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.
EDIT: The big wording news is a not unexpected change: "enters the battlefield" gets shortened to "enters". I wonder whether the same applies to "leaves the battlefield".
That wasn't a problem inherent to energy, but the individual card designs (or the cumulative weight of multiple pushed ones). For Standard there is no harm that comes from a return of the mechanic on some toned-down cards. It's just a matter of the circumstances under which we see Kaladesh again.
That's basically what I assumed until a Wizards employee outright said he's dead. Unfortunately I didn't bother keeping the source. Might have been a miscommunication either internally (not everyone will be kept updated on story plans) or by the employee at the time, but it wasn't a phrasing of the "looks like he's dead" kind.
As a "never found the body" situation the scene is far less awful, but as a final send-off it was severely lacking since Tibalt didn't even got to be a particular prominent Phyrexian 'walker throughout the rest of the final.
If he shows up here that will resolve one of the twenty things wrong with the MOM story.
?
I suppose Gonti heading a Commander deck makes it less likely they are a face card of the main set, otherwise I'd be counting out Tibalt by now.
It looks like the set has promising things going on, though the appearance of so many cross-plane characters so early into the omenpath story leaves me wary. Blurring the lines too much is a real risk.
Based on the hands or is there other evidence I'm missing? I don't know enough to say that's Tibalt. His "death scene" was really disappointing and quick in a story full of disappointing and rushed story resolution by death. In consequence I really hope, you are correct. He's definitely a character I had penciled in for a prospective "villains" set, too.
I don't know what you mean by "going all in" on this. This is not Drake Haven or Roost of Drakes which are pay-offs for playing cycling or kicker respectively - inherently linear. There is no prerequisite quality to any the cards in your deck to make this work. It's effectively an evasive creature that's resilient against removal in multiple ways. The fact that it can also just create a 2/2 for five mana on top of being a pre-transformed Uninvited Geist is just a bonus.
It's a rare, so it's not going to be a determining factor in how good blue is in Limited, but if you are drafting blue, you are going to be very happy to take this.
It doesn't really rely on top-decking if you get a 3/2 with ward that's unblockable for 3 mana no matter what. It can become even better with top-decking.
I'm going to disagree here, too, because this seems shortsighted both in terms of mana and card investment.
On the card advantage side you playing Murder to remove the cloaked cards means you are down a card, but the card they played from hand is still on the battlefield and can generate more card advantage by bouncing and re-playing it. If you both are in top-deck mode and your opponent is spending their mana re-casting this and you draw a perfect string of 1-for-1 removal like Murder, your opponent fills up their hand tun after turn, which doesn't seem like "burning a card".
On the mana side, you seem to put a lot of stake on the fact that bouncing and re-casting the card costs five mana... but that's exactly what you pay for Murder against a creature with ward . Once again, if both players are developed equally and you tap out for Murder, they can tap out and get a new 3/2 unblockable and are, as mentioned above, up a card.
The value goes way up with a good setup, but even if you couldn't turn cloaked cards face-up this would already be a card I'd be happy is rare, because it can take over games.
Don't worry! If you put face-down fatty on the field with it, it still can help you get through with your fatties.
I mean, using your graveyard rather than your hand as a source makes it basically +1 card advantage relative to the other spell, so only more in the mana cost still makes it an overall discount.
The text box isn't even any smaller, they just make some other parts transparent. They really should keep reminder text more often.
If it is "Create a token that's a copy of target nonland permanent and each other nonland permanent that shares a color with it.", would that be a problem? Radiance sucks as a named mechanic because most effects with it can backfire and you want to use named mechanics multiple times, so the first time around they couldn't avoid doing those bad effects. But it's entirely possible to make a single good card design with that mechanic, which is why Modern Horizons and other sets that allow single cameo appearances (which are now all sets) can make good use of one-ofs.
You control even a single non-Plant token and you already are getting Divination plus a small token, which is entirely fine card draw. Playing this after A Killer Among Us, Bestial Menace or Trostani's Summoner (+1 flavor point) is icing, but green alone creates seven differently named non-Plant tokens in this set.
Clue tokens are so easy in this set (and Clues/Treasures/Maps/Food/Blood in general, the latter often cost at less than a mana) that removing the restriction to creatures would bump the required cost quite a bit; I think, that version would be prohibitively cost.
Yeah. I recall Body Double being not something blue should have. When did that change?
The "this turn" restriction feels insufficient.