Quote from"Saproling" seems to be a generic term for small plant/fungus creatures rather than a specific species.
Indeed what a Saproling is varies from plane to plane - sometimes even within a plane; on Ravnica in the old days Saprolings differed from guild to guild; Selesnya Saprolings are small creatures consisting of vines wrapped around crystals (as can be seen in the artwork) - the vines are based on plants which is why the Selesnyan Saprolings use seeds and pollen; Golgari Saprolings with the guilds focus on lightless subterranean rotfarms are classical fungal beings; Simic Saprolings are open to interpretation, though they are cyan/green-blue globules and seem to consist entirely of their trademark Cytoplast.
Guildless Saprolings could follow either style guide or none at all.
Remember: A Saproling doesn't need to be fungal. If anything its root tells us more about the fact that it likes death and decay. It can be (and sometimes is) a plant and apparently sometimes part gem.
--
Now you don't only seem to have a problem with Saprolings being not depicted fungal enough, but with Saprolings depicted too much like a Fungus. For example the "earthstars" are not there for there own sake. Those are the Saprolings that Vitaspore Thallid tosses around. Look at the mechanic and art and tell me that "every now and then it throws a new creature onto the field" isn't what the Thallid mechanic is actually reads like.
You can see similar depictions of Saprolings on Thallid cards again and again e. g. a big "white" Thallid in front of a few smaller "green" Saprolings on Pallid Mycoderm; maybe now you also understand the boring palette of colors: When an artist gets told to paint a "green" Fungus it will end up being green more often than not.
I'm almost certain given the "you may" is correct, this won't have "This ability triggers only once per turn" but the variant phrasing for optional effects: "Do this only once each turn".
Yeah, but won't you have better things to do with you 6 points of evasive power?
It's really awkward how the Angels are just to small to saddle this individually, but also so big that you waste a lot of additional power if you use them.
I cannot believe how after day-log discussions about how players cannot comprehend nonflying Birds we get this art of a Unicorn with indicated cloud-wings and it doesn't gain flying when saddled. I have a feeling this art got commissioned before a mechanical change to the card.
To be fair: Even if they weren't blue, they'd still be Rogues so they can be outlaws. You'd need to accumulate new tokens regardless of the color choice. And given that, adding blue for Skaabs totally fits. I suspect it also signals that this might be a blue-black theme.
I'm always happy to see new iterations on tokens. Seeing blue Zombie tokens on Innistrad would be totally cool, too. I guess, you should be happy they only changed the color when they had to add a creature type anyway.
Most of the stuff we get to see is not native to the plane. That's the whole point. It's actually neat to see something that clearly comes from another plane rather than something that seems it might be native, because such a fish-out-of-water fits the concept of the plane better.
Maybe this is not a Simic mutant, but since you don't know what plane it is from, you don't really know whether it might not be something that makes even more sense than a Simic mutant.
I have many misgivings about how OTJ handles the way many planes are coming together, but I would say the idea that we could get previews to creatures/characters from upcoming planes is not one of them. I hope, we get to realize in the upcoming year some flash-forwards from OTJ.
There is no fair way to make commit a crime triggered abilities without an extra cost or per-turn-restriction except for a few effects that don't stack (animation, gaining redundant keyword abilities etc.)
You also in the past often would get "At the beginning of our end step, if you did the thing this turn, do another thing."-style triggered abilities. They already were restricted to once per turn, but you just straight up couldn't do some effects that don't matter at end of turn, or you'd get less useful timing (e. g. you couldn't get the counter on this one and attack the same turn with the counter already there).
Is that what you want? Remove the explicit "once per turn" restriction and replace it with an implicit "once per turn" restriction that also makes the card weaker? Or do you want to pay an additional mana for each counter? Why would you want a worse card? Because at the end of the day, they still do play design and you don't get the card that is exactly the same without the restriction.
I expect no one has a problem with Marchesa wanting her slice of the fortune, but she's both a monarch an has been shown to use a group of capable agents since before becoming a monarch. Given that, she ought to delegate.
I don't think, her being mentioned in the flavor text as the employer of another character filling this slot would be a problem and could still serve a purpose without ripping every single character from their home plane.
Should be "3 on turn 2"?
I doubt attaching an Equipment is the most powerful thing we could do with this.
It is. It's pretty similar to a new template for kicker I was pondering a few years ago.
The central conceit of spree seems that the spell is entirely modal i. e. it has no "unkicked" base effect. As such this could be considered closer to a fixed fuse, where the base mana cost allows for more nuanced cost. Fuse cards always had the issue that the cost for fusing was just too high to be really attractive. Here you have a portion you pay for each single mode that doesn't get doubled if you choose multiple modes and that will really make for some more attractive designs.
I also think the card is put well together. Top grades.
On the on hand: yes. On the other hand: Missed chance for it to be a Jhovall.
Still bad design since you get better signalling out of making multiple abilities out of it. OTOH you wouldn't have to, because here is an ability that is useful one way when attacking and useful a different way when blocking: "Deathtouch". I can conceive of it.
Note also that I also at the same time subtly point out that the ability in question doesn't make proper use of the colors' slices of the color pie.
That's bad design. If it gains deathtouch that's your incentive to not block. Then taking away the choice makes things less interesting. Also the colors would lend itself more towards deathtouch + Lure anyway.