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.
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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.
You know? Someone suggested, we would get morph for and comparing the two adding ward seems... inelegant, but I'm coming around to it quickly. At first it seems natural to have a vanilla form for the face-down creature, but then you realize one of the issues with morph is that removal that takes care of two-toughness creatures just becomes much more premium in the whole format, and built-in ward helps to mitigate that nicely. It also incidentally makes perfect sense with the flavor since camouflage often means shroud/hexproof/ward anyway.
EDIT: Who gave vigilance to red? I didn't expect to see any more of that after Tahngarth, Talruum Hero and yet... first Experimental Synthesizer, now Dog Walker.
I still think, that (B/G)(R/G)G(G/W)(G/U)-style seems most likely, closely followed by (2/W)(2/U)B(2/R)(2/G) and "we have a new type of hybrid mana symbol".
I personally hope for a more hard-boiled gumshoe Homunculus in a trenchcoat and fedora. Same typeline. I soured on the magnifying glass in front of face look when The Thirteenth Doctor illustration used Black Hole Sun eyes.
On another note, there is so many reasons this set should have surveil over scry.
(W/U)(U/B)(B/R)(R/G) seems right, but also has black more than green or white, so why not just add the two missing (R/W)(G/U) rather than UR?
I could see for Niv-Mizzet, but that would be only three hybrid symbols, so I somewhat wonder whether it is Niv-Mizzet at all. It seems far more fitting for four hybrid mana symbols to have a concept with one common color e. g. (G/U)(W/U)(U/B)(U/R).
That does not seem fair. With the amount of sets spoiled all the time can you really blame a person reacting to/evaluating the cards in the order they are revealed over the the order they will eventually become available?
and it allows them to partner with any Contraption.Many heroes have a significantly different alter ego, which could call for a DFC.
Whenever a character gets enough focus to have a chance to become recognizable there are complaints from the MtG community. It's not wrong. The planes, the multiverse are the real main character (at least nowadays), and that just might be best for MtG itself.
On the other hand not every UB product focuses on one main character. WH40K showed how "factions" can be imported into another game, so if another IP was interested, why not? There has been at least one non-MtG Jace card, too.
They also have successfully transported settings to D&D, so there is a working concept to bring an IP with a "world building"-focused identity to another.
I personally care about MtG the game system, so I cannot really say I see it as "unfortunate" if MtG crosses over only one way, but I'm also quiet certain that MtG could have some guest spots if they really cared about that.
Tarmogoyf clearly was made after they already designed tribal - after all it replaced Garruk when they didn't manage to finish planeswalkers in time for FUT - which also means Tarmogoyf also would have been made if tribal never existed, because the key element of its "futureshift" design (foreshadowing a card type) only required one new card type in the reminder text, and planeswalker would fill that role.
I wish, they'd update the world rule in a way analogous to the legendary rule. If it's good design for one, then it's good design for the other.
As mentioned above even Rakshasa is not yet handled consistently due to D&D flipping Demons and Devils. If the stated assumed reason is the whole story... but how will we know?
I think, it's meant to be a representation of yanking an object towards yourself with a whip.
According to this video both affinity and flashback are deciduous as of Phyrexia: All Will Be One. But it's also obvious that R&D lingo is not as well-defined once you consider more than one source.
MaRo also used to call flashback deciduous in that context (I would dig up a quote, but tumblr's search function has been broken for me for a while now), but it might be he has reconsidered and considers it to be a "cameo" mechanic - like battle cry in LCI.
I wouldn't be surprised if flashback is just both: deciduous and a "cameo" level mechanic. In fact, I am not certain one isn't a superset of the other. There are only one or two deciduous mechanics that I wouldn't feel entirely unimpressed seeing a single card of in a set.
Strike the "incredibly rich" and I can see that being relatable to a lot of damaged personalities. And since we like our fiction to be aspirational as well as relatable that totally makes sense: The inherent contradiction that the character might be born rich rather than having pulled themselves up by their bootstraps is something people already overlook in many real-life examples of aspirational stories as well.
Making a bit fun of the fact that a MtG pterodon is quite a different thing from a real-world pterodon. Just to show that it's entirely okay to think about these things by their entirely own in-universe logic, too, in case I missed an actual real-life pterosaur species called aerosaurs. At least Wizards makes an effort to keep things fantasy.