  Creation operators are given for the three distinguished bases of the type
BCD universal character ring of Koike and Terada yielding an elegant way of
treating computations for all three types in a unified manner. Deformed
versions of these operators create symmetric function bases whose expansion in
the universal character basis, has polynomial coefficients in $q$ with
non-negative integer coefficients. We conjecture that these polynomials are
one-dimensional sums associated with crystal bases of finite-dimensional
modules over quantized affine algebras for all nonexceptional affine types.
These polynomials satisfy a Macdonald-type duality.
