I would change the name of Enduring Authority to Enduring Repression, leaning into the -negative aspects of authority.

Blood Artist is already a key card in a lot of combo decks, and this adds free recursion, deathtouch, and +1/+2 for just one black mana. This is probably printable at rare/mythic rare, but a safer option would be to make it trigger on either your creatures dying or your opponents' creatures, not any creature.

Enduring Hostility also feels strong, but it's a little harder to gauge. Auras like Power of Fire and Lightning Prowess give the ability to one creature for 2-3 mana, and Lightning Volley gives the ability to all creature temporarily, but they're not exactly power cards. Maybe add an additional cost, like discarding or , or activate only during your turn?

Talrand, the Typhoon

Legendary Creature - Merfolk Wizard

Flying

Drake creatures you control have ", : This creature deals 1 damage to any target."

Whenever Talrand, the Typhoon deals damage to a player, create a 2/2 blue Drake creature token with flying.

2/2

"I rule the kingdoms of sea and sky, and I control the power between them. Dare I try for land?"

Create a pro wrestler.

Unless you specifically want mass trample, Slip Through Space might be better than Crash Through as a finisher--basically another Enter the Enigma. You're going to have a small number of high-power creatures, but I'd like to know whether one unblockable creature or several trample creatures are better in your meta.

Tezzeret the Seeker is another straight-to-play artifact tutor. Maybe switch it for Jace, Architect of Thought?

Bribery is a good card, but do you have any specific intent with it?

StarRushford I'm more than happy to check it out and give thoughts and suggestions, but with the disclaimer that I'm a very casual EDHer who would rather take an interesting and unique loss than an uneventful win.

Bookrook You can cut out some of the middle of that with Living Lands. Lands become Forests, Forests become creatures, swap and sac.

Wood Elemental and Sorrow's Path are on pretty much every list of "worst M:tG cards ever". Anything you do with them is going to be gimmicky and flex-y at best, and self-defeating at (the much more likely) worst.

Allure of the Unknown has a proud place in my Rakdos group hug deck.

Prophecy and Goblin Sappers are overcosted/underproductive and have better options. There's nothing really strictly better, but if you're paying to make a creature unblockable for a turn and then lose it, you had better be winning the game right there--do you want to sacrifice it for some reason? If so, is there a better sac outlet? The delayed draw is generally going to be the best part of Propechy. Sideboard if you're playing in a scry- or top-deck-tutor-heavy meta and want some style points.

Winter Sky is unreliable and doesn't offer enough to build around. 1 damage to everything is fine for , and cheap drawing is good, but the player symmetry and randomness reduce its utility.

Asmodeus the Archfiend and The Toymaker's Trap are more fun than powerful, but they're still solid. They can be good build-around support for casual decks. I would say these are the best options if you want to put your brewing hat on.

This doesn't mean that these cards can't or shouldn't be used--if they look fun to you, go for it! But it's going to be hard to optimize most of them because they have a lot of hoops to jump through or just don't do anything worth doing.

Knowledge Pool + High Noon/Rule of Law/something like that is a hard lock. Cast a spell, exile it, can't cast the replacement spell because you already cast your spell for the turn.

Or just put it in a chaos deck and make a big mess.

Companion really isn't working out for anything. Yorion, Sky Nomad and Lurrus of the Dream-Den welcome Jegantha, the Wellspring to the land of the Modern lost.

Reanimator's gotten a lot of new toys since Faithless Looting got banned, especially in MH2. I'd like to see it float back up the ranks a little bit. I suppose it would be too much for another Golgari Grave-Troll unban? That worked really well last time, right? I'm sure it'll be fine. What's the worst that could happen? There's a lot of options for graveyard hate right now, especially that Surgical Extraction, and Rest in Peace and Leyline of the Void can still be viable when they're needed. Graveyard-omancy is so hard right now...

I'm interested to see Psychic Frog survive. Not super surprised, but I had it at an outside chance of being banned. It's very color-restricted, but it's been a good engine for several decks. I feel like it's right at the top line for Modern utility.

Zarait, the Mountain Gale

Legendary Creature - Elder Sphinx Noble

Flying, vigilance

When Zarait, the Mountain Gale enters, create two 2/2 blue Djinn Monk creature tokens with flying.

Attacking creatures your opponents control get -2/-1.

5/5

I'm going to break (or at least change up) the Elder chain. Create a Pirate. Bonus points if it includes or .

I assume the timeline has to be pretty close to real time, but that comes with a lot of smaller assumptions. The planeswalkers do things and interact with each other in what looks like real time, and time seems to pass for them normally, although none of them really show signs of aging. And there's the assumption that time passes on each plane more or less as it does in reality, and it's not normal to age ten tim s faster or slower. So the time lapse between events is really up to interpretation, I'm just choosing to go with the easiest one.

I'm definitely waiting to see a crowd shot of the Amonkhet race course to see what it looks like.

