Blue Library Manipulation

So the typical card draw/filtering for blue needs to deal with the fact that the blue-red and the blue-black identities are different. There needs to be consideration of both scrying for red and the possibilities of playing things from outside of your hand for black.

So let's start with this set's version of Telling Time:

Putting a card on the bottom of the library rewards the blue-red scry-to-the-bottom gameplay. Putting a card in the graveyard makes it accessible for possible recursion or playing out of the graveyard later, or even a reave kicker with a black or red card.

Here's the draw three sorcery:

I had an idea of having blue and black spells that have inherent bonuses if they're played from outside your hand. I don't want push into that too much because it's so very parasitic and not terribly compatible with reave in black. But I might have one or two cards. Scour for Answers does go great with the set's mandatory Weird Blue Enchantment:

I think this is okay as rare and not mythic. To explain what's gong on with the scry components: In a limited environment with less emphasis on sorceries and instants, players might be concerned about exiling a bunch of cards they can't play. The scry on ETB before the exile is intended to let the player improve their chances of getting playable cards. They can bottom lands or creatures. And then the activatable scry is simply to make sure it's never a "dead" enchantment if you don't get any castable cards or after the cards have been cast. And it also makes the card compatible with red-blue.

Drumbeat Enchantments 2.0

Now that I have the mechanics and color pair identities nailed down, I went back and looked at the drumbeat enchantment cycle to see if I wanted to keep it.

I think I do, rather than having a uncommon creature auras. So what I did is to create them so that they grant appropriate color-associated bonuses that aren't typical combat keywords. So they're not granting menace, or flying, or hexproof, or what have you. Those will come from typical auras and combat tricks. But with mutate in mind, I wanted to have thoughtful bonuses that rewarded strategy but didn't give the typical +X/+X bonuses.

So here's the new iteration of the cycle.

White probably has the most powerful of them (especially when combined with the U/W flyers archetype). But white doesn't have access to mutate on its own, so it makes sense.

I am still unsure as to whether these enchantments are too powerful with the flexibility or too weak with the mana requirements. It will have to be tested.

R/W Identity: Purge the Monsters!

The last of my color pairings here is probably intentionally going to have the smallest footprint in the set.

Red and white combined will be the best pairing for taking out the various corrupted, mutated, and overgrown beasts of Guthreham. That's not really much of an identity. It's what the two colors already do. 

I don't see this being a set where people would be drafting red and white. They just really don't have a lot of identity in common. But I did want to make sure they are at least playable together.

Here's a common red creature who will be helpful early on against mutating decks:

So this is going to be a little different from U/W's control of big beasts because it's based on aggression. U/W is much more defensive. R/W is going to destroy them all.

Here's a way for white to both control and be aggressive in its typical exile enchant effect:

So you remove an opponent's creature and potentially make one of yours a bigger beater. And there are red mutate creatures, so this could partner well with your own monsters if you want to be a big ol' hypocrite.

The signpost card is a sorcery, which is about as big a sign that you can get that this set is not trying to push you to play these two colors together. But it is a nice card:

So I've defined identities as best I can for each of the color pairings. I need to figure out what the artifact components look like and what I want to do with non-basic and dual lands. A set about an overgrowing plane begs for some land weirdness, but I'm really not sure of an approach yet.

B/W Identity: Survival at Any Cost

People who have been afflicted with the various plagues that have cropped up along with the overgrowing abundance of life get pushed out of The Arbor and other communities and end up in various small encampments. There's a long collection of them along what's now known as The Blightcoast. 

There people struggle to survive, and to deal with the horror of their own pending zombification when they do. It's a riff on the familiar zombie apocalypse trope, but in this case, the zombies aren't inherently predatory and they're not just randomly attacking and eating people. They don't need brains. They don't need anything, actually. They just shamble along in a brutal unlife. They respond to threats. So when the encampments get attacked by raiders or outsiders, zombies will actually help defend the humans.

The B/W identity is focused on using recursive creatures and token creatures as resources to help survive. The G/B vermin theme is about going wide in attacking with your tokens. B/W is about using tokens and recursion as tools to keep yourself alive.

Reave in black will play significant role. Here's what will likely be a staple common:

A simple zombie that would be too odd in any other set but makes sense here at common. Whenever you have a reave kicker show up on a card, you can target this zombie and he'll return to the battlefield instead of being exiled.

Here's an important uncommon build-around for this playstyle:

Note that you can get several zombies from this card. This is why I separated reave as a cost from the effect. At common, reave will cause a thing to happen once. At uncommon, a reave effect can iterate multiple times from a single trigger. At rare/mythic, a reave effect can be a recurring trigger.

Getting white involved is a little tricky. This all reads pretty black. In fact, I'm looking at this next card, and it feels black instead of white. I may need to tweak how it works:

I want white to represent some devoted healer types who were not willing to abandon people who have been touched by plagues. The way the sacrifice is triggered here feels black, not white I need to figure a white way to trigger a very limited recursion effect with Desperate Stitcher.

