The thing I don't get about the <> thing is why they're changing it on lands. All they had to do was add <> in mana costs, and say its has to be paid for with colorless mana. The other half makes it more confusing, if anything/
Not everyone understands the difference between colorless mana produced and generic mana in cost- the majority of magic players aren't the tournament players who know all the rules! They'd have to have the reminder text "Pay <> with colorless mana only" on every card with <> in its mana cost (which will eventually appear again), which makes sense to people with all the game knowledge, but someone who learned from a friend who learned from their cousin would look at their artifacts, see that they 'pay colorless mana' for them (because their friend/cousin worded it badly), and think they can pay any color mana as colorless- "So why did they bother with this new symbol again? Whatever. Ten forests = Kozilek."
This way there is no way for someone to misinterpret the new mana symbol going forward, as long as they learn "any time you make number mana it's that many <>," which IMO is less complex than trying to explain to someone the difference between the
their painland makes and the
their bonesplitter costs- I have a lot of casual players under my wing that ask a lot of questions, and this has been the hardest thing to get across to them since re-teaching oldschool players all the M10 rules changes. They get that <> costs colorless but get confused when they look at kozilek because they shortcut "
=<>" when they first look at the cards and just stop there.
Oh yeah, spoiler season started today:
Couple new mechanics, couple interesting cards- some themes going forward etc.
