wallisface That's a fair take. Pretty much on line with my thoughts on the higher rarity cards.

wallisface I think this can be resolved by looking at rarity. The most obvious examples I found were mostly common, with a couple of uncommon. At those rarities, there aren't that many different effects, and direct comparison is easy. Constructed formats tend to lean more on rares and unique uncommons, with a healthy splash of mythic rares. At these rarities, there's much more complexity, so it's harder to directly compare cards. In, for example, Modern Boros, is Seasoned Pyromancer a better card than Fable of the Mirror-Breaker  ^Flip? Is either one better than Affinity's Pinnacle Emissary? They have different effects and fill different roles. My position is that where cards can be differentiated solely by color weight, like in my examples above, the card with more color weight creates a bigger/better effect. Genuine question, are there any cards at higher rarities that are so directly comparable? Are the any examples of competitive-tier card comparisons where lower color weight produces a more desirable effect?

wallisface Skimming some current tier lists, it looks like pretty much every major tournament format has at least one monocolor deck in its top four. Vintage has mono- Initiative, Legacy has mono- Mystic Forge and mono- Prison, Pauper has mono- Burn and mono- Terror, Modern has mono-(ish) Eldrazi Tron, Pioneer has mono- Aggro and mono- Midrange, and Standard has mono- Aggro. So while it's not everyone, monocolored decks aren't exactly unpopular.

Mana Leak vs. Counterspell. Murder vs. Vanquish the Weak. Greenweaver Druid vs. Llanowar Tribe. There aren't a ton of cards that are directly comparable for color weight and effect, keeping rarity the same, but my general statement is that the more specific the mana cost is, the better the effect is. There's probably a handful of counterexamples, but I submit that not only should it be the case, it generally is the case.

The cards here default to the most recent print. On the deck editor page, towards the bottom, there's a drop down menu called Default Printings, with the options Newest, Oldest, Lowest Price, and Highest Price. If you want more control than that, then yeah, you'll need to use the set codes.

Undercity Glowshrooms

Creature - Fungus

Defender

Bioluminescence - Whenever this creature blocks, put a -1/-1 counter on each creature it's blocking.

0/4

Create a pile of rocks. It can be a cairn, an elemental creature, a burial mound, or anything else, but the art should show a pile of rocks.

FormOverFunction The rules for Pauper is that if it's ever been printed at common, and it's not on the ban list, you can use it, and the only way to stop you from using it is banning it.

For your suggestion, let's look at one of my personal favorite bits of jank support, Faithless Looting. All of its prints are common, with four exceptions. One of those is an online-only event reward, two of them are Strixhaven Mythical Archives, and the last one is Secret Lair. None of these use(d) the common rarity, so it's never been upgraded in rarity on power level alone, only as a promotional piece. So it wouldn't be illegal because it's too powerful, it would be illegal because it has a unique and recognizable effect.

Don't get me wrong, brewing with jank is great, and I think a true commons-only format would be interesting to try. But interesting and useful cards tend to get promotional prints outside of common, so the meta would be inherently unstable. I can imagine WotC hypothetically making a tongue-in-cheek Secret Lair with a bunch of Pauper key cards like Writhing Chrysalis, calling it Pauper Power or something and giving them all the gold stamp. Suddenly, a bunch of cards become illegal because of a promotional gag. (It actually took me several tries to find a Pauper meta card that didn't have a higher-than-common print somewhere. They do love their fancy alternates.)

If I throw this comment down the slippery slope into the pits of worst-case scenario, nobody's going to get excited about blocking a Zombie Goliath with a Fortified Rampart.

The hardest thing here would be keeping track of what's legal. Most common cards only have common prints. But taking this strictly, even the basic lands wouldn't be legal, thanks to promos, Secret Lairs, and other limited edition weirdness that have gold set symbols.

Close to optimized deck, same combo as the last one. Buried In Silver II

Also, do online-only sets count? In particular, Lotus Petal is the only uncommon print.

Bregtha's Studies

Enchantment

At the beginning of your upkeep, choose a loyalty ability of a planeswalker you control. Until end of turn, planeswalkers you control have that ability.

With Kasmina, Bregtha learned that all things are possible. With Nissa, they learned that all things are connected. By themself, they learned how to connect possibilities.

Create a personal item for Bregtha.

