Thank you for writing this Dave. As usual, you hit the nail on the head. My main concern is that this feels VERY similar to Aggy's 'new mode' distractions when he pulled devs off of vital SPL work to focus on the company's new games. We have had focus issues for years, and we need to feel confident that the team is learning how to focus, finish what needs to be done, and not get sidelined with new ideas before finishing those that are much more important.

We have very limited resources and very limited time to catch this bull run. We need ALL of our focus on attracting and maintaining new players. If we are going to spend dev time on a new game mode, it should be a mode that NEW PLAYERS can enjoy, not a mode specifically meant to target 'players with large collections' which has ZERO chance of new players participating. In fact, if a new player were to accidentally play this mode and suddenly find their cards on cooldown... man, there are so many things to consider here that are not even on the table. I fear this is a whole Pandora's Box of unseen consequences that are not being considered.

As mondroid points out, this mode just gives a bigger piece of the pie to legacy whales with ZERO benefit for our most important demographic, new players. I can't wrap my head around the stated belief that those with large collections have been neglected, which is the stated reasoning behind this mode is being launched.
Land has consumed SO much of our dev resources and will consume so much more before we even get to actual spells and items. Land is exactly what Matt claims this game needs, it IS that asset management mode he speaks of. And the promo cards being marketed to whales (Matt's own words - "we needed something for whales to buy" hence the pricing of the promos), and the auction card... these are ALL new things that are pretty much 'whale exclusive' regarding community participation.

It's the most important demographic being neglected once again, the bronze and silver players. And at a time when these players need to be considered our MOST important asset...

If the goal here is to bring value to cards by creating demand, it's missing the mark. The only real long term way to create PERMANENT demand for cards is to CONSTANTLY GROW OUR PLAYER BASE.

This mode is an incredibly dangerous gamble at this point in time, as it has the very real potential to drive even more existing players away at the worse possible time. This again points to the issue of TIMING, a lesson the team is in desperate need of learning!!
If this mode was proposed a year from now after a successful marketing campaign that brought in a lot of new players, if our NPE and tutorial was finished and successful, if ranked was 'working' as intended regarding levels/matching, and a new game mode or two had been launched that focused on ALL players, or even just one for the little guys, THEN this mode would likely have been embraced as one more cool thing in the ecosystem to add variety. