Set Design Pitch: Muraganda

HV: This set pitch is by Devin Green.  My comments are in blue.

Muraganda: Time of the Dinosaurs

This is a set I've been tinkering with for some time. It began as a top-down attempt to bring Dinosaurs into Magic, and to pull slightly away from the relentless fantasy of each and every world Magic visits. Naturally no world visited by a Planeswalker could (or should) be completely devoid of mana and magic, but the magic of each world works differently. Muraganda is teeming with naturalistic magic, the magic of survival and fitness and adaptation. And, of course, Dinosaurs.



Rampaging Therax 6G
Creature - Dinosaur
Provoke
7/3
The Taal have three words for predator. Vorak hunt. Nychus hunt the hunters. Therax hunt the world.    

Provoke is an interesting ability. It evokes the idea of hunting, plus it's only on 9 creatures so there's lots of room for new designs. Alongside fight it makes the game feel like a wild world full of dangerous predators. But you aren't playing a dinosaur, and I think the central mechanic should evoke the idea of fighting for territory and resources, for fitness.

Now that's a dinosaur!  I like Provoke for dinosaurs, and giving this only three toughness and costing it at 6G keeps it from being too oppressive.

Territory Taal 1G
Creature - Taal Scout
Natural Order - When a creature enters the battlefield under your control, if no creature has greater power, you may put a land card from your hand onto the battlefield tapped.
Maps never occurred to the Taal. If they couldn't remember the way, it must not be safe.
1/1

(The Taal are the stand-ins for humans in the set by-the-by, they exist in each color but they're primarily in White, Red and Green.)

Natural Order is the centerpiece of the set. It rewards playing creatures at its most basic level. It can result in some pretty kooky value plays. It can make advancing your board into a backbreaking finishing move. But it does all that with a sub-game, and sub-games are the best thing about magic.

Natural Order is very precisely worded to include your opponent, and allow you to play chains of same power guys. This is because the wording actually got more confusing without that (I did a poll and found that more than half the people I asked thought it would work this way even when worded "When a creature enters the battlefield under your control if it has the greatest power...", so I just made it clearly work that way). I also don't like the idea of having your opponent shut your engine down by keeping pace with your creatures. Stalemates are lame.

This is a bit of a "rich get richer" mechanic, but it has a built-in safety valve of sorts.  I also like that it very strongly encourages people to play big creatures.  Still, I'm a bit worried that it takes things out of the player's control.  It would take some playtesting to figure out the potential of this one.

The hardest part about designing has been Blue. Blue has some considerable amount of its slice in brainy, flashy magic, which has little place in this world. But blue is also the color of inexorable advancement, and in this more naturalistic world that means something pretty interesting. There have been creatures in the skies for a while on Muraganda, but blue gets the first Dinosaur that flies.

Archeopteryx 2U
Creature - Dinosaur Bird
Natural Order - When a creature enters the battlefield under your control, if no creature has greater power, target creature gains flying until end of turn.
3/1

This was the first card designed for the set. I think it does such a lovely job of evoking the evolution of flight. Whereas Territory Taal provides resources as creatures you control dominate more land with their thunderous footfalls, Archeopteryx offers your band of creatures a more adaptive advantage. It's a very mystical take on evolutionary theory. I like the notion that a Planeswalker can use their mana to combine the adaptations of their creatures with magical-artificial selection. This is what blue Natural Order will do the most. Red is more about aggression, so its natural order could panic, or shock your opponent. So on and so forth.

Does this really want to be 3/1?  It's somewhat anti-synergistic with itself because of its high power.  The flavor is also bizarre; why is it "target creature" and not just the Archaeopteryx itself?

To support the idea of a more naturalistic magic, the other set mechanic is Primordial, the Imperiosaur mechanic:

Molten Blast RR
Sorcery
(Spend only mana produced by basic lands to cast ~)
~ deals 4 damage to target creature or player.
When mountains burn, even Therax know to retreat.

To make cards like this dynamic without having them all have heavy color requirements, a selection high quality mana-artifacts or powerful non-basic lands could be put into the set. I originally borrowed the Common Manland cycle posted on Goblin Artisans by Jay, which was totally sweet. I never really design multicolored cards, but having some sweet multi-lands and making the set more gold is another option. I just don't want Primordial to be pure upside for limited, where basic mana is the norm.

Imperiosaur is a cute card, but I really don't think this kind of effect is worth keywording.  Even in a strongly gold set like Ravnica, most of your lands will be basic.  Also, why would you put high quality mana rocks and nonbasics in a set along with a keyword mechanic that discourages you from playing them?

Beastlands
Land
T: Add 1 mana of any color to your mana pool.
Natural Order - When a creature enters the battlefield under your control, if no creature has greater power, untap ~.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

What is going on here?  A land that taps for any color of mana with a massive upside?  I know we're designing and not developing, but this is just silly- you can play as many 1-drops as you want on the first turn, as long as you do it in ascending order of power.  Power level issues aside, this sort of acceleration is heavily encroaching green's slice of the color pie.

Black is another color that feels a bit restricted without access to flashy magic, but I think an emphasis on Black's Weakness tech gives it a nice place to live in a Power Matters set.

Shredding Swarm 3BB
Sorcery
Put two -1/-1 counters onto target creature. Put two 1/1 black Dinosaur creature tokens onto the battlefield.
The scavengers of Muraganda occasionally forget to eat only the dead.

Shredding Swarm does a lot of work, sometimes it's a removal spell, sometimes it helps you win the Natural Order fight, and it gives you a bit of a board presence. Removal will be touchy to design, since having lots of giant creatures makes it a necessity, but having those creatures easily removed undermines the central mechanic. I think the best solution is to have a solid array of value removal. I don't like locking us into a -1/-1 counter set just for one card, it seems like creatures getting bigger would be strong and flavorful here, but this is early design and I'm just kicking ideas around.

This is a fine portrayal of scavengers and a good interaction with Natural Order.  As you say, however, this may not want to be a -1/-1 counter set.

I'm hoping to create a Dinosaur set that isn't nearly as fast as Zendikar, which is obviously the set that this would be compared to most readily. That means no Plated Geopedes, but aggro is still a thing. I've been thinking about is a Red creature that forces looting, because that would be sweet, also players need to loot more.

Skullcracker Stonebrow 1RR
Creature - Taal Warrior
Haste
Whenever ~ attacks, discard a card. If you did, draw a card.
3/2

A fine design in a vacuum, but I don't see what it has to do with your theme.

If the set were to be made real, I'd like people to remember it as the set that brought the classic value plays of Magic past together with the aggressive, creature based world of Magic today. That might be an impossible dream, but it seems like something to shoot for. Plus, you know, DINOSAURS!

Summary

Hooray for dinosaurs!  Provoke is a solid choice for a dinosaur set.  I'm not yet convinced that Natural Order has found its ideal implementation.  The wording is slightly awkward, there are a lot of triggers to remember, and it seems swingy; the player who controls the biggest creature is usually already winning.  If there's a better implementation to be found, that would do a lot of work for this set.  There are also some color pie issues to be fleshed out, but overall I'd say this set is off to a strong start.