(The first actual set made with draft in mind!*)

#1: So, they reprinted Disintegrate, made it better, put it next to multiple common burn spells, and put some solid midrange creatures with them for good measure. In a world where playing blue hurts. In fact there's so many insane common burn spells, there are uncommon and rare burn spells that are objectively worse! Amazing! But you wanna know what the best card in red is? The card that's super effective against itself, that's right it's Goblin Scouts. Shoutouts to Telim'Tor's Edict, or, "Hey you know what would be a really good rare? Exiling your own stuff. Hey, it's a slowtrip! That's powerful!" Stellar color to pair with black or green and those are also good colors so, yeah, red's the only color that matters.

#2: Wall of Roots. Wall of Roots, may just be the best wall ever printed. It's a wall dork that provides mana without tapping for a pittance of a drawback. They don't do that anymore and playing this set will show you why. Good selection of creatures at common in a set that favors stalling and, as usual, evasion and burn spells. This set has Worldly Tutor. As an uncommon. In limited tutors aren't particularly good, but outside of that, oh man, are they some of the best cards you can use, especially in commander. At uncommon we also have the incredibly funny Foratog, and the incredibly miserable to deal with Barbed Foliage. It's because if you have to attack through this with non-flyers they can then use Sandstorm to destroy every single flanker in this set. Every one. The green spells are, mediocre, except for like Armor of Thorns, and BEES: the spell. Their flyer haters would be alright if there wasn't one uncommon blue dragon that can invalidate all of them.

#3: Dark Ritual's back and we have a weaken aura in Enfeeblement. And because they're cooking they also brought back another good burn spell in Drain Life. Dark Banishing is also hard removal, for 3. We call that good removal nowadays. Fetid Horror is great at closing games, Shadow Guildmage is black Tim, (and Granger Guildmage similarly is green Tim.) Dirtwater Wraith is for hard countering your own color, and Wall of Corpses remains a high tier wall simply because it might as well be a 1/1 with deathtouch. They got some stinkers but it's still a solid choice, at common. Their uncommons and rares are pretty stinky overall. I hate Ravenous Vampire because it basically requires me to also have Goblin Scouts or something. We keep on having aristocracy with no way to generate a wide board. Ashen Powder, however, is a rare that can cause some real shenanigans since you can yeet their creature one turn, and then the other turn oh it's your friend now. I have been saying nothing at all about 98% of rares but this one will destroy people trying to play bombs if you're playing a proper black deck.

#4: There's potential in blue but they're the color that acts like phasing is a good thing. Jesus Christ it's not. I tried them on the first attempt and then slowly but surely realized how bad having a creature every other turn is. There's a blue/black enchantment that can nickle and dime your life to stop that from happening but it's uncommon. There's some good stuff that blue can have and, be just like white. There's actual OP stuff like Dream Cache being a strangely good draw spell, but they won't win games by themselves. The only blue common creature I liked is Dream Fighter, because it's another one of those creatures that can block just about anything. Anyway at uncommon there's Mystical Tutor, Tim threeee point oooh, Floodgate if you can give it flying, (not the hardest thing to do) and Cerulean Wyvern, for when it's time for green to stop having fun. (It's also just good.) Hey, outside of limited though, you can be a real jerk by playing Shimmer on their lands so they get them every other turn. Also want to waste time by putting an infinite amount of activated abilities on the stack? Mist Dragon has you covered. These aren't good cards. Actually blue has very few good cards, but they can support other colors.

#5: Which brings me to white. It's still bad. We have uuuuh Femeref Healer, Pacifism, (Its first showing! I love this bad card so much.) a bad wall, oh boy Ward of Lights actually being good since it's protection, flankers, a bad slowtrip aura, and 2/2 for 4s with a variety of keywords, mainly flying. (And for no reason there's an elephant with trample in white.) They've stopped putting 5 bad circles and now there's one circle that's any chosen color but then they stuck cumulative upkeep on it. (I had others point out to me though that we now have three different flavors of artifact hate cards instead. In a set that doesn't have a lot of relevant artifacts. You can figure out why I didn't notice this myself.) Still, this is the best white has ever been...and it's still bottom tier unplayable at common. Maybe you'll be lucky and you get Melesse Spirit, since all the spells are okay at best, but are mostly useless. Shoutouts to Sacred Mesa! It's an enchantment that makes pegasus tokens, as long as you have the mana for it! It sounds incredibly good, except it's actually a 5-drop instead of a 3-drop because you need to make at least 1 token per turn to keep it, and to actually generate tokens you need to make more than 1 per turn, so that's 5 to play and 4 per turn to get any real value out of it. It's still something that can finally get you a wide board and peasants for aristocracy but my read is that it's too slow and too mana-hungry to be good. You can get more value out of the stupid 6-cost legendaries from past sets that required an upkeep on top of the high cost.

Set Observations:

So we have bomb uncommons???? That are miserable to play against and it's all because they're all their particular flavor of color hate and they're all way too damn good. The overtuned color hatred is what really kills this set. I won some games because I had Reign of Chaoses and a Reign of Terror in the sideboard to hard counter colors. Goblin Scouts is also a hard counter to itself. I love color hate.

I have heard from sources that this is the first set that was created after limited formats started becoming a competitive thing. Therefore, an attempt was made to make this draftable. It is, not, draftable. It has a lot of the same issues Ice Age had, in that one or two colors are ridiculously good at common level and there's no real identities. A color in this age is less defined by the set's theming and interactions with other colors and more defined by just what handful of common cards are above the curve.

There's several cards that are either A: too good, or B: too broken. (literally) It's old Magic, most of the rares are unplayable sure I get that but hoo boy, can we not design out of what the colors at their best are. In this way, reprinting the good cards from core set is just further highlighting how the color identities are set in stone and while they can make some bad mechanic ideas, they can't escape the fundamentally flawed balance between all the colors. It's why white is still garbage.

Every color does have its familiar concepts even now, but I'm feeling their strengths haven't changed in the past 2 years. Blue is trying to be okay with having card draw ever since printing Ancestral Recall, black is still at its best when it refuses to go to the graveyard, red can't stop burning, and green continues to be the standard for good creatures and nothing else. I'm more explaining why this set also feels worse than Fourth Edition more than anything because we did, eventually, improve the color identities.

If anything I feel like a large chunk of a color's identity is just, what colors they hate, instead of anything unique to that color. I'm really starting to hate protection and landwalk is what I'm saying. Can you imagine playing a card game where if you so much as had the wrong hand in rock-paper-scissors you're just blown up? Crazy.

To be positive, I have found the enchantments that can be played as combat tricks interesting design. You can get more mileage out of them being auras but playing them as if they were combat tricks allows you to get more instant value, especially if you go up against decks that can punish aura usage, which turns out is a lot of them. They also don't feel expensive like the initial slowtrips were.

Flankers I'm mixed about because it took a minute for me to be able to correctly evaluate their impact. I also took a bit to notice that it's only relevant when flankers are attacking. It's not banding but it seems to cause more headaches than complexity, just like banding. However, because they're actually pretty strong in combat and can invalidate 1/1 chump blockers they're going to be a staple in this block, whether I'm okay with them or not.