General Underexplored Horizons- a custom set

I'm trying my hands at creating a draft format from the scratch, including the cards themselves.
I will try to update you guys through the design process in my mind and decisions both broad and small, like Maro does with his articles, but I'm one guy and this is gonna be a slow and long process so I'll upload some cards here once in a while as I suspect some of them will be good in cubes you guys make here.

A recent discussion in the Land of Mordor Cube updates revolved around designers abandoning their designs underexplored and trying to come up with new things with every new set. This inspired me to make a Modern-Horizons-esque set that tries to use some of those mechanics to create overlaying themes and a complex environment, hopefully with individually simple cards.

The themes I tried to utilize at first were Modified and Bargain as they each worked with a lot of different things, alongside the thing I fing particularly interesting (I really don't know the source of this fascination), Delirium

Map tokens
were the first obvious glue, bridging all these themes. Blood Tokens also work with 2 of them, and I thought about introducing blood to Gruul (via the flavor of Innistrad's werewolves injuring people and seeking blood) to add some Gruul madness support that I find a lot of people here enjoy.
Tireless Persuer-min.jpg
I then started to think about the colors, guilds and shards. I really liked the design of capenna in terms of the colors. each 3 color combination (shard) had its thing, but also each friendly color pair (guild) had its own theme, and themes from each guild worked with the themes of the two shards it was a part of, thus causing a lot of combinations that overlay and interact with each other. As an example, Brokers (WUG) had shield counters, while Obscura (WUB) had connive, so WU got the connecting theme (counters). Another: Obscura (WUB) had connive, while Maestros (UBR) had casualty, so UB got he graveyard theme as both the shards fill the graveyard.

Anyway, I first tried to think of having both Alara shards and Tarkir clans supported, alongside all 10 guilds, creating this beautiful web, but the more I thought about it, the more impossibly ambitious it looked, so I settled on the 5 shards + 5 guilds. I also figured I would give each Shard its own token, with Bargain being the 5 color-theme that utilizes these tokens. This also meant The whole format could have 5 tokens and avoid the mess a lot of cubers have to endure with every set adding to the countless number of weird tokens you have to keep around.
To choose between Khans or Shards (or any other combination that has each color represented in 2 of 5 guilds and 3 pf 5 trios, there are many possible arrangements) I already knew I wanted Jund to have the Blood tokens for madness and delirium purposes, also I made this, so how am I not putting that in the set? [inspired by a recent post featuring the playtest card Jund'em out]

Jundum-min (1).jpg

Did I mention I have the same Obsession with Emerge that I have with Delirium?
I also had some ideas for Modified in Naya with a lot of things these colors can do to their creatures (I'm still not sure if I want Modified to be a shard theme or a 5-color theme), so I Decided to fully embrace the capenna and go for the shards and the 5 friendly guilds. Also now we have a general understanding of the Gruul guild: It has Blood, madness, delirium, and modified. Smash them with modified dudes, utilizing graveyard and discard synergies, or preferably, a combination of the two (Scavenge?).
In the next post I will go over the other color combinations and their tokens, also the website won't let me upload all the cards I want although I already compressed the images, so I'll have to upload them in another post.
 
The Naya Modified Example cards the site didn't let me upload in the previous post
Cloaked Crocodillo-min.jpgGhor-Clan Legionnaire-min.jpg

Unfortunately I couldn't find a fitting image featuring an Armadillo, so I had to come up with the shitty name to work with the image I could find

Also, this is a Horizons set, so expect shitty puns, callbacks and references, a triple of a one mana 1/1 [Healer's Flock], cards with set names [Urza's Saga] and much more tomfoolery. I'm not breaking those traditions.
Remember Bone Shards? Now get ready for
Bone Chains-min.jpg
 
I am trying to build an enchantment cube and you hit the same themes I was going for: modified, delirium and bargain as common ground. So maybe consider enchantments matter too. And if you do, historic + sagas could do work.
 
