Keep in mind I know nothing about designing sets, but here's a hypothetical:

RtD Set 1: Enchantment Sunday Funday; these are the big bad's hidden agents; they hide in plain sight (Enchantment theme predominates)

RtD Set 2: Approaching the threshold of nostalgia; the theme of our big bad continues here too (Threshold theme predominates)

RtD Set 3: Big bad whose brain was fried by the Time Rifts kicks off a ballroom blitz of battlecruiser magic in an attempt to slay Rith and gain her powers. His old followers muster their meager forces and bring out some surpise allies.

Set 3 brings together enchantments, threshold, throws in madness and the big critters that were around in Invasion's standard blocks. I think these are what really made an impression on players, as far as nostalgia goes. I don't recall much about Provoke or Amplify that would make them big draws for the players.

The narrative I stitched together shouldn't be taken seriously. Its me typing **** as it comes to mind.

Chief to consider being the fact blocks are only two sets now.

Make shadow great again

EDIT: I also really love the design of the dauthi and the soltari

Bo Levar shielded the Eliterates.

Etlan Shiis was an northern outpost of the original, Sarpdian Vodalia, which developed into its own empire after the fall of its mother country. Until Empress Galina returned from her trip through time and re-instituted the militarized caste system through a coup in the short story "Return of the Empress".

Tell me more about Galina's trip through time, please?

I stand corrected... For the terminology, if not the spirit of the post. My points still remain cogent of the state of the Vodalian state following the apocalypse with the Eliterates more or less seizing the remainder of the Vodalian military state and basically disbanding it in favor of the philosophical nature of the movement.

The story is up online (well, with a little help from the Internet Wayback Machine you can still reach it), so you can read the whole thing there if you want!

Thank you squirrel. I read your entry on Colors; King's Bo Levar story was my favorite of the collection. Speaking of King, how would you say his work on the Onslaught novels compare, from a technical standpoint, to his prior Magic novels and short stories?

Let's put it this way: When Legions came out, it was dubbed "The Book That Shall Not Be Named" on the Wizards forums. Scourge, when following it up, was dubbed "The Sequel To The Book That Shall Not Be Named".

They were pretty much without competition for the title of "lowest point in Magic fiction" until Quest For Karn.

Onslaught was relatively positive, certainly better than Judgment and Odyssey.
Legions had... Parts that weren't bad. Scourge was garbage.

I like King's earlier work much more than his later stuff. I liked him a lot on Born to Greatness, Expeditions to the End of the World and The Thran. Time Streams and Invasion were okay, and Onslaught block just devolved into unfocused weirdness.

But the problems of those later books can already be found in his earlier work, they just become much more pronounced. The depiction of the Thran in The Thran doesn't fit 100% with what we saw in The Brothers' War, but the changes are minor and can be handwaved away by saying "Something must have happened in the 5000 years between those books". Then in Scourge he starts doing such weird things to continuity that I wholly embraced it being retconnned out. And the tonal problems of that book, which goes from Karona's trippy vision quest to Sash and Waistcoat making masturbation jokes, can already be seen, though much less pronounced, in Time Streams, which also had some ill-fitting "goblins being silly" antics in between the unremitting horror of K'rricks attacks on Tolaria.

All things considered, King seems to be the kind of author who at his best is capable of sheer brilliance, but also needs some tight editing to rein him in when he gets carried away by his crazier ideas. Which makes you wonder why things like Karona visiting Serra's Realm, talking to Yawgmoth or turning the land into pudding ever made it to print or whether there was any edititing at all...

As to the merfolk stuff, I know I'm the one who brought up the Pearl Trident's apparent connection to Vodalia in the first place, but maybe we're reading too much into it. The reference to Atlantis in Merfolk of the Pearl Trident's original flavour text refers to all merfolk in general and was made by in-universe sources who probably have no idea what they're talking about, so maybe the Pearl Trident guys have nothing to do with Etlan Shiis. I just think the story behind Master of the Pearl Trident is pretty interesting, partly because it's pretty much the only new story hook for Dominaria that we got after Future Sight.

