Flavourfully, Eldraine is a win. The book was (as I hear) a little awkwardly written, but the world building done on the plane is fantastic. Every facet of it seems really cool, and is a great homage to the fairy tales many of us grew up with.
But there's one aspect of Eldraine's mechanics that seems to worry me quite a bit, and that is their dedication to mono-colour.
Each of the following cards is in it's own mono-coloured cycle (meaning these all have variations that are Green, Black, Blue, and Red):
All of these cards lean REALLY HEAVILY on mono-white, meaning it would be difficult to play in a two-colour deck. This is exacerbated by the mechanic "Adamant" (which sounds like Addendum from RNA, but that's for another time), which further causes you to lean on one colour.
Here is an example of Adamant, if you aren't familiar with it:
This focus on mono-colour means one of two things: either it will be really difficult to make a multicoloured deck using Eldraine cards, or people will have to rely on expensive dual lands (like the shocklands from Ravnica) to build decks.
- Sticking to monocoloured decks isn't a good thing, because monocoloured decks are almost always less powerful than their multicoloured counterparts. Also, drafting a monocolour deck makes you 2 to 3 times more likely to get shafted on the colour that you need.
- Because of these restrictions, the necessity for shocklands will skyrocket. As it stands right now, just 4 shocklands (for your dual coloured deck) usually will cost you 60 bucks, total. That is by itself an insane price; I can buy Borderlands 3 with that (and honestly, I rather would). This has already been a huge barrier for aspiring Magic players for awhile, and seeing Wizards continue down this path is really worrying. The best solution (in my opinion) is to lower the standard of dual-coloured lands that offer no utility beyond mana production to an Uncommon rarity. This would offer more supply to meet the demand, and would bring the game to more people.
And while I've been advocating for Uncommon shocklands for awhile, I've never expected to really see it happen. What I expected even less, is to see Wizards make the problem worse.
Furthermore, Wizards is trying to push Brawl more. While there's nothing wrong with that, it does clash with their monocolour theme in ELD; everybody knows that monocoloured decks in Commander are almost always subpar, and many of the best cards in the format (like Mirari's Wake) are dual-coloured or more. The same thing applies to Brawl.
Of course, this is only one mechanic in the whole set, so I could be worrying more than I should be. But I'm still disappointed, at the very least, in WOTC's blatant ignorance in what has been a huge barrier into the competitive Magic scene.