Now to the other Shards and Guilds
For Grixis, I had to choose between Amass and Decayed 2/2 zombies. Although Amass works with Modify, I really like 2 things: Rakdos Sacrifice Burn, and Dimir Ninjutsu, and you know what enables both? So Grixis Got the 2/2 Decayed Zombies

Naya Gets 1/1 Human tokens. Ilmost all powerful cubes have a minor human subtheme and it'd be nice to give a it more tools to work with
Another Thing that Baffled me was powerstones being abandoned, so I gave them to Esper for now
I also really like the spirits that can be disturbed and come back as enchantments, so WU will have disturb to work with Modify and another mechanic that has many ways if being triggered, Valiant that will probably be in either Naya or Bant
For Esper I'm thinking of creating the new keyword Glitter (as in All That Glitters) that triggers whenever an enchantment OR an artifact enters under your control, working with the disturbed spirits as well as the artifact tokens (Having both artifacts and enchantments is also important to enable Delirium) I've also thought about dropping Glitter and just using Constellation mainly in Bant or Esper colors
I also thought about a sort of Zombie/Spirit tribal mishmash for Blue, either the two creature types working together or just combining them under a singular keyword and supporting that tribal keyword (something like the Outlaw mechanic, maybe name it Departed?)

Bant took the glue token, what we started with, Map tokens

And so we have the Set-Mechanic Titan
Junk Titan-min.jpg
Also, two callback cards
Ajani Fells the Godshire and Ral and the Implicit Maze are cool, but I want to focus on more iconic characters
Fblthp gets totally lost-min.jpgYargle Devours All-min.jpg
I'm thinking about Tibalt as the Iconinc Red character, but I'm open to new suggestions.
Also no idea about iconic white or green ones. Suggestions appreciated
 
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I am trying to build an enchantment cube and you hit the same themes I was going for: modified, delirium and bargain as common ground. So maybe consider enchantments matter too. And if you do, historic + sagas could do work.
Exactly
Funny your comment arrived while I was writing the third post explaining the exact thing
And yeah, we're having the same thoughts
Every set that wants to support Delirium has to have enough Enchantments and/or artifacts (besides the tokens, actual cards that go to graveyard)
I also like historic a lot, and sagas
But I'm not a huge fan of legendary creatures.
I'll definitely think about Historic though
Seems like a good Glue for a lot of things we're doing here
It's also a dominaria mechanic and that's a plus for me
 
A few thoughts:

This should probably be a cube blog.

Please figure out how to use CardConjurer. It looks so much better.

"Custom"

Not sure calling it "Riptide" makes sense unless many of us are working on it.

Maybe many of us should work on something?
 
I found a better Iconic character for red
Norin Runs away-min.jpg
also there's this thing
Ninja od Innistrad's moon-min.jpg
Unfortuanately, cards are becoming way wordier than I would like.
I'll have to mind the complexity budget
Here's some less wordiness to compensate
Secret Delver-min.jpgTaste of Blood-min.jpgIsamara, timeless loyal-min.jpg
I think this delver plays much better than the OG, also isn't double-faced so makes things easier
On Historic: I had suspicions about the mechanic because I'm not interested in most legendary creatures of the game and I'm not coming up with new ones in a callback set, but there will be sagas and artifacts, and there are enough interesting legends. Historic will probably be a Bant mechanic, or maybe span all the colors. I'm thinking about putting Historic synergy mostly on legendary creatures so they can work with each other, but I don't know. Regardless, I like the mechanic and I want it in at the very least as a subtheme

Another thing I'm considering is changing either the 1/1 humans or the powerstones into eldrazi scion or drone tokens considering eldrazi will be a part of this (Mostly Emerge is on my mind right now but who knows, maybe bargain?? I could imagine cultist like Foul Emissary bargaining with the eldrazi), but for now that's just a thought
 
Alright
So this is the general theme web we are working with
00Theme Web.png
And I want the majority of cards to be a glue for these themes to create tension when drafting and to maje each theme work with many different possible color combination
This card for example, is an artifact that makes a modified decayed zombie
Draugr's Bonesplitter-min.png
 
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