Also, you guys were much more kind to each other than I remember while doing this. I do miss when LSV would slam TSG and be like "Well, you're wrong and this is why" on like every single card during the hit or myth segment. The good old days. Cheers.
Raise the Alarm was first printed in Mirrodin which was the first set to make Humans a creature type, so the fact that they're not Human Soldiers wasn't simply an oversight.
Regarding the creature types of the apexes, the white ones are all cats, the blue ones are all elementals, the black ones are all nightmares, the red ones are all dinosaurs and the green ones are all beasts. Those creature types also tend to show up among those colours' other cards in the set, including a bunch of the gold uncommons that mutate for hybrid mana.
30:00 - I knew from the start that "Cycling 1" was too darned good. WOTC clearly knew it needed to be 2 colorless in Urza's Block, and figured out it could cost 1 colored mana during Onslaught and 1 hybrid mana later on. But they knew that a people would run cards like Street Wraith with little to no intention of casting it merely because it cycled. Ikoria's team had repeated magic design experience that told them "Cycling 1" was too good... and they just ignored it.
1 mana cyclers are great. I'm so happy they finally realized how to make cycling viable by not over costing it. Even 1 colored pip cycling was fine, but they went all out on 1 colorless pip on playable cards and some really good cheap payoffs that ALSO cycle!
I disagree with you about the Apex legends. Brokkos feels the least mythic because it doesn't have a mutate trigger. I know that creatures that return from the graveyard tend to be rare or mythic but I'd argue that's neither complex nor splashy. I'd fix Brokkos by giving it "Whenever this creature mutates, you may return target card from your graveyard to your hand." and then raise its mana cost a little.
Fiend Artisan reminds me of Ko, the Facestealer, from Avatar: The Last Airbender. But instead of collecting faces, he's collecting creatures. So that's definitely a huge hit imo.
