MTGPauper

Bog Witch works incredibly well with Madness cards, allowing to both discard the card and use the mana to pay for the madness cost.

Bog Witch’s activated ability is a mana ability, which means it doesn’t use the stack and resolves immediately when legally activated. 

Here’s how using Bog Witch to cast Voldaren Pariah for its madness cost would work:

Pay B, tap Bog Witch, and discard Voldaren Pariah to activate Bog Witch’s mana ability.

Voldaren Pariah is discarded into exile and its madness ability triggers. 

Bog Witch’s ability resolves immediately and you get BBB. 

Voldaren Pariah’s madness ability goes on the stack.

When Voldaren Pariah’s madness abilty resolves, pay the BBB from Bog Witch to cast Voldaren Pariah for its madness cost.

Voldaren Pariah resolves and enters the battlefield.

Bonecrusher Giant ?

Here’s some brainstorming for what to depict, possibilities for cards and ideas for each color. I’m missing a lot here, so feel free to add your own ideas! This also doesn’t take into account multicolor cards; think about how you can combine them.

White is the color most commonly associated with peace, mechanically represented with damage prevention and lifegain. What else can white do? What are the knights doing in times of peace? What are they building? Think about passive moments that show what white does when not faced with a foe, that is neither proactive nor reactive. White cards in this contest should represent isolated events and tales. What story is it telling?

Blue is the color of meditation and self-reflection. Blue likes to play with itself. Cards that draw and discard and sort and scry are the kinds that will see the most play here. So what story does it tell? Why is blue seeking improvement in these times? For what are they studying? The nature of blue’s isolation makes the aspects of peace come out easier than other colors.

Black is the color of self-improvement at a cost, which makes for an interesting story development. Think about what a black character like Liliana would do during peacetime, such as on Kaladesh or the beginning of Amonkhet story. There can be costs, but costs that come from its own origin, its own resources. Black is the color of ritual, seeking, power as it plays with its own mind and body.

Red is the least peaceful color. Its associations with fire and fury and hastiness belie an underlying creativity, a notion of making things out of passion and need. In times of peace, red makes things. Red seeks for the pleasure of seeking. Red gambles, creates, tinkers, improves for the sake of improvement, even at the cost of its own destruction. How can you take red’s energy and transform it into something productive?

Alright, I’m going to jot down a few of my thoughts here. There is an ongoing discussion, both from the fanbase and, I believe, at WotC, about what to do about the Kamigawa situation. By this, I mean the following: Kamigawa, the Japan-inspired block, was very unpopular. Yet, people sometimes clamor for its return. So the question we need to answer is: do we go back to Kamigawa, or instead try to make a new Japanese-inspired plane so we can be easily rid of the plane’s negative baggage?

Anecdotally speaking, Kamigawa is the plane that Mark Rosewater gets asked if we can/will return to the most. Just a couple days ago, a comment he made in one of his answers spurred a new flurry of asks on the subject, pondering various elements regarding such a return, like whether or not we should reuse the same mechanics, what exactly went wrong, and whether or not the player base would respond positively.

Let’s start with a wider approach. What went wrong? According to Mark Rosewater, the issue was manifold: “The names scored poorly because they were hard to parse and remember. The art scored poorly because too much of it was thought to be not what the audience expected. The world scored poorly because it didn’t resonate with the audience.” In the past, Maro has also said that the block suffered from the over-abundance of Legendaries (every single Rare creature was a legendary (or flipped into one), which is insane) and the fact that we had parasitic mechanics (a mechanic which requires you to have very specific cards at your disposal to be useful) in play (Soulshift, Splice, and Offering). Can we circumnavigate these things and would that be worth it?