As long as we're doing characters who never saw the light of day, I had an idea for a dragonborn bard whose creative artistic medium was painting. The story I had for this guy was that he practiced "witch painting", which was the magic of painting something and making it real. Invented by gnomes, it was originally a carefully protected secret, and even now non-gnome practitioners are unusual. My character's style attracted the attention of a (full) dragon patron, who decided to basically kidnap and enslave him as a resident artist. So he's on the run, using his paintings to get by and make some money while trying not to attract too much notice and tip off the dragon patron where he is.

Pogona Kheryllon, Witch Painter

Legendary Creature - Dragon Bard

At the beginning of your first main phase, you may reveal a permanent card with mana value less than or equal to Pogona's power from your hand. Create a token copy of that permanent with a finality counter. If it's a creature, it gains haste until end of turn. Sacrifice it at end of turn.

2/3

As a side note, Pogona is part of the scientific name for bearded dragons. Such an original name, I know.

Anyway, if you have another D&D or other tabletop RPG character you want to show off, create that. Otherwise, wild.

Masral, Hypnotic Usurper

Legendary Creature - Human Noble Advisor

When Masral enters, create a 1/1 blue and red Bird creature token with flying and dethrone.

Whenever one or more Birds you control attack, defending player discards a card unless they pay .

At the beginning of your end step, if an opponent discarded three or more cards this turn, transform Masral.

1/2

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Masral, Cruel Sultan

( indicator)

Legendary Creature - Djinn Noble

Flying

Whenever a creature with flying you control attacks, it deals 1 damage to each creature defending player controls.

: Reveal the top five cards of your library. You may sacrifice a creature you control. If you do, put a creature card from among those cards onto the battlefield. Put all other cards revealed this way on the bottom of your library in a random order.

4/4

Create the flying carpet from Aladdin. It does have a personality, so it should be more than Flying Carpet or Al-abara's Carpet.

Interestingly, black shares recursion and death triggers with its enemy colors white and green. Add in some red for big bulky smashiness and you get cards like Rienne, Angel of Rebirth or Havi, the All-Father. Wayta, Trainer Prodigy can feed into some black-adjacent play styles, too.

The poster in question has made trollish comments before, and I wouldn't take them too seriously.

But to take it at face value, the most controversial/disliked cards like Acrobatic Cheerleader are more character tropes than characters, and broke the immersion of a lot of people. Probably some of the "modern electronics" angle will be toned down (which I find kind of odd, because as long as copper, magnets, and vinegar exist, people can make simple batteries without magic).

Balaam__ That's a good answer. Play what you have fun with!

The Familiars require colored mana to cast and reduce costs for two other different colors. The Medallions don't need any color.

If you have, for example, a mostly green deck with some black and blue, the black and blue Familiars aren't super useful, and the green familiar is a vanilla 3/1. Emerald Medallion can be cast off any two colors of mana and still be relevant.

The Medallions are just more flexible in what decks they can support, while the Familiars have a lot more hoops to get their full potential. In a color-balanced Grixis deck, Nightscape Familiar can be great. In a black-centric Grixis deck, it loses a lot of utility.

My point of view is that they're not really out of place. The usual comment that I agree with is that M:tG has mechsuits and lasers in some of its earliest sets, going from Arabian to African to Chinese themes around that. Frankenstein's Monster is a fully in-universe card. There's never really been a unifying theme, and it syncretizes everything easily.

If it's an issue of originality, I would say that the game has never been especially original with its story and settings--Mirrodin and Alara are some of the most unique locations, and pretty much everything else is an exploration of some genre or another. Original Innistrad has references to a ton of specific Gothic Horror stories.

I'm not trying to start an argument or anything, I just haven't really had this discussion before and I'm curious why people don't like UB.

Balaam__ Out of curiosity, would you consider a playset of a unique UB card in an otherwise M:tG-exclusive deck Fortnite-ification?

I don't really understand what that term means, and I've seen it get used a lot for UB. Something to do with mashing up different franchises. But if, for example, a minigame-themed deck used a couple copies of The Toymaker's Trap, and no other UB, alongside its Goblin Games and Liar's Pendulums, does that count?

Crow_Umbra I was imagining more like mascots, but now I'm thinking Saquon Barkley with haste and menace or something. And a way to get flying for the memes, of course.

I'm generally okay with Universes Beyond, as long as they don't cross over into the M:tG-verse (which they've said is not going to happen, so it's good). A lot of them I only know anything about because of UB. So I look for individual cards that help my decks, rather than looking at the IP.

Some UBs I'd like to see are Discworld, Soul Calibur (too close thematically to Street Fighter?), Redwall (didn't happen with Bloomburrow), and as an outside shot, a major American sports league, preferably MLB or NFL. That's more than one or two, sorry.