Ruin of Seffala – The Gold Uncommons

Another nostalgic pseudo-memory I had of old Magic is that gold cards were particularly rare. It was amazing to see a card that wasn't one of the base five colors, just like artifacts. These days, I know there is a gold uncommon cycle in near every set that acts as a 'signpost' for each color pair, giving the draft archetype. Some of that I tried to capture here. In other cases, I struggled to come up with the draft archetype, or forgot about it alt/-1ogether while designing these cards. Each of these cards costs exactly two mana, and I tried working within that restriction, with varying success.

Fancy.

Frenetic Notions simply combines a loot with a rummage, which I think is cute, but if I was going to do it over again, I would make this a Djinn, since Blue/Red is the Djinni tribal colors.

Likewise, Dangerous Journey, while Witherkin-flavored, is not Witherkin Tribal. This card represents the Witherkin leaving their home of Slog Bog and journeying to the new terrain of the mountains and forests. In this case, I might like the flavor, but the mechanics don't hit the theme.

Countersong is the mechanics of Blue with the flavor of Green. Blue naturally provides the counterspell, while Green's theme of music in this set provides the flavor, with the bonus of the healing effect here. Ultimately, though, once more, it doesn't quite tell you what the archetype is (which is really nothing).

Grinding Parasite helps a lot more with the Blue/Black theme, which is Mill, and a sub-theme of Parasites (though that's more of a mono-Black take). Still, so far this is the closest we get to a true signpost uncommon. The problem here is the incredible amount of text on these Parasites. Oof!

With Faith in Flames, once more, I didn't have a tribal idea to work with, so I just combined what I thought of as the mechanics of White and Red together. I used a lot of the Magic wiki in designing cards, researching what each color does well and what each color pair does. Boros is aggro, so I just threw together red's direct damage and white's combat trickery. The flavor of the name is that when White Shamans come in contact with something unfamiliar (like Red) their faith is strongly tested.

Now we get to quite a few more proper signpost uncommons. Bewitcher is pure Shaman tribal, and includes the untap shenanigans the color pair is known for. We did it!

Provoking Balder is a Witherkin, as Black/Red should be. The flowstone activated ability is nice in that it allows you to pump up a Witherkin's damage if you know it's going to die anyway to tear down an opponent's creature with the Wither. Or, of course, you can pick off opponent's creatures since you can target any creature with the ability.

Unpoison Frog has the theme of Toughlink, which is the Golgari named mechanic of the set, and screwing around with -1/-1 counters, which is the unnamed mechanic for Abzan.

Survivor's Vigil combines the two Green/White themes of this set: life gain and tokens. The untap clause is there just for a bonus.

Occult Armor is mostly a Black card, in that -1/-1 counters are Black's wheelhouse, and Black is big on Voltron in this set. It just has a bit of the flavor of White to go with it. Oh, well. Can't win them all. How about 50%?