The self-animation effect is fun. But what I'm most interested in here is the mana ability. It's a fascinating take on "slightly-worse-than-a-Plains", specifically because you managed to make it not ETBT or change life totals. "Filter-to-colourless" is an ability I've only seen before on Apprentice Wizard, but it very much makes sense here.

It definitely is somewhat worse than a Plains, but not very much. I think this cycle of lands are fine because the self-animation is quite difficult to achieve, but the mana drawback might not be enough for many other cycles of nonbasics.

Nonetheless, excellent idea, and I may borrow it at some point :)

I really like this version of 'filter to colorless' as you put it, and hope Wizards figures it out someday. I especially like the fact that too many of these in your deck give people a desire to play spells that cost as opposed to , which, most of the time, is irrelevant. I had a cycle of these in Uncommon in my Core Set as well, and they all had minor, no mana activated secondary abilities. For example, the white one had : Return target creature you control to its owner's hand. Use this ability only when you could play a sorcery.