Nice to see you, the trick of moving monocolored rares to mythic so that you can divide 5 colorless cards among these rarities. I guess, with set skeletons this rigid, you kinda become a necessary evil.

3.1. Mythics

3.1.1. Family leaders

It’s the top of the food chain of each family, rightfully deserving the legend crown. One is very elegant, one is alright, three are horrifically wordy.

• Obscura keeps things the simplest because their leader just needs to have the most novel form of their set mechanic. Instead of, I don’t know, connive once then have the rest of the text box be “whenever you discard something, nonsense happens”. Ultimately, I kinda struggle to see the color black in this card, not like the artwork has much of that color for anything outside of shadows.
• Riveteers’ leaders has a once per turn fling, and Magic wording makes sure that sounds the most roundabout way possible, especially with the middle of the text box needing to spell out the whole card name. And also three Treasure tokens on top of that, no scaling like the damage. So who am I to say this card could just be mono red?
• Maestros and Cabaretti both have their leaders using three abilities, representing three stages. Another case of Magic wording making things far more intimidating than they should have been, especially with how all three abilities start with the same phrases. Colors wise, chances are it sound clever to cut red from both of them. Actually the Naya one, each ability belongs to one of the pair so cut just one color does the trick.
• Lastly, Brokers’ leader has the most awkward text box of the bunch. After all, these Future Sight effects do need their two separate abilities. I do wonder however, do you really want to remove this leader’s shield counter over all the other counters lying around? Ultimately, if you squint your eyes to pretend this faction is just Simic, then their leader fits in too.

Was you expecting another mythic cycle to flesh these families out, like some big prowess the Tarkir clans would get? It would make sense considering the fact we have 20 mythics per set instead of just 15. It’s certainly odd that so much of this rarity is dedicated to monocolored, I guess the art deco theme is that important in the grand scheme of things compared to the last few faction sets.

3.1.2. Characters cast

These are mostly planeswalkers but all of them don’t just stick to this plane. Following NEO, obviously we can’t have any blue here.

In typical tricolor set sneaking color imbalance in, we get a Rakdos Ob Nixilis is just ripping off the ZNR Jace with the whole kicker doubling ordeal. I get the flavor of him using that second name in the story through, and it means this card can’t just have the tick up be a card draw. Hooray.

The two women plays it pretty straight. One is Vivien, who is here because surely this place has the most animals to tame. The other is Elspeth, who is this plane’s native planeswalker, hence why she dresses so fancy. How straight did they played? Well, both have the highest ability be upgrade a creature, the middle ability be selection draw, and the last ability be a single line of text that creates token, which highlight how awkward the planeswalker frame is, like the first two abilities all get horribly crammed up there for some reason. To dodge the stamp and the loyalty box?

Urabrask is here, the only one that isn’t a planeswalker, not broken and all. That surely explains why no one got compleat here just yet.

3.1.3. Other things

• First off, Meeting of the Five is a terrible Magic card. For 8 mana, you probably should wish for more than milling 10 cards and not even to play all of them, for free, with future mana, yes all of those are separate limitations. 10 mana doesn’t even feel well divided for three tricolored cards too, do I need to bring in the wonky hybrids in Alara Reborn to get more cards out of this.
• There’s an Equipment that makes planeswalkers work the way I would have logically imagined: creatures that tick up and down +1/+1 counters instead of this proprietary counter. Because that way, they can just be commanders.
• For the remaining monocolored cards, let’s make quick pairs of them: Colored artifacts in GW, Angels in WB, Brokers creatures in GW (overlapping!), looters (UB), magecrafting (UR). All that and the three red families’ watermarks are completely absent.

3.2. Rares

3.2.1. Multicolored