#1: Red keeps winning. Please ignore the last set. All of their commons are solid choices with things like Dwarven Berserker, Boiling Blood, Fire Whip, (Another way to be a Tim.) Fit of Rage, and Lava Storm among others. The only real stinker at common is Cinder Wall. (a 3/3 wall for 1 that blocks once. Wow.) This set focuses on giving them more combat tricks and exactly one way to burn the face, but considering the way these sets have unfolded, one extra punch to the face can potentially be all you need, and it doubles as a way to cook most flyers. Honestly why are they giving you more ways to burn face when I have already talked about how easy it is to burn face? There's some good noncommons as well like Roc Hatchling, Aether Flesh, Cone of Flame, and Lava Hounds if you can handle the hounds biting you first. Very strong selection of cards at all rarities. Like I said, red keeps winning.

#2: So white's still terrible right? ...No. Ahem. Empyrial Armor. Common aura that gives +1/+1 for each card in your hand. It costs 3. Play it on curve and it gives you like +5/+5. Don't play cards and that number just keeps going up. There isn't a lot of ways to just tell a 6/6 at minimum to go away. Sure you will get blown up by Undo and destroy effects but if they don't have hard removal or bounce they kinda just sit there and go, "Well, guess your white weenie kills me. Never thought I'd see the day." And that's just one card at common. They get more weenies that mess with combat, Kithkin Armor to walk around fatties, combat tricks to extra mess with combat, a giant siege crossbow for shooting people in combat, and only a couple real duds like Soul Shepherd. At uncommon they have a good amount of choices for low-to-mid creatures and Serra's Blessing to give your board vigilance, which I'm not too sure how effective it is. Usually with vigilance you want a board that would be happy to swing if it didn't have to worry about crackback. I don't know if you can do that in this set; that is, without just resorting to flyers or something already.

#3: Rogue Elephant. A 3/3 for a forest you have to then eat. I don't see this being a good idea in most scenarios but against limited decks that don't have an easy answer for a 3/3 I guess they just lose because they're eating like 3, 6, 9 damage right away. In smart human versus human Magic you would just save an Incinerate for this, but with having to draft out of 3 sets and the good burn spells being in exactly one of them you may just not have that happen. We also get our first cantrip creature! Which is a 2/2 bear for 4 so not stellar but hey, it's there. I think they ran out of green spells to make so they're all pretty bad or hard sells like Briar Shield. I guess if you missed your Armor of Thorns. Hey, you could luck out and get a bunch of Llanowar Sentinels? Barishi would be interesting in a different point in time where I'd have to care about things like mill and playing draw spells. This is a bizarrely mediocre color because they just thought about, "What if you could get value out of lands in your graveyard?!" and they forgot that this is a block with a miniscule amount of landhate. Even sac lands aren't a common sight. Llanowar Behemoth seems good at least. Problem here is that Green is already crazy good and their last set doesn't do a lot for them. Mwonvuli Ooze if you can get it and stick it though can be a fun time. (It reads like it's bad, but it's been errata'd to clarify it gets twice teh number of age counters on it in power and toughness. So it does get out of control pretty fast.) Tranquil Grove is also an extremely funny enchantment that will blow up every other enchantment at the repeated snap of the fingers, which since the best cards are still the auras/tricks from Mirage, that's quite the hard counter.

#4: So there's a lot of creatures in this set that can do an alternate effect if they swing and get through, in place of just dealing damage. Ophidian is such a creature that gives you the ability to draw a card, and since this is on a 1/3 for 3 it's not the hardest thing to get across the line with unblockable effects or flight auras, of which Weatherlight does give you such a thing at common level. Everything else is either, a worse version of a card that's already in this block, or useless regardless of what set or block it's in. Jesus blue, not even most of your spells are worth picking you up for. At least at uncommon you have Phantom Warrior, in case you want the unblockable baked right into the creature. Vodalian Illusionist who can finally, properly, weaponize phasing out because it's been garbage as just a drawback. And you get one more steal spell in the form of Abduction. This block really thought blue should have a bunch of steal spells...why did it have more than one? That's a good question! They're not the only one either. My point is this does not a draft pool make. Have fun drafting from this pack as blue! You have very little to work with.

#5: Black really leaned into a new mechanic introduced in this set: exiling cards from your graveyard to pay for costs. Black has a lot of those, and with things like a 4/4 for 2 that wants creatures in your yard exiled or a 3/1 for 3 that can regenerate by doing the same thing, it does sound pretty good. So what's the issue? There isn't an easy way to just dump cards into your graveyard. And it's such a niche application for not enough of a payoff that you would just be inflicting damage on yourself to be nothing more than viable. Sure there's Buried Alive but I said "eat cards in your yard for effects," not "get cards out of your yard". And that is most of black's cards in this set. So have you figured out yet why black is the worst color in this set? You can perhaps luck out with getting both Buried Alive and Strands of Night or some of the other uncommon or higher ways to get cards out of your yard, but this is an idea that doesn't actually translate to a gameplan. Yet. Shoutouts to the two rare black legendaries that would be pretty alright if they didn't have "Cumulative Upkeep--Pay 1 life" as a line on their cards.

Set Observations:

And this set keeps adding to the list of good red cards, continuing to make this a block where you draft red or you draft dead...or somethin'. We've seen plenty of good cards from other colors but jesus christ is red so loaded.

Is this really a block? Weatherlight introduces new mechanics and gimmicks that are completely alien to the block as a whole, and it's really making me think that all we're doing is just watering down what works. Visions was overtuned and this is undertuned relative to Mirage. I can't see the point of this sort of 3 set block as a result. Context: this is the first time I ever drafted a whole 3 set block.

I also am still suspicious of what they could've imagined a "limited-friendly set" was. Because I'm gonna be honest with you: there's no change between this and previous sets. It feels like it plays about the same. Maybe they are starting to pay attention at this point but it really doesn't look like they learned much of anything before putting these sets out.