The Aetherborn are the Replicants from Bladerunner. The Dwarves make and drive flying cars. Like in Bladerunner.
That Dwarf is literally using the lifter suit from Aliens.
The humans in Kaladesh are South Asians and wear South Asian clothing.
Also there are Bandar and Elephants and so on and so forth.
While the people and clothing are very Tamil, the architecture is inspired by the Mughal Empire.
This set has a lot of robots that fit into other robots and also the core resource of the set (aether) is based on "spiral power." I'm not even kidding. Row Row Fight The Power!
Obviously, in any limited format you're going to be to some degree limited by what you open. The only way you are getting a Skysovereign Flagship or a Torch of Defiance is if you open a pack and it's sitting in the rare slot taunting you. Also, you draft 45 cards and you play 23 or 24 of them (Kaladesh is a 16-17 land draft format), which means that just over half of the cards you draft are going to be in the final deck - which means there is room for taking some speculative cards and changing your mind about what colors are open later on and you don't have to play all the janky shit you get at the tail end of pack 2. You should draft good cards over bad cards and cards in the colors you end up playing and not cards from cards you are not playing. But the real bottom line is that there is a lot of synergy to be had, and if you draft cards that fit together into an archetype, you'll do a lot better than if you don't.
That is to say that the Minister of Inquiries is a bad card, but he does make two Energy for coming into play, and if you are running a Blue Green Energy Growth deck that can reliably fold that energy into buffs on their creatures then your draft pick of him isn't wasted. On the flip side, Eliminate the Competition is a very good card, but if you draft it into a creature-light B/U Heroics deck you're going to have a bad time.
The Minister is a bad card, but can be part of a delicious curve out in Blue/Green.
Blue/Black is looking for non-creature cards, but not so much cards that require a lot of creatures on your side of the board.
Kaladesh Mechanics: Energy
Energy is a new resource in Kaladesh. It works like power in Shadowfist or bits in Netrunner. Energy lasts until it is spent, and is gone forever once that happens. Most cards that give you Energy also give you a way to spend it, and all cards that let you spend Energy also give you a way to earn it. The value of an Energy point is wildly different card to card, so ideally you want to gather Energy from cards that give you Energy with a bad outlet and spend your Energy on cards that give you a good outlet.
Some cards give you big effects for big Energy costs and other cards give you small effects for small Energy costs. Your strategy should be to try to spend all of your energy by the end of the game and to spend your Energy on the biggest most awesome outlets you have, and not to run any Energy outlets that are too costly for you to afford. It's... a delicate balancing act for Draft, and you will often end up with Energy you can't spend or cards that have cool super modes that require Energy you don't have. But try to keep that shit to a minimum.
In general, Black, White, and (especially) Blue produce Energy that they can't or don't want to use, while Red and Green are hungry for Energy above and beyond what they make for themselves.
Kaladesh Mechanics: Vehicles
Vehicles are a new type of Artifact that is in many ways similar to Equipment. Vehicles are not creatures, but they have a Crew number and if you tap a number of creatures whose total Power is equal to or greater than the Crew number, they turn into a creature until end of turn. Note that it's the vehicle that taps the creatures, not the creature - so you can drive cars with your creatures who have summoning sickness.
Think of this like an equipment that costs 5 to play and zero to equip that gives +4/+2, Menace, and Haste. It can close out games, but you may need to top deck a creature in order to ram it into your opponent's face.
Note that because these things aren't creatures on your opponent's turn, they are highly resistant to sorcery speed removal.
Kaladesh Mechanics: Fabricate
Fabricate gives you a choice when a creature comes into play of putting bullshit 1/1 creatures into play or putting +1/+1 tokens on the creature. If you intend to sacrifice or bounce the creature, obviously you want the servos. If you need a bigger creature, you may need the +1/+1.
Note also that there are a lot of cards that care about artifacts coming into play, and that when you grab the servo option that you can potentially put a lot of artifacts into play.
Kaladesh Archetypes
Kaladesh has a number of new mechanics, and most of them are well distributed throughout the colors. There are a lot of artifacts that can be used by any color and all of the colors make and spend energy and drop +1/+1 counters on things and so on and so on. The color identity shines through with how those mechanics are used.
