We'd like to take a moment to talk about Ixalan; more precisely, Ixalan cards' mana costs. Since release, we've been closely monitoring the forums, in order to gather feedback. A recurring one was that the cards in Ixalan were costed above the curve of the game. Because of that, we re-evaluated the collection as a whole and identified the issues that led to those high costs.
To summarize:
We added two new mechanics in Ixalan (Explore and Treasures) that increased the mana generation potential for players. The impact of this was overestimated.
We wanted to address the power creep issue.
Another issue was the self destructing supports. While definitely over-used in Ixalan, the mechanic will remain a tool with which we control very powerful supports. Rest assured, however, the mechanic’s use will be significantly reduced in future collections. In order to help ease the issue with XLN’s self-destructing supports, while keeping with our planned RIX release, we have increased their starting shield and reduced cost where necessary.
Before we show the changes, we’d like to thank the community for the mountain-load of useful feedback that allowed us to quickly identify the issue and correct it for future collections. So thank you for being an active and passionate community.
In light of that, we have decided to rebalance the set to bring the cost more in-line with the game's overall cost/stat line. Here are the changes to the Ixalan Planeswalkers and Cards.