Quote from"Saproling" seems to be a generic term for small plant/fungus creatures rather than a specific species.
Indeed what a Saproling is varies from plane to plane - sometimes even within a plane; on Ravnica in the old days Saprolings differed from guild to guild; Selesnya Saprolings are small creatures consisting of vines wrapped around crystals (as can be seen in the artwork) - the vines are based on plants which is why the Selesnyan Saprolings use seeds and pollen; Golgari Saprolings with the guilds focus on lightless subterranean rotfarms are classical fungal beings; Simic Saprolings are open to interpretation, though they are cyan/green-blue globules and seem to consist entirely of their trademark Cytoplast.
Guildless Saprolings could follow either style guide or none at all.
Remember: A Saproling doesn't need to be fungal. If anything its root tells us more about the fact that it likes death and decay. It can be (and sometimes is) a plant and apparently sometimes part gem.
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Now you don't only seem to have a problem with Saprolings being not depicted fungal enough, but with Saprolings depicted too much like a Fungus. For example the "earthstars" are not there for there own sake. Those are the Saprolings that Vitaspore Thallid tosses around. Look at the mechanic and art and tell me that "every now and then it throws a new creature onto the field" isn't what the Thallid mechanic is actually reads like.
You can see similar depictions of Saprolings on Thallid cards again and again e. g. a big "white" Thallid in front of a few smaller "green" Saprolings on Pallid Mycoderm; maybe now you also understand the boring palette of colors: When an artist gets told to paint a "green" Fungus it will end up being green more often than not.
less to play for each Dragon or Demon permanent you control." would be preferable.
It's just another (mega)cycle they get to complete in supplementary products.
More options for your kicker decks. Unless they go five-color there is really nothing stopping them to challenge you a bit.
1st: There is a green-blue legendary creature in this set that copies kicked spells, so there IS s "kicker payoff commander".
2nd: Kicker is such a basic mechanic, it could show up in any number of supplemental products, maybe even the commander draft set we get this year, so... there would have been plenty of opportunity.
The same way Custom Card Creators have suggested for years. Put the copy on the stack. It resolves into a token.
Finally creatures with replicate are one step closer to becoming a reality.
The most important thing about this is that we can finally get an effect like "Copy target spell." Full Stop.
Oh, let me!
This set is supposed to be about a "Return to Adventure", but the extreme focus on party kind of let's yo see a lot of adventurer's, but not so much the adventure itself. The returning mechanics and MDFCs all neatly play into the land theme, but the adventuring tropes are not well served. There are individual cards like Adventure Awaits and Spare Supplies, but is there really a feeling of adventure without a unified mechanic or presence of cards like quests and Traps? Those were the adventures and the challenges to overcome. While there is bad weather and grumpy creatures, we get a lot of the latter on any plane.
I get a feeling ZNR delivers only on half of the adventure trope with the vehemence of original ZEN. Quests and Traps didn't need to return, but they left a hole that needed filling.
Converge, but well spotted!
Remember: Sets have sub-themes. First RAV-block was all about color-pairs and guilds, but with an enchantment sub-theme. And since then sub-themes have become increasingly prominent as a rule.
Did they even say ZNR is a "land matters" set? ZEN-block was "land matters", but return sets can shift the focus and make the main theme a sub-theme - even ROE made the Eldrazi the main focus and reduced "land matters" in favor of "battlecruiser" game-style. BFZ was top-down focused on the conflicted Zendikar vs. Eldrazi with OGW playing hard on the cooperation aspect of the conflict. Zendikar is still the "land matters" plane, so that theme will always be there with a higher than average amount of nonbasic lands and - so far - landfall. Yet ZNR has been announced since the failure of BFZ as a "return to adventure world", so with that in mind it should be no surprise that tribal - the way they mechanically realize adventuring as a party - gets to show up in force equal to "land matters".
And that's not even taking into account that the base level of tribal in sets has gone up over time in all sets, even those without explicitly stated tribal theme.
This set will likely have about half of its draft themes be tribal - four color pairs for the four party tribes, probably one color pair (?)really trying to make party work and the partially green color pairs will get a stronger focus on land themes with landfall enablers/rewards in green-white and red-green, apparently getting some more kicker-pay-offs in green-blue (directly) and indirectly in black-green (+1/+1 counters) which is all fine and ramp-y.
I'd adjust my expectations.
You might be unaware of all the known kicker cards from Invasion-block, Time Spiral-block, previous Zendikar-blocks and Dominaria etc. This card will get some people excited just for the backwards compatibility. Premium sets are not all about Standard and Limited.
I agree about your point. There is nothing preventing them from calling this Skyclave Ruin of Emeria implying that there were left multiple ruins when something as large as Emeria shattered - and this is just a ruin. And at the time you are free to consider it to be the ruin when that suits you.
And "permanent card" is "any card" that can go to the battlefield in the first place.
So, I recon that this cannot grab lands that are on the back face of a modal DFC with a spell on the front face, but how does it interact with modal DFC duals? Can you grab either side or only the front face?
The other effect seems like it is a prime example of something that should be realized with an inherently time-counting mechanic like fading, vanishing or as a Saga.
Being especially bad in multiplayer also is a weird aspect about that effect.