I'm sure it actually helped with a lot of cards in the long run, but damn looking at prices of tarmogoyf and all that jazz it doesn't feel like MM helped at all lol.
The immediate result of MM was to increase supply (which noticeably, though not hugely, reduced prices across the board) but the secondary result was to dramatically increase demand by getting more people to play Modern. The end result was that there are noticeably more people with the cards needed to play Modern in total, the most vital cards still have very little liquid supply so their prices have gone up, but a lot of other stuff has become more broadly available.
I think they could print at a higher, but still limited, volume such that most cards saw a meaningful reduction in price but valuable cards didn't tank into the basement, basically.
Some other interesting new token art:
That Pentavite token is old, I think they sent those out in Player Rewards mailings back in the day.
I also think the current mulligan system can be improved in many ways to make variance less punishing.
You have to balance this stuff out. At a certain level, reducing variance improves gameplay and increases the role of skill (someone who can use scrylands correctly will play better and win more often than someone who cannot.) Once you cross a certain threshold, though, it starts to reduce skill. If you make the mana system less variant, you eliminate the skill of building a deck with proper manabase and curve, because you can just kind of throw stuff together and it'll work. If you make card quality less variant, you make it easier to have a "good enough" deck without taking the effort to tune it.
Song of Dryads made mostly as a versatile Green Planeswalker bullet. From the way he talks, there didn't seem to be much color pie controversy with the design/development team though he recognizes that Maro wouldn't be a fan of it.
Literally everyone in R&D is less of a hardliner about this than Maro is. I guess it's cool that someone has to be and he's probably the right person for it, but I'm glad there are people like Forsythe working on the game who take a different approach. The recent Core Sets really helped inject some old-school feeling that I think helped bring about the game's recent success, and I honestly don't think Rosewater's ultra-restrictive approach could have gotten there.
Working in R&D is awesome. Working in the digital side = don't do it.
Fucking loooool. Emmons is the second GDS2 vet who left and talked shit about WotC digital almost immediately.
No straight-up Zombs...