Well, it depends on what's most popular about Dominaria among the players, and I have no idea what that is. The thing that stands out to me as a distinguishing feature of both the Plane and the sets based on it is diversity: there are far more moods and themes and ideas smashing around than in a modern set. Perhaps I'd build on that, and do a "diversity matters" theme, and tie it all together with the idea that all Dominaria was banding together against some sort of threat. If it were up to me I'd make the threat metatextually based on modern Magic – all obvious CG and stiff posing – but I'm fairly sure I would be fired if I actually did that.

The cool thing about mechanics based on diversity is that they might allow a way to have lots of old-school references without the set being overwhelming. Like if you had something like this:

Hazezon's Legacy (U)

Sorcery
Diversity— Put a green 1/1 Sand Warrior token onto the battlefield for each creature type among creatures you control.
Much of Dominaria is still dust. But the dust can rise.

I'm not much of a card design person, but that mechanic sounds like it could have a lot of charm. I could certainly see myself enjoying it and building a deck around it, and you're right that it would open a lot of space for old-school references. Maybe it could be combined with a token theme, so it would work with general token support, but you could also have every card in the set/block that produces tokens produce tokens of a different type. I guess the mechanical downside would be that it can be hard to keep track of all the types, especially when tokens are involved (you'd really have to make sure you have the proper cardboard tokens that tell you what type they are).

While there's pobably no one most popular thing about Dominaria among all players, diversity as an overarching theme would certainly be on track, and that's basically what they did with Time Spiral block, too. It's also kind of what I was going for with my "one continent per set" idea. I mean, Dominaria as a plane is diverse because it's so huge and has such a long history. I think my main interest in revisiting Dominaria would be to revisit all those old places and characters there and see how they've developed and how they're interacting in new and interesting ways etc. Basically getting a global update and seeing more Dominaria on new cards. It's the centre of the multiverse and Magic's true home, but we don't even know what the status quo is really like at the moment. Seeing Dominaria change and following it throughout its long history always felt pretty epic, partly throught he cards and partly through novels (especially those by Jeff Grubb).

That being said, the problem I see with the story approach you proposed is that all of Domiaria banding together to fight a common threat is exactly what happened during the Phyrexian Invasion, played up diversity included. I also wouldn't be down on another world-threatening cataclysm of any sort, I think Dominaria has had enough apocalypses for a long while.

Diversity would never make it out of development. Even if they don't test for modern and legacy, they'd know one Changeling card and it's instantly broken.

A smaller, yet far-reaching threat would work. Like my reaver idea - you have individual countries, or even just port towns, across the globe fighting against it. As opposed to entire coalitions like we had in Invasion.

The Changeling thing is a problem and would probaly kill that mechanic, but a mechanic caring about creature type diversity could generally work. Maybe something like Threshold or Ferocious that cares about reaching a certain number. A fixed version could look like this:

Hazezon's Legacy (U)

Sorcery
Put two green 1/1 Sand Warrior tokens onto the battlefield.
Diversity— If the total number of creature types among creatures you control is five or greater, put six of those tokens onto the battlefield instead.
Much of Dominaria is still dust. But the dust can rise.

Can still be abused with Changeling, but at least you don't get 200+ tokens.

Or something like

Apostle of Harmony (U)

Creature - Human Cleric
1/1
Diversity - When Apostle of Harmony enters the battlefield, you gain two life for each creature you control that doesn't share a creature type with it.

Apostle is actually very, very good. Like, rare card and probably costs another mana good.

Hm, not sure. I mean, Congregate gives any player two life for every creature in play at instant speed and only costs one more. But the thing I was going for was an example for a reverse Coat of Arms mechanic.

but wizards themselves HATE congregate cards. its so easy to put yourself into a position of comeback with it they try to NOT make them or make them overly costed. Heck the only way your card could come out at 3 would be rare and 3 solid white for the CC.