Anydria is a set without blue cards. That's the main concept of the first set. My issue with designing it has been coming up with other compelling themes and mechanics to accompany the main theme.

Anydria is not entirely a desert world. In some places, it is green, lush, and fertile. The ongoing struggle of the first set is that of the inhabitants against the ever-growing deserts: basically, they're fighting not to become a desert plane.

Established Concepts: These are the mechanics and themes that I feel pretty confident about. Some of them haven't been well-executed yet.

• Desert Theme: There's a portion of cards that care about Deserts, and Desert is a prominent nonbasic land type. So far, there are two cycles of Deserts, at Common and Uncommon, and a single Rare Desert. I've considered making a cycle at Rare as well, but I worry that this will hide the fact that Anydria is only partially a desert.
• Enchantment Theme: White has an enchantment theme.
• "Blue Feel" Theme: If you look at the Skeleton for Set One, you'l note that some of the cards are noted as having a "Blue feel." This roughly corresponds to the number of blue cards that would be in the set. It means only that the card has a bit of a blue touch to it. The cards should still make perfect sense in the color in which they appear, but, in most cases, they should also make sense as a blue hybrid card.

Mechanics: The mechanics that currently appear in Anydria are as follows.

• Sift, a draw-fixing mechanic
• React, an ability word that shows effects that trigger when the creature becomes blocked
• Persist, a returning mechanic
• Prepare, which allows you to exile a card face-down for and cast it later for a reduced cost

Questions: If you'd like to help me with this set, consider the following issues I'm having:

1. Is React interesting? If you don't think so, do you have a better proposition?

2. Should each color have its own mechanic? Should I make "factions," as many popular Magic sets have, and have them each have their own faction?

3. White has an enchantment theme. I think the other colors should have themes as well. I'd love suggestions on what they should be.

4. This isn't actually a question. I need help filling in the commons in the Set One Skeleton. You can give me ideas Set One Submissions here, either in text format or by creating them in Cards With No Home and linking to them. I keep getting intimidated and losing focus, but I'd really like to finish the commons so I can playtest them and get a feel for the mechanics.

React is just "when this creature becomes blocked", right? That sounds fine. I wouldn't want a set to discourage blocking too much, but as long as it's possible it will need to happen sometimes.

I don't know that each colour needs its own mechanic or faction. It gets a bit predictable if every set has a set of factions, but I guess it's been a little while since we've had "the Order, the Cabal, the Horde" etc.. If you do want factions, you could mix things up a bit by grouping the four colours into pairs, something like Wr / Rb / Bg / Gw.

(I fixed your bullets for you :) )

I don't think I'm going to do factions, but I think I would like each color to have a subtheme of caring about something or other. The colors each have a bit more space than normal because blue is missing and I want to make sure I'm using that space for interesting things.
White cares about enchantments. Maybe Green will focus a bit on basic lands.

(Thanks for fixing my bullets. :) )