Quite a bump over Sakura-Tribe Elder; which was already pretty darn good.

Ok, you can't use it for islands or swamps; but it's on ETB rather than sacrifice, and it's modular?

This is almost format definingly good.

good reasoning. making the easy fix here.

I would leave out the "almost" there, Vitenka.

Another suggestion though I don't know how much you're willing to change your keyword and how much that change is going to affect your set.

Anyway, how about changing Symbiosis so it is similar to Modular as on Arcbound Worker? This card would then enter with a growth counter and you could remove it (probably also pay ) to search out the land but then it couldn't pass on the counter of course. If you want the death trigger to get the counter onto another creature, you can't do the ramp.

Most obvious downside of that change would be that all cards with Synthesis would have to be re-evaluated because all Symbiosis cards would make them go live. Now that I'm writing it, you should probably change the name of one of those mechanics. Symbiosis/Synthesis seems like they would be way to easy to mix up.

not opposed to changing symbiosis, just need a good reason for it. right now i'm pretty happy with the split between creatures that ETB with counters and enablers like symbiosis & tithe. not sure if you omitted a sentence there, because i couldn't actually see a reason for changing the mechanic. i did see a reason against it though!

and yeah, certainly not opposed to new names! agreed that it's going to cause a lot of headaches, but i needed names for now and these fit the flavour well. hopefully i'll find a more unique replacement for one of them

Yeah I was a bit unclear there. The change to the mechanic would mainly allow for neat knot-turning for development. Right now you get effect + counter moving on death. With my change you could split that up if an effect would be too powerful otherwise so you have to choose betwen effect (obv with counter-removal as cost) OR counter moving on death.

Of course it would make a radically different mechanic that works in an entirely different designspace. This card just made me think "wow you could do so many things with counter-removal as a cost" basically.

Also, to clear that up, I startet writing the above comment before you made the "land goes to hand"-change, so I was still in the mode of coming up with a solution to the powerlevel and I thought you wanted the land to go to the battlefield immediately.

For the new mechanic names, I have to say I'm no native english speaker so I might not get the same interpretation of the name as you do, but I thought compound instead of synthesis sounded cool. It also has a more primal, natural (krosan) feeling to it while synthesis to me sounds rather artifical (simic-y or phyrexian).

you're right that it's a very different mechanic, but i can see the benefit. i guess it just depends on how clearly i want to highlight the split between enablers and users. it's also possible that it would make the mechanic too narrow? like, now every card that has symbiosis has to also have abilities and maybe having a few french vanillas sprinkled through the set makes it work better

i'll keep it in mind, might make a few example cards and see how i like them. we're still in the early stages here, new ideas are always good. thanks!

as far as hand vs battlefield goes, i kind of just wanted a small creature that helped your land base as well as enabled growth counters to some extent; a nudge is just as good as a shove for now. at some point i'll be altering these cards with an eye towards making some more pushed than others, but for now i'm trying to emulate WotC as best I can and try for a flat power level. well, as flat as i can make a power level having had no prior design experience.

you could be onto something with the name. i think in my head because i derived the mechanic name from photosynthesis i've assumed a naturalistic slant that the players can't see. compound kind of has a similar problem though, in that compound suggests chemistry which is also not really where we want to go with this.