I couldn't get this guy out of my head, so one more card. Atticus is the reason why our group of intrepid expolorers were able to get off of Mirrodin in the first place. He's a mad genius of a Vedalken, who's unafraid of asking questions, then using whatever answer he deems appropriate. His initial field work into Moriok necromancy lost him a lot of friends in the Lumengrid, but Atticus never had much need for friends. Besides, he wasn't particularly interested in a future in necromancy... he just didn't know much about it and was expanding his knowledge base.

The Mirrans that are left on Glorica know that Atticus is dangerous. He goes too far with his experiments. But they probably wouldn't be able to operate without him, so they put up with him. They know that Atticus wants the same thing that they do, the continuation of the species. As long as the colony works to preserve Atticus and his research, Atticus will work to protect them. What the Mirrans don't know is that Atticus is working hard to clone the crew, and plans dispose of the original crew once his work is complete.

On the card: As I mentioned before, Atticus, like the rest of the Mirrans have a very splashable cost. Also, he's Legendary... obviously. But the idea in this set is that all the Mirrans are Legendary. There are so few Mirrans that made the jump, that I plan on making a card for each one of them and having them fill up the Rare and Uncommon slots (and maybe a common Legendary creature for someone's child, or for Beboop.) Also, most Mirrans shouldn't have access to Glorican mechanics, but Atticus is an early adopter, and a survivor. I find it funny that black is probably the most open-minded color. For such an 'evil' color, it has the occasional admirable trait.

Nice story. I love the idea of all of the Mirrans being legendary. Is this just one set, or might it be a block? If it is a block, you can't actually represent all of the Mirrans in the first set, because then there wouldn't be any left for the other sets.

This looks like block material to me. So much of the first set is bound to look like Weatherlight... the characters and the world is introduced, but the story isn't in full gear yet. I'm not sure where I want to take the story from here, but there's a lot of natural choices, so I'll let them come out naturally.

I know this isn't how counters normally work, but what about "~ ETB with a gem counter of each color on it."? If the counters are "gem counters" and their color is a characteristic like on cards, it could work. Or, you can simply decree that it will work in this set.

I've thought about this. Mostly, I didn't want butt heads early with people who would focus on the rules change more than the ability, and wanted to see if it would work this way before switching over to the... shall we call it the simpler version?

But, yeah, you can already see me breaking down in the occasional card like this one. "That shares a color with that counter" is not standard Magic parlance. Too many cards like this one, and I'm changing over.

It almost feels like you need a new item that is neither token nor counter.