TypicalTimmy I agree with your points about why the mummies should be considered survivors. My issue is that the story pretty much never mentions them except as servant background extras, and the cards don't help. Do they fight? (Maybe, Unconventional Tactics.) Do they just keep working? (Yes, Dutiful Servants and Disposal Mummy.) Do they have any autonomy? (I guess so, loosely hinted at Mummy Paramount and confirmed in Aetherdrift Guide.) What do they do during the Phyrexian Invasion? (No idea.) Do they have any consistent description at all? (Not really.)

So now, they pretty clearly count as survivors. Before the Aetherdrift Guide, there was no real indication they had any more "survivor-ness" than simple machines; they were just another type of mindless zombie. Also, there's absolutely no description of how many mummies were destroyed in either conflict. And that's one of the things that bothers me. The number of survivors, living and mummy, is exactly "enough to make the story happen."

plakjekaas I had thought about that a little bit, but I don't know what the reproductive rates and maturity ages of the equivalent animals are, or if that's a meaningful comparison. Let's dig into this line. There are explicitly no old people in Amonkhet at any point, so nobody dies of old age. And attrition is definitely a thing, especially pre-HoD. So birth rates are presumably high just to meet replacement rate, but time spent in late pregnancy is time spent not training. On the other hand, the city of Naktamun was probably pretty close to resource capacity, even assuming the mummies don't consume any resources, so the living population was close to, if not actually, being maxed out, and HoD would push the resource cap down by a lot. As with other planes, humans seem to be the majority. Khenra are almost always birthed as twins. Humans presumably are usually going to be single birth. So that's a lot of time the human women are going to be reducing their activity (no full-contact sparring in the third trimester), and it's probably similar with the other mammal-based people. Since nagas and aven are not the majority populace of the plane, they either also have 1-2 births at a time or an extremely high mortality rate. Would a minotaur or khenra born between the wars be mature enough to fight the Phyrexians, and would one born after the Phyrexian Invasion be mature enough to help prepare a racetrack? Even if a child has been learning how to fight since they could walk, the Phyrexians were ostensibly fanatical, merciless, versatile, and physically much stronger and tougher, more than a match for an army of six-year-old humans, jackals, and cattle. Or maybe the naga and aven population is currently exploding--high birthrate, rapid maturity, low mortality--and they're going to be the majority in the future, outpopulating the mammals.

Dragging this back out to obsess about it some more with the release of the Planeswalker's Guide to Aetherdrift, Part 2. The city is being rebuilt with outside help, and it seems like enough living people and mummies survived to facilitate that. That answers two of my questions, but I still have no idea what the population numbers are. Either the city of Naktamun was much bigger than I assumed, the death toll of two wars was much lower than I assumed, or both.

Point 1: What counts as a survivor? Are only living people counted as survivors, or are mummies included? Grisly Survivor, Resolute Survivors, and Survivors' Encampment don’t provide many useful hints. There’s also Disposal Mummy, Dutiful Servants, Mummy Paramount, and Unraveling Mummy as the Amonkheti mummies in the Hour of Devastation set. In the 2017 online stories, there’s almost no mention of the mummies once the Hour of Devastation starts, and they don’t show up in the card art unless they’re the focus, so the number of mummies after the Hours is a complete unknown.

As a side point, there’s no real indication that the mummies of Amonkhet are independent, or even sentient, before the Aetherdrift Guide. In fact, cards like Dutiful Servants carry the implication that they are very much not self-aware, but Unconventional Tactics make that more ambiguous. In the Aetherdrift Guide, though, they suddenly demand independence and partnership, and have opinions and desires. This is the sort of detail I would have loved to see in the Amonkhet stories (and I was reading them as they came out). Even just a couple of paragraphs from a mummy’s point of view would flesh out the world that much more.

The March of the Machine story doesn’t offer anything else. The Amonkhet cards in March of the Machine are Blossoming Sands, Djeru and Hazoret, Injector Crocodile, Invasion of Amonkhet  ^Flip, Khenra Spellspear  ^Flip, Ruins Recluse, Sandstalker Moloch, Swamp, and Unseal the Necropolis, none of which offer too much insight.

So the number of mummies helping clear rubble and replant farms and construct a racetrack is a giant question mark. They’re simply there when they need to be and not there when they don’t. Do they count as survivors? I honestly have no idea, and that bugs me.

Point 2: How many survivors are there? The current population of Amonkhet is apparently enough to have "crowds lining the route and packing the grandstands", which to me suggests more than a few hundred, or even a few thousand. I would take this as at least tens of thousands, if not over a hundred thousand, going off typical capacities for major motor sports stadiums. This probably includes mummies as well as living people, but the total is still several orders of magnitude larger than what I would have expected.

Incidentally, I would expect the mummies—who explicitly failed the trials, usually with a major injury—to be the first ones to die. I don’t pretend to know much about invading, but cutting off supply lines seems to be pretty popular, and neither Nicol Bolas or Elesh Norn seem to have thought of that. Nicol Bolas even made sure that the people of Naktamun were entirely reliant on mummy labor, and he doesn't take advantage of that. So much for masterminds and tactical geniuses... Mummies are explicitly said to massively outnumber the living in the Aetherdrift Guide, so either Amonkhet was like 75% mummy for the Hour of Reckoning (not especially borne out by the story or cards), or they had a very low casualty rate across two invasions.

