Since I told you I was going to make some crazy set for the fun of it, I've come up with quite a few cards in Magic Set Editor. :PWhile it's probably breached the one hundred mark or something, I've deleted some impractical ideas, deleted some multicolored cards, redesigned or consolidated several series of cards. For now, I've designed everything in a cycle, meaning that the set is most obviously going to be imbalanced since I don't have any experience whatsoever in designing sets to be balanced, good for draft or anything like that. I'm just going to do a series of cycles, some of which are not really cycles with a specific theme, but they are certainly cycles during design.
Here's a card from one of the cycles:
The idea was to make a cycle out of each basic land. This card was originally a "Land - Plains", then I realised that making the cycle to have basic land types would make them positively broken since anyone who managed to get two lands in this cycle could pull off an infinite chain of gaining life (and some other effect) with another land of this type (over many turns at the cost of stunting your mana development). So, it was either I cut the land type or cut down on the ability. I obviously wanted the effects on the other cards to stay.
Gaining life for free is cool for casual (regardless how much), but the more powerful cards in the cycle would be drastically affected, like the blue one, which is the most powerful (at least at this point in time, since I'm still considering whether it is too powerful). The land originally required you to return a land type of enemy colors, but I found that wasn't flavorful since why should enemy colors help you? :D
The net effect if you return a land for the untapping and the effect is stunting your mana growth slightly (unlike playing the guildlands of Ravnica, which actually still develop your mana). For example, playing it on turn 2 will still net you 2 mana, which means it won't stop your turn 2 drop. Unfortunately, the following turn, you end up with 2 mana again. Of course, the original version of the land isn't broken at this point, it's just broken when you go further into the game when you can continuously stunt your mana growth (because you don't need any) to gain a massive advantage over your opponent in the long run, since the effects on these lands are uncounterable.
The ability to continuously reuse the blue one at the cost of stunting your mana development was way too undercosted, so you can imagine what got cut since I wanted to keep the cards cool. Of course, that being said, this will probably be the second last or last post before I depart for Australia and become disconnected for a while. :D