Reddit AMA with Sam Stoddard, who lead-developed Eldritch Moon. Other than the
massive amount of whining about reprints in the top comment, notable things are:
* Sam came up with land freezing in red.
Stensia Inkeeper was originally a 3/1 creature for 1RR still with its land freezing ability, but they made it late in development, and they felt it wasn't right to push land freezing when they didn't have time to properly test it.
* Red getting
a 2/2 for 1R at common is considered a much bigger deal than, say,
the 2/1 for R with an upside at rare it got the set before due to its significance to Limited.
* Giving creatures higher stats for their cost makes black's destruction spells stronger but makes red's damage spells weaker. It's difficult to adjust red damage spells, because a card for 1R that deals 4 damage to a creature or player is very strong. They can split things up, so that some spells hit only creatures and others only players, but Sam views that as a net negative for red.
* Red-Green Landfall is a lot weaker than they thought it would be.
* They feel they aimed too low on red burn spells this Standard.
* In the future, more of red's power will be in burn spells rather than efficient one-drop creatures.
* They feel
Disdainful Stroke and
Dissolve is about the right power level for blue counter spells.
* With duel decks, they feel it's a mistake if two skilled players are evenly matched using the decks but two beginners are imbalanced 90/10, or vice versa. The decks have to be balanced for multiple levels of skill.
* In Modern, though Infect can win turn two, it can also be stopped with a
Path to Exile, which can be found mainboard in many decks. On the other hand, few decks have mainboard answers to Storm decks. That's why the latter is a problem but not the former.
* Sam also acknowledges that Battle for Zendikar had a lot of problems.
* Concerning whether the cards unique to the upcoming Planeswalker Decks could run into the same issue Reflector Mage did, where it was pushed for its format (Limited) without considering the repercussions to Standard, Sam says it's easier to focus on those cards as a batch.
* Concerning the lack of graveyard-hate in Standard, Sam says they wanted Shadows over Innistrad to have a chance to work. This is a shift from what we saw in the original Innistrad block, where we got
Grafdigger's Cage in Dark Ascension to hate out the decks Innistrad was supposedly pushing.
* They acknowledge that blue card draw is too weak this Standard. A big part of this was overcompensating for Jace, Vryn's Prodigy.
* To get the story in player's hands, they've started printing story moments on strong and splashy cards. They view things like the Eldritch Moon Pro Tour being decided by Emrakul vs. Liliana as being preferable to it being decided by some big monster vs. some necromancer.
* They tested emerge cards with Kozilek's Return, but didn't go so far as to use
Wretched Gryff and
Vessel of Nascency.
* With meld, there just isn't a lot of room for many pairs in a set. He thinks they could maybe get 4 or 5 pairs in a large set, but he thinks 3 in a small set was the right number.
* 2-mana mana dorks (creatures that tap to produce mana) have proven to be weaker than they'd like, outside of
Sylvan Caryatid, which was just frustrating.
* In hindsight, Sam wishes they included more Alpha reprints in Magic Origins.
* Eldritch Evolution exiles itself due to Goblin Dark-Dwellers.
* Comparing the level of changes between large and small sets after the shift to two-set blocks, with Battle for Zendikar -> Oath of the Gatewatch being greater and SOI->EMN being lesser, they will be favoring the level of changes between SOI and EMN.
* The lack of a core set to use as a pivot in Standard has been a big challenge, and he expects that there will be mistakes in the first two years of the two-set block paradigm as a result, but they're getting better at it.