The Aetherdrift Guide includes the sentences "The Phyrexian invasion saw the deaths of tens of thousands of Amonkheti. Newly risen under the Walking Curse, these fresh undead were not eager to submit to the old order of servile mummification." I'm getting two inferences from this. First, the Phyrexians did not process, convert, or utilize tens of thousands of dead Amonkheti for whatever reason--were they immediately coated in lazotep as soon as they died?. Second, the living population of Naktamun after Hour of Devastation was at least in the tens of thousands.

So after the Accounting of Hours, there were enough living people for tens of thousands to die against Phyrexia. After Phyrexia, there were still enough survivors (probably including both living people and mummies) to form crowds of significant size to watch the Aetherdrift rally. So we’re blowing way past the 30,000 population of ancient Memphis, the most populated city in the world at its height and a major inspriastion for Naktamun. I’m not going to fault a city in a fantasy story being unrealistically big, but I would like to at least have an idea on how unrealistically big it is, besides just “big enough to support the story”.

Time to start headcanoning some numbers.

Starting with what I would consider at the upper edge of realistic, put the living and mummy population of Naktamun at 30,000 each, for a total of 60,000. Let's then assume a devastating, plane-threatening 80% mortality rate for each group, each conflict. After the Accounting of Hours, there would be 6,000 living and 6,000 mummies for a total population of 12,000. After the Phyrexian Invasion, there would be 1,200 living people and 1,200 mummies, for a total of 2,400. That could probably serve as a base to rebuild from, but it doesn't capture grandstands full of cheering crowds or Phyrexians killing tens of thousands of people.

Try some different numbers. Now, the initial total population of Naktamun is 3,000,000. Of that, let's say 2,000,000 were mummy servants and 1,000,000 were living soldiers in constant training. (This is still very high, given the apparent technology and appearance of the city.) Let's further say that there was a 50% casualty rate among the living and 25% casualty rate among the mummies for each major conflict. After the Accounting of Hours, there would be 1,500,000 mummies and 500,000 living. After the Phyrexian Invasion, there would be 1,125,000 mummies and 250,000 living. That feels too high for a city struggling to keep itself alive.

Tweaking numbers until I'm happy. 400,000 mummies; 150,000 living; 550,000 total. 60% casualty rate for both groups, each conflict. After HoD, there would be 160,000 mummies and 60,000 living survivors. After Phyrexia, there would be 64,000 mummies and 24,000 living survivors. That feels pretty okay to me. Mummies outnumber the living by about a 3:1 ratio, the Phyrexians could have killed tens of thousands of people, and there's still enough for crowds to fill grandstands and line racetracks, assuming it's mostly mummies.

On other notes from the previous discussion, there’s still no real word on where Crested Sunmare came from, which is interesting, and the “Death Race” set does go through Amonkhet.

Right now, the Elder list is Demon, Dragon, Giant, Dinosaur, and Fungus. (Not counting Dog because the Dog isn't the Elder.)

Avatar of the Past

Legendary Creature - Elder Avatar

At the beginning of your first main phase, return target card from a graveyard to its owner's hand.

At the beginning of your end step, if you have exactly seven cards in hand and your life total is equal to your starting life total, Avatar of the Past gains hexproof and indestructible until your next turn.

6/8

What has happened once must happen again. Such is the unending cycle.

Same challenge.

DemonDragonJ It would be a good way to take advantage of a quirk in the rules, but when it's functionally equivalent to a Black Lotus, that's just too much power even when it costs a land drop for the turn. Smaller effects might have gotten away with it better, but Lotus Vale is not the card to do it with.

Balisian Flaregrass

Creature - Plant

Mutate

Whenever this creature mutates, it deals 2 damage to up to one target creature.

If a creature dealt damage by Frostwielder this turn would die, instead exile it and create a 0/1 green Plant creature token.

2/2

This is a mutate creature who makes more creatures to mutate and put counters onto. (I hope the mana costs are appropriate...)

I'm going to break the Majovin streak. Create a Hydra.

Holchos, Titan of Memory's

Legendary Creature - Elder Giant

When Holchos enters, sacrifice it unless it escaped.

Whenever Holchos enters or attacks, return up to one target nonland permanent to its owner's hand and up to one target creature card from your graveyard to your hand.

Escape—, Exile five other cards from your graveyard. (You may cast this card from your graveyard for its escape cost.)

6/6

I tried to work a "three" theme in there with mana values, but it got too wordy and complicated.

I'm not going to push for a full cycle, but let's get one more of these. , , and are available.

Wow. I'm gone for two days and this gets into the deep deep stuff. I don't know if I should be proud or worried that I found this kind of glitch. Would anyone be willing to pass this directly on to the rules manager, I believe that's Jess Dunks at this point?