It was pretty normal for smaller sets like Fallen Empires and The Dark to have no rares but to have U1, U2, and U3 distinctions for the uncommons. From what I remember the number was the times a card appeared on a sheet so a U1 showed up once and a U3 would show up 3 times.
Homelands at least had some desirable power creatures, Autumn Willow and Baron Sengir were pretty hot at the time. In comparison nobody wanted anything out of Fallen Empires, except thallids for silly themes or goblin grenades. Homelands wasn't great, but it was a slight upturn for expansions. They even had a fake City In A Bottle, not that anyone used it to delete all Homelands cards. The setting might be good, if they ever decide to revisit that plane. Eron the Relentless was kind of cool too.
Unfortunately Mark Rosewater has said multiple times that the plane of Homelands has been "replaced" by Innistrad. (that is whatever theme/style they might get out of it, Innistrad does better or something IIRC, see also this article)
I think that just shows failure of creativity. Innistrad and Ulgrotha are both horror planes but Innistrad is Victorian/Post Victorian era, while Ulgrotha always struck me as a feudal setting, where in one you have things more related to society, such as Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll, in the other it's more about the terror of nature and the outside with an overall grim existence. If anything, Ulgrotha would be a much more realized place as it's a more abstract concept instead of a theme park based around horror movies.
I mean Six months isn't that long in magic terms, especially back then where new sets didn't come out as fast and you didn't have the internet to instantly tell you the results of every tournament.
The oracle updates that unfinity caused were posted and I want to kill myself.
Comprehensive Rules Changes | Magic: The Gathering
The Astrotorium has rules, and it's important to follow them (except when it isn't). Eternal-legal cards in Unfinity have brought quite a few rules changes with them, especially for stickers and Attraction cards. This page is a summary of the rules cha...magic.wizards.com
I'm seeing a lot of videos on this topic, so it's gaining momentum, but really the biggest issue is all this Draft, Set, Collector, whatever shit. Foil and alternate arts keep a product relevant, but making a box with nothing but them is a great way to make the product feel shit long term as who will care about most collector sets after they rotate? Secret Lairs were a better idea, but once again they printed a million of them and no one cared after a while, not to mention all of the super shit ones they decided to pump out.
That's not exactly fair. I don't think several of them have been printed at this point. Folks from my LGS still haven't gotten their SL street fighter sets, one has been in email arguments with support about still missing their Liliana demon set from last fall, and half the Uro ones around look so curled you could assume they baked them instead of printing. I'm at least fortunate enough I've only ever ordered a cat one for my SO and the Dan Frazier ones.
Supposedly they had Oct 14 as a ship date for one recently, and then when the date came and went the stealth removed the date from their site and pretended that there never was a scheduled date and it was a "you get it when you get it" type deal. People were clearly mad and eventually they admitted it was just a delay, but funny to see them just pretend like it wasn't a fuck up because it shows what they think of their audience's intelligence.
A friend who also saw it posted to the /r/custommagic subreddit and did get some pretty funny replies.
Draft is for people who play limited, set is for timmies (and has List reprints and thus always retains some interest as sealed product), and collectors are for investors / whales to buy up. That division is fine, and has helped to drive down the cost of playing the game unless you're trying to go pro in paper standard (lol) or you literally can't even unless you hyper-optimize a casual kitchen-table/commander deck to stomp people playing precons.