The first option seems like it could be quite strong, especially at instant speed. What I'm feeling with this cycle is that trying to stick to the 3 aspect while keeping them instant and each costing 2 is making them all appear unbalanced, either overpowered or underpowered.

Balancing them out does appear to be an issue. This one was the most uncertain one to me. If anything, if we don't keep the cycle, maybe a few of the ideas on some of these could make for good regular uncommon cards.

Edit: I just scrapped the black one, and made the "three cards from top of library" thing an ETB effect for lands (), enchantments () and instants or sorceries (). Solar Flare, if we keep it, will have to be a standalone card.

Just a note on creature types, names, and flavour stuff: Most of what we decide is based on the art we can find for the card. Thats why at this point we've got loads of cards without creature types. We can pencil in stuff that we'd like to see but at the end of the day if we cant find art for a card then it cant have that creature type unfortunately.

It's a consideration, though with enough searching I think we should be able to find most types of things for creatures. For example, with this card, I could easily just type "D&D monk" into google images and come up with hundreds of images of fantasy monks. Art for something more abstract like an enchantment can get considerably harder. And finding images where you also can find the name of the artist from the source does narrow things as well.

Don't really like that cycle, giving all colours search cards on top of Cycling makes control colour combinations weaker on average. If you give every colour a way to increase card quality you take away the advantage Blue control players have over these colours.

About creature types: It's true that generic types are easier to find, however TRicher is right in saying that giving artless colours now race and classes is a bit too much right now. I also get the feeling that if too many cards have a certain type already that I need to design a card that fits the creature type too, and that's limiting designwise. That one article I can't find right now about the process of designing for RTR was interesting insofar as they really had no flavour on the cards except the abilities. It was added afterwards when everything was tested, and I think that's the best way to go.

To be clear, I haven't actually created a cycle. The blue one I said I'd probably scrap, as once edited it becomes Augur of Bolas and I agree that we don't want to reprint that here. Otherwise, there is no red or black one.

It's really just two cards - Emori Wanderer for lands and this one for enchantments. To me they jibe with those color's themes in this set, with the green one being a helper to Discovery players and a better alternative to Satyr Wayfinder (which is in competition with a card that actually is part of a cycle), and this one for the enchantment theme. So they're just a few cards similar to Augur of Bolas for different card types.

I could see this one being less important as the enchantment theme is minor, but I really don't think having another land acceleration card at uncommon like Emori Wanderer hurts. Also, I consider it to be an individual card idea that sums up what our earlier Explore/Discover mechanic was trying to do, which I think is nice to have around at least on one card. The only other card we have in green that directly filters for lands is Discover Territory, and that's a card that doesn't really get off the ground in practical usage until the mid-game.

Hmm, fair point too. We will see if these cards are too oppressive in later test anyway.