One thing that always stands out in my mind about this set is that damned additional blue uncommon. Ultimately, it’s a symbol of many infuriating things you’ll see in this set skeleton that, I would say, stems just as much from the wonky card counts for each rarity really. There are many sets with 60 rares, but to my knowledge this is the only one with 59, for instance.

3.1. Mythics

3.1.1. Dragon Spirits cycle

The big cycle of this set are five Dragon Spirits (no, not Spirit Dragons like in Tarkir). These are five big flying creatures with another keyword and two different modes for their death triggers. Over the original cycle, we get both one more keyword and one more death trigger choice. Another element to remind us of the current day is that the mana value and statlines can vary now, from as small as 4/4 to as large as 6/6. What’s interesting about each dragon?

• Blue: It’s really obsessed with the number 6, even though it has just ward 3. Admittedly, that might be expensive enough to basically be hexproof, as a value engine commander would find out.
• The life drain of the black one is now split into the two modes.
• The Naya trio is the typical “I wish I could combine these two modes together” mindset, which is to say one mode gets the cards and the other synergizes with it.

Flavor wise, we still have the name structure being <Name>, the <Adjective> Sky (last time it was Star). Adjective is the interesting part, the original cycle had two times of the day, two vertical status, and one blue one. Now we also have two times of the day, two continuous adjectives and one green one, admitting that it scales in the second mode.

3.1.2. Characters cast

This set has quite the large cast of planeswalkers, and a very blue one at that. Which definitely checks out with planeswalkers being as new of a thing as colored artifacts really.

• Tezzeret feels like an obvious pick with these science planes progressing the story arc, like you know, Mirrordin, Avishkar, Sothera, he’s all here.
• The Wanderer’s reveal here is baffling to say the least. Considering how little she get to planeswalk down the line. Ultimately, her card has proven to be the most practical of the bunch, with the flashing kill and all, sometimes you do wish you can just bolt her before she can activate.
• Kaito is a very whatever character, but I guess a Ninja complementing a Samurai makes sense. Putting him aside with Tezzeret and see them match up all three loyalty abilities, I wonder even more.
• And lastly, Tamiyo got compleated because no one would care if the Wanderer got that instead. Killing her however is still a really awful decision, considering what characters WotC kept nowadays. Showerthought: If you want this to be even more painful, make this plot point the second set instead of Crimson Vow, Jin-Gitaxias getting his waifu instead of Olivia doing the other way around.

The character list doesn’t end here either. As I’ve name dropped above, Jin-Gitaxias is here, allegedly to try on some fancy pants, but actually it’s to find the technology to keep planeswalkers’ spark while they’re compleated. Nashi is here because we did that much nonsense to Tamiyo, because you see Tamiyo adopt this rat and a fox and something.

And lastly, Kodama of the West Tree makes me realize how messy this cycle has always been. The original trio was respectively a French vanilla, a scalable French vanilla and a parasitic value engine, wow it took that long to find one. Then the East one came in CMR, so it has partner, and also it has a brutal value engine. And finally we get the West one to “finish the cycle” if your perspective is limited to the plus shape. This one is a lord plus a value engine and it kept the reach of the east one, albeit costing half and is half the size. If by the 5-drops’ logic, we should have a triple green one coming any time now.

3.1.3. Other things

The three Sagas are surely interesting choices. One references to one of the original Dragon Spirits yet the ability is not a death trigger, but one you can find on an Eldraine fox. One is a reference to a character you’ll be meeting soon that managed survived this giant time skip, and frankly it’s the one with the most normal artwork of all the Sagas. And lastly we get a 5 colors card to reference a C17 backup commander that was also 5 colors, it’s the second Dragon Spirit.

What else is here? Words and a lot of them. One is a Reconfigurer, we’ve already glossed over that. Another is a big damage spell that have basically generic convoke. I wonder how tolerable this card would be had it had the real convoke. And lastly, we get a really wordy enchantment in Orzhov, one that’s basically simply “swap something on board with something of the same type in the graveyard with a finality counter on it”, how complex could that be?

Something you definitely notice is that Red and White has one fewer mythic than the other monocoloreds, which I suspect is due to missing a (second, if you count the Dragon Spirits) character in Red’s case and something else in White’s case (how would blue fit in this logic, I wonder your take on this). And black is one Golgari short from having all four pairs, imagine how cool Tamiyo would look like in that color pair. This seems to be the theme with this set: breaking so much color balance.