A group of heroes being overwhelmed by an ever-growing zombie horde isn't a fantasy storyline; it's a modern horror storyline.
It's the difference between "voodoo zombies" and "virus zombies". In the fantasy settings Magic draws from creatively, zombies are "voodoo zombies". "Voodoo zombies" are harder to make: every corpse has to be raised individually by some necromancer or other magic, and the resulting zombies aren't infectuous.
Left 4 Dead's zombies, on the other hand, are "virus zombies", which don't come from any fantasy setting; they originally came from the head of George Romero (and, oddly, the Smurfs).
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- Orbifold
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And apparently birds. (Second from the right, top row.)
EDIT: It's startling how much this is annoying me. Green has been the go-to colour for this effect for years, going back to Portal: 3 Kingdoms in some cases, and green pays five for a "your creatures gain hexproof" effect. Blue had this effect on two cards previously, and suddenly blue gets the hexproof lord and "your creatures gain hexproof" for two mana on a stick?
Go for the Throat and Despise were both played more than Beast Within in the >=18pt decks from PT:Nagoya. And Garruk, despite being Standard-legal right now, wasn't played at all in the day two decks at GP:Singapore, unlike both Tezzeret and Koth.
Someone forgot to tell that to everyone at PT:Nagoya. The block constructed decks which won 18 points or more do not include a single mono-green infect deck. In fact, the pros seem to think that the best SOM block deck is some form of mono-W with Tempered Steel, and that green is barely playable at all. And I suspect some of the pros did extensive testing. EDIT: oh, and if we're going to play "compare the rares", Phyrexian Metamorph saw more play than Birthing Pod.
[nitpick] I'd check your count: I counted "only" 60 decks with JTMS from 9th to 85th, so there were at least 17 without. Maybe you counted some Belerens?
Seriously, folks: 77 decks from 9th to 85th, and FIFTY-EIGHT of them had a full four JTMS (two poor souls had to make do with three). SIXTY full playsets of Preordain.
Two decks with Hex Parasites. One Baneslayer Angel; not one deck, one copy.
Two black abilities and one ability that could be either green or black. Yeah, that's pretty much what Wizards would do with a BG planeswalker.
He'll be BG, because Wizards loves to "develop" green characters by making them black characters (see: Glissa, Sarkhan, even Nissa according to her planeswalker page on the mothership).
The cost will be at least 3BG, probably at least 4BG, because thanks to Jace they won't want to make new planeswalkers too good.
It annoys me that the only reason we can be certain Garruk will appear in Innistrad is because we already know Lilliana is there and Garruk is a secondary character in her storyline. Wizards' creative department has a real problem producing green characters.
Reveillark and Ranger of Eos in particular always stand out to me. You may think weenie strategies are limiting white, but Wizards seems to think white can jump all over the colour pie as long as small creatures are involved. Creature tutoring, last I checked, was a green ability, and creature recursion was black first, green second, and white third, but white was best at both during Lorwyn-Alara standard. Weenies are to white as artifacts are to blue: a blank check as far as Wizards is concerned.
That's the thing: Wizards likes white. They pay attention to white in design and development, they want white to be played, and they care whether or not white has a distinct identity. White was probably the biggest beneficiary of the great Onslaught-block era colour pie shift, getting flying and a range of creature control mechanics. They don't always succeed in making white a well-played colour--witness Time Spiral, or as I think of it, "the blue Torment"--but they know white had problems in the past and they're sure as hell trying to keep it from having the same problems in the future.
Even better, pro players and the wannabe-pros like white. White has enough "cleverness" and control aspects to satisfy a pro's need to feel that they're not playing a card game. Or to put it less politely, White doesn't seem to give them Timmy cooties.
And yeah, PT Paris. Among my annoying habits, I like to read things like the big list of standard decks that got 18 points or better at PT Paris and add up the numbers. What were the number one and two most-played creatures in those decklists, by a wide margin? Go on, guess. (Hey look, card advantage.) What were the top lands? Here's the top ten:
Don't get me wrong: I'm pretty strongly of the opinion that Wizards still needs a kick every now and again to make sure all five colours are interesting. Keep the flame alive and all that. But right now white's doing fine.
[gatherer gatherer gatherer]
Scout's Warning
Curtain of Light
Pentarch Ward
Withstand
None of those part of cycles AFAIK and none of those sets had "cantrip" as a base mechanic.
I'm a little annoyed that white has hoovered up yet another good card/mechanic/idea from its colour wheel neighbours but it's no use claiming that this one doesn't fit in white.
EDIT: whoops forgot Carom. (And in case you were wondering, I wasn't even counting core sets, just expansions.)
There is a rule that says mana pools empty at the end of each phase and step (500.4, I just looked it up), including the cleanup step. But there's no rule that says that mana pools empty at the end of a turn.
I suspect what happened is that they simply didn't bother issuing errata to Upwelling when they changed the mana burn rules, and now the "turns" part is just redundant. EDIT: hm, that's just wrong, isn't it? Clearly they issued errata to remove the "mana burn" reminder text from Upwelling. But I still suspect they just didn't bother removing "turns" from Upwelling's rules text.
Five whole months? Oh no. It's a good thing you have over fifteen years of the game's history, three other sanctioned constructed formats, and every other sanctioned constructed format in the history of the game (except Onslaught block constructed, poor dears) to keep you warm. Oh, and Zendikar limited.
Orbifold, who thinks the counterspell in question would be just fine and might even quell some of the wailing and gnashing of teeth.