Here's a weird rare that I think works with this color combo:

I'm not really sure it's actually rare. Note that white will have access to fecund, so this actually also works as a bridge rare with other color combos that aren't focused on zombie tokens. There's a rules question here as to whether spells that create tokens directly, as with Disrupted Peace, count as being cast from your hand. Should it? Maybe the card should read "wasn't cast from your hand as a creature spell."

And the signpost uncommon:

Pretty straightforward.

Fecund 3.0

I wasn't really happy with the wordiness of Fecund 2.0, partly necessary to avoid immediate infinite combos. Also, I was kind of unhappy with the flavor of how the mechanic worked, which suggested a massive interspecies orgy going on. What I really wanted to do somehow is have a mechanic where an individual creature could create a token version of itself, but only once.

And then today, this lady was introduced from the upcoming core set:

So when she deals damage to something, she loses hexproof. And it's easy to remember if she's dealt damage or not. So it's a change while the card is in play that isn't signaled with counters or anything, but it is not likely to cause memory problems. So I was thinking of reversing that. What if a thing triggered only once when a creature did damage?

I made an additional hoop to trigger requiring it to damage an opponent. This keeps it a little bit more in check so that it can appear on common, and more importantly allows for fecund to remain on the token copy. The copy will need to do combat damage to another player, but if it does, again another copy.

There's the thing that because Palladia-Mors is an expensive mythic legend, you're only ever going to have one of her out. She's not going to cause memory issues for that reason. I'm not sure how difficult it will be to remember if a creature has dealt damage to an opponent or not yet if you have multiple fecund creatures out.

It's a way of capturing reproduction that has gatekeeping that keeps it being interactive with the opponent. The question will be how balanced it is, especially in a limited environment. And of course, this is only going to be able to be on small creatures. Well ... maybe one really crazy mythic. We'll see.

G/B Vermin Swarm

I thought about "batching" a bunch of small green and black creatures as "vermin" the way Dominaria has batched "historic" cards, but I don't think the set actually needs it. I'm creating many creatures that qualify as vermin, but not a lot of vermin "tribal" cards. Instead I'm caring about creature tokens, which will abound in both colors.

Ultimately I think I'm definitely cutting black out of fecund, so that mechanic will appear only in bant colors (G/U/W). Black has both mutate and reave. And it will be getting some zombie tokens, which will also be relevant for the B/W identity.

So some vermin relevant cards:

Reave isn't terribly compatible with the vermin concept because tokens aren't going to end up in the graveyard. But it is a way to get a second use of combat tricks, and not all the creatures are going to be tokens, obviously. There won't be many reave cards that this deck will want.

What fecund looks like in rare. I'm very curious to see how this plays out. Once the Warproot Ant Colony is on the battlefield, your natural inclination will to be target it with every subsequent creature with fecund that enters the battlefield. I'm not sure how dangerous this will end up being.

This is a bridge card that can also fit in B/W with zombie tokens, but obviously is also very powerful when comboed with green's fecund creatures.

And a new signpost for G/B. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep Vermin Frenzy as yet. I actually haven't decided on how many multicolor cards will be in the set beyond the signpost uncommons and the two planeswalkers.

So the play dynamic is to play vermin creatures. Use fecund to create additional vermin creature tokens. Swing in with your vermin creatures. When your non-token vermin creatures die, you make token snakes. When your tokens die, you drain your opponent.

G/W Managing the Mutations

Because green and white also have a starring planeswalker, it needs a solid identity. This is slightly awkward because white is the color without mutate and green is very pro-mutate.

They do also share fecund, but again, I want green-black to be token creature heavy, and Janell just doesn't fit that kind of mentality. She wants the growth, but she also wants control. So that hit me with the idea that G/W should be the color pairing where you can spend +1/+1 counters for various effects. So flavorwise, you're having your creatures grow, but keeping them under careful control and management. There will be no wild reveling like in red-green and no secret evolutions like in green-blue.

So the mandatory elf mana dork:

She's also obviously a bridge common for anything else you might want to splash, especially if you get a strong mutate creature in red or blue.

Definitely a different idea for a card. Obviously you don't want this unless you're going to commit yourself into creatures and spells that give counters. I'm still working on the white-red identity, but you probably don't want it in there or if you're invested in the white-blue flyers token creature deck.

This maybe looks a little underwhelming. I may jack up the power level depending on how frequently it triggers and the battle effects. White will have plenty of first strike, though, so there's potential combat trickery here.

Green non-mutate common that's compatible with this color combo:

The humans have hounds (in white). The elves have cougars (in green) outside the Arbor helping deal with large beasts. Even though it doesn't have mutate, there are ways to give it more counters. But in all likelihood it will die when you use its ability. That's the point.

Here's the Green-White signpost. I'm kind of ambivalent, so it may change:

Maybe I should have it destroy a tapped creature? Destroy a large creature? Maybe it should be only four mana.

And here's my latest iteration of Janell:

Her ultimate was once my legendary angel's ability, but I think I'm going to change her to perhaps go with a red-white identity I'm working on. Note that Janell's ultimate exiles both creatures and artifacts, but only the creatures come back. Yes, I'm aware that her ultimate doesn't pair well with her +1. But the whole growth reset button is definitely part of her intended identity.

Also a fun thing. You can use her +1 on opponents' creatures to make them bigger, and then use her -3 to exile them.