Blue has some low to the ground creatures that make Energy, which will be role players in Blue/Green and Blue/Red decks that have neat things they can do with Energy, and bad filler in Blue/Black and Blue/White decks whose energy sinks are more limited. But Blue also has bounce spells that make Blue/White get all tingly and some prowess and giant snakes to make Blue/Black a thing.
The goal when drafting is to pick powerful cards early, try to figure out what archetypes aren't being taken by the people next to you that your powerful cards can work with, and then take those. Not all archetypes are created equal, but good cards in a poor archetype will often steamroller bad cards in a good archetype. Don't take trash cards you won't play just because you think you're going to be in an archetype that would be barely OK with them as their 23rd or 24th card.
Inspired Charge is better in White/Black and White/Green than it is in White/Blue or White/Red. But it's still a bad card that you will only play if you are short on playables even if you are in the "right deck" for it.
It's also important that the pieces of all the archetypes are in the colors, so you can mix and match a bit. In Eldritch Moon the strongest archetype was Blue/Red Spells. But if Blue or Red wasn't open, you could swap one color or the other for a black package with a bunch of removal spells (Dead Weight also triggers prowess, Murder untaps Thermo Alchemists). So if you wanted, you could make Black/Red Spells or Black/Blue Spells and do pretty OK. So don't think these archetypes are set in stone. You're going to be playing 23 or 24 cards, and some of them won't be on archetype. And that's OK.
Also I don't have good names for most of these. The folks at WotC have made a cycle of 10 gold cards at Uncommon that give you a hint as to what the designers think your archetype should be doing. They aren't all good cards, and the designers have been wrong before about how to play an effective color combination (the Eldritch Moon team apparently thought you were going to play Black/White as a token deck, which was ineffective), but it's a good place to start.
A note on Chase Commons: while every archetype is going to be after different cards because they fit into their game plan, there are also cards that every archetype in that color is going to be after simply because they are good cards. Every Red deck is going to want Welding Sparks because it's 3 for 3 instant speed removal with upside. It doesn't matter if they are doing a Red/Blue combo deck or a White/Red aggro deck, they are going to draft Welding Sparks early rather than late. While archetype role player cards showing up late in the pack is evidence of the archetype being open, chase commons showing up late in the pack are evidence of the entire color being open. If you haven't decided what your second color is by pick four and a Welding Sparks comes to you, you should take it and anticipate getting some tasty Red cards in pack three because obviously Red is pretty open in your seat.
The Contraband Kingpin gives you life, slows the board down, and durdles like mad with incidental scry effects. Black/Blue ends up doing a lot of that, which means that really what you're looking for is moar durdle, ways to trade off or stall the board, and big fucking creatures.
There's a definite "artifacts matter" subtheme to this archetype. I mean, the whole set has a lot of artifacts matter cards, but it's more pronounced in Black/Blue Go Big. You are probably going to find yourself in Black/Blue because you opened sick rares, because the whole archetype seems weakly supported to me. You are trying to drag things out long enough to cast something that costs 6 or 7 mana and win the game that way, so you're probably going to be running 17 lands.
Target Commons:
Your mission as Black/White is to trade your cards at a slightly better than 1 for 1 exchange rate with your opponent until your increased board presence can crush your opponent. You want cards that can trade up and cards that give you something when or after they trade so that you can ratchet up incremental advantage until you win by acclamation.
Target Commons:
Green Black together have a number of "+1/+1 Counters Matter" abilities, which incentivizes you to go up with your Fabricate rather than out. Green/Black should have the biggest things on the board for most of the game and you're looking to win combat steps and shut the door. A thing to note is that enough of your stuff costs 4 that you're likely to end up being a mid range deck, so plan accordingly.
Target Commons:
Black and Red together is a lot of destruction, but surprisingly it's not usually that much of a berserk aggro combo. You're looking at putting out damage sources that your opponent can't block. You have lots of sources of weird evasion and creatures that plink away at your opponent without going into combat at all. Pro tip: you can use the guys who do damage for tapping to crew vehicles even if the vehicles aren't attacking this turn. You are pretty heavily dependent on having some artifacts around, and there is a strong possibility that one or more of them should be freight trains.
Target Commons:
When you go into White/Blue, you do so because of the sweet Enter the Battlefield triggers, and you stay for the recursion you get from Blink and Bounce to get those triggers again and again. A Blue/White deck will almost always servo out their fabricates the first time a fabricate creature comes into play - ho ho.
Target Commons:
So the plan here is to get a lot of energy fast and then spend it on putting a few creatures out of reach of your opponent's deck to deal with. Your Uncommons give you Energy when your opponent can't block your shit, and you spend Energy to make your creatures bigger and harder to profitably block. Blue Green can take over the game and simply run away with it. It's shit like this is why four out of five of the chase Commons in the set are removal spells.
Target Commons:
I honestly don't see this deck even working without pulling some weird uncommons and rares. The signature gold uncommon is a key piece of an infinite combo deck, and you can theoretically pull it off in draft. And if you get a Panharmonicon and some Decoction Modules and actually pull it off in Limited, you are officially my hero. Since that's probably not going to work, what you're going to do instead is have something like an Aethertorch Renegade or Aethersquall Ancient that converts large piles of incidental Energy into you winning the game outright. So really what you're looking for in roleplayer Commons is just to give incidental Energy or keep you alive long enough for you to pull shenanigans.
Target Commons:
OK, just to get this out of the way: Green/White gets the worst gold card. I'm not sure it's worth using in a Green/White deck. Yes, you are looking to make and buff a big army and when you have to trade it off for your opponent's board you have a backup plan with big creatures and it would be nice to support both ends of that with a single card. But five mana is a lot for that kind of finisher - I'd really want something that stayed in play and actually gave me board presence at that point in my curve. The designers seem to want you to make a deck around going wide and then having Inspiring Charge and Larger than Life as two win conditions your opponent has to play around. And... honestly those cards aren't very good and Green White actually just sort of ends up being a vanilla stompy deck more often than not. Probably you should just ignore the designer game plan and draft mid range creatures in your colors.
Target Commons:
Your goal is to go low to the ground and be aggro as fuck.When your opponent stalls the board you either start tapping your creatures to crew trains and cars to go over the top or you blast a way through with Welding Sparks and Privilege Revocation.
Target Commons:
Bonus Common:
So... that's kind of a 4/3 Trampler for two fucking mana. It peters out after two attacks unless you keep feeding it, but you weren't expecting it to last long anyway. Red/Green is like the old Atarka Red decks. Like Red/White, you don't really want to spend more than 3 mana on a creature, but your goal here is to put so much pressure on your opponent's life total that they have to trade down with your aggressive creatures and have enough Trample and Burn that you have reach for the last few points of damage if people stop you cold.
Target Commons:
A Note On Creatures
Even a creature light deck like Black/Blue is still going to be running like 10 creatures in a 40 card deck. A creature heavy deck could plausibly have 20 creatures and three spells (which would probably just be removal spells for enemy creatures at that point). Decks don't have a lot of room for durdle and combat tricks, even if that is their primary goal. A deck like Red/White Speedway is looking for some Red and White combat tricks, but it still needs to have a bunch of creatures in it and will take dumb creatures that don't fit its game plan all that well if that's what's there. Yes, you'd like to fill your deck with Gearshift Aces and Speedway Fanatics to pilot powerful freight trains of destruction, but you might end up playing a Wandering Giant because it's Draft and you don't get to choose what gets opened.
Inventions
Some packs have special chase cards in them that aren't in the normal set but are worth a lot of money and can be played in some eternal formats. If you open one of them, you should take it no matter what is in the rest of the pack. You might not be able to effectively use it in whatever deck you end up drafting, but they are individually worth more money than your entry fee into the draft, so just fucking do it.
The Orange Border and funky pi symbol indicate that this card is worth money. The Cloudstone Curio is part of some dumb infinite combos in eternal formats, but normally is not expensive. The Kaladesh Invention version costs sixty dollars.
-Username17