Sarpadian Empires, Vol. VII

The flavor of this era lived in callbacks, and this one wears its source on the type line: an in-universe history book that musters the rank-and-file of five long-dead factions. The choice made on entry locks in which empire you are raising, and each option points to an archetype that once mattered: Citizens for a white go-wide board, Camarids for blue's old token swarms, Thrulls for black's sacrifice economy, Goblins for red, Saprolings for green's fodder engine. Mechanically it is a token factory throttled by a steep rate: three mana down, then three more and a tap to muster each 1/1, and the tokens arrive one at a time rather than in a wave. That tax is the whole governor on the design. A repeatable token maker with no per-use cost would warp any board it sat on; pricing each body at three mana keeps it a slow, grinding sink rather than a snap-value engine. The activation carries no main-phase restriction, so the bodies can be made at instant speed, dropping a blocker on an opponent's attack or replacing a creature in response to removal, a small but real flexibility for a producer this expensive. What separates it from generic makers is the typed and colored output: the chosen creature reads as a real tribe and a real color, plugging into anthem effects, tribal payoffs, and color-matters triggers that ignore a plain colorless Construct. The book is less an engine than a lore object given rules, a five-faction sampler that doles out its citizens at a deliberately punishing clip.