Magic Enemy George

This didn't take long. I was thinking, 'how do I make an Orchard that isn't just another land' and I settled on my traditional 'dunk on Heliod' card. The golden apples! You gotta wait for them to grow, then you reap the rewards!

So I went with the rule of three. Wait three turns, get three Food. But when I looked at it I thought that was a little weak, it needed a bit more ciderpunch. So you get the life right away! It's a divine harvest, after all!

0/8 seemed right for a 3 mana plant, you want to keep it around as long as you can, but still you might not want to risk losing it when it's on it's 2nd counter, and your opponent will know that!
No defender though... 😈 because i forgot

okay I've been forgetting to put posts up for each of these so there's just gonna be a ton of them quite quickly so there

anyway

I wanted to do something to represent 'Autumn is here' as a card. I did think about maybe doing something with a repeating suspend card, like Chronomantic Escape, but then I thought that would not really work with one of four seasons. Didn't feel right.
So, I went more direct. Goodbye forests, the leaves fall from the trees, and this affects everyone. I mean, it won't affect people with forests, and it won't do much unless you get tricky with it. I mean, who on earth remembers that playing a World Enchantment causes a prior World Enchantment to be sacrificed eh? Eh?? or just destroy it with any of the large number of green disenchant effects and enjoy your pile of extra green mana

Oh shit, Yavimaya's a card isn't it? HmmmmmMMMMMMMM.

and so this was born

It's Misspelled Plains! Formerly Mistveil Plains, which is a very different card and actually real, unlike this one which I made up.

So what would make a 'misspelled plains'? Misspelling Plains. So I did. But what would that do? Lose the ability to make White mana, 'cos what the heck is a Plians, that ain't in the comprehensive rules

So it makes colourless. Great, a land that just makes colourless, isn't basic, and does nothing else. Absolutely something anyone wants ever, said no-one. So how do I make it good? Took a bit of tinkering.

Originally, This just had 'taps for White or colourless' then I decided that didn't work with 'this isn't a Plains', so I scrapped that. Next, I added a way for it to tap for white, but you also had to mill a card. Then it became pay a life, 'cos mill a card would be too damn good in all those self-mill brews, especially since this doesn't have the white mana symbol anywhere on it.

I kept the pay life for white idea in a few forms for a while, until I realized what I was actually looking for was the idea of correcting a spelling mistake, by erasing it and trying again! So I took the 'spirit guide' exile from hand thing and mixed it with a fetchland effect (but only for Plains, and heck, even the pay 1 life thing I was mucking about with for ages matches with that!)

So here it is, a not-Plains that you can erase from your hand to get an actual Plains. But not necessarily basic... 😈

The prompt was Jund, so I made Jund. Literally.

The 'Soul of' cycle came to mind right away. A 6/6 for 6 with a keyword, a non-tapping activated ability, and the same ability again, usable from the graveyard but also exiling the card, and each part has to be thematic to the flavour and mechanical identity of the plane. But unlike with the existing cards, Jund isn't a plane, it's a fragment of a plane, so how would that work? Well, I didn't think about that right away, but the design did reflect that in the end.

So the first thing I did was look up all Jund-related cards just to remind myself what Jund as a place mechanically was about. And well, it's Devour. It's making loads of small stuff, then eating them for power. With that in mind, I decided the ability would have to make Saprolings (the token of choice in Jund apparently) and then as part of the same ability, make something with Devour. Not much tinkering with the devour creature, I ended up using the same token made by Dragon Broodmother. How many saprolings ended up being harder, until in my research I came across Spore Burst, which I riffed on here. So when you were just playing a Jund deck, you'd get 3 Saprolings at most, but in a full Alara 5-colour deck, you could get 5. Using a mechanic of a combined Alara to make the ability better? Yes please.

That's when it clicked about how I'd do the mechanics of a full Alara Shard 'Soul of 'cycle. Use domain on the abilities, but don't make them punishingly expensive to use for what you get if you're just using the three colours of the shard. Then finally, what the keyword ability should be popped up in my head. All 5 of the Souls would have Cascade, a keyword very specifically (in the Alara block, at least) representing a combining/combined Alara.

The art was an interesting hunt. I wanted something that felt like 'this is Jund'. So, what's in Jund? Plants. Dragons. Plant Dragon. Finding a suitable image that I could also track back to its artist took some time, but I eventually found one that looked like it grew right out of the plane and is gonna eat ya. Hurrah!

So that's 'Soul of Jund', and the ideas that I'd use if I decided to try completing the cycle. Which I might do, but it's not something I'm gonna do now.