now.
Bitterblossom should possibly have made Elves (the other black tribe in Lorwyn) instead of Faeries, but the real problem was they presumably compared it to Phyrexian Arena and decided that a 1/1 flyer was worse than a card and lowered the cost, conveniently ignoring the whole not having to pay mana thing. It would still be powerful at 1BB, just not as ludicrous as it is now.
Vivid Lands were a great idea, and might have made 5-color control viable without Reflecting Pool, but the real problem was not only the Pool but the filter lands of Shadowmoor block. The drawback to the latter was that you already needed to be able to prudcee one mana in either color to get anything but colorless out of them. Reflecting Pool's drawback is you need to be able to already produce the color you wanted to get out of it, quite similar really. Put them both into play and their drawbacks are negated in a round-about way. Combine that with their apparent ignoring Vivids' interactions and impact in comstructed, and you have issues.
Despite the deplorable use of an apostrophe, this is main reason why it works.
The key is that it is still the Blink that is removing the creature from the game. Unearth attempts to change where it goes, but ends up not changing anything. Since the card is still in the RFG zone, it can find the card later to put it back.
If an effect replaces a zone change with RFG, that effect does not (in itself) remove the card from the game - the zone change is still "done" by whatever did it originally. This is why a rule was added (currently numbered 407.2b) to make Shared Fate (and others) work correctly - previously the cards removed "with" Shared Fate were really removed from the game by the rules of the draw step or whatever the card draw effect was, *not* with Shared Fate. Replacement effects by themselves can never cause zone changes events - they can only modify them.
The reason this is relevant is that even though Unearth is creating a replacement, it is still the Blink that is causing the zone trigger that removes the card from the game. As long as the card remains removed from the game (ie, isn't wished for), the delayed trigger of Blink will be able to find it because the card is exactly where its own ability put it.
That's more than probably needed to be said about that subject.
3/2
Flying
B or 1B ?, sac a creature: regenerate
Not even close to trash in Limited. 3 power flyers 4C mana are never awful, and regenerating ones are insane. Yes, that regen cost might be somewhat prohibitive, but it's obviously made to be played in Jund and eat Goblins. The creature in Lorwyn block with Kinship and the same cost + P/T was good even if you only had Changelings to dome them; it doesn't seem better than this.
1B
1/1
When this comes into play give a creature -1/-1 until eot
Friend of Sparkmage Apprentice, especially for Mental Magic.
1R
1/1
Haste
Tap: give target creature with power 5 or more haste until eot.
Yes, the Hybrid guy is almost certainly better, but that guy couldn't give mono green fatties haste which is where the real power of this ability is. Ok, it's trash since it won't be nearly as useful as its previous incarnation.
http://www.wizards.com/sideboard/article.asp?x=PTTOK01%5C897fm1 for a player that took Azerbaijan's deck to a Pro Tour.
I'm fairly sure Chain of Plasma + Swans works as well as people think, but there's some weird rules intricacies that I had to work through in order to confirm it for myself.
Swans will trigger during the resolution of Chain, and that trigger will go in a "waiting hut" until a player would receive priority. Before a player gets priority though, Chain copies itself, putting a new copy on the stack. Now, before the chain copy resolves, the Swans trigger finally gets its chance to go on the stack, and since its on top of the Chain copy, it will resolve before the copy. Thus you will get to draw before you are asked to discard again, allowing you to go through your entire deck and put most of it in your hand.
How does this differ from every other set?
You pay a price in order to be more flexible in terms of what colored mana you need. If the cost isn't full of hybrid symbols, it probably means 1 generic mana more than you'd really be willing to pay in order to get an effect in a color you normally wouldn't.
Typical casual and limited filler. The burn spell looks to be very solid but not ridiculous; it has the ability to blow board positions wide open at a cost that will leave you slightly hindered in your ability to take advantage of it.
And does it or does it not include flavor text? Perhaps people could try putting in some more esoteric words to see if they show up - although they might be *card titles*, which we're assuming are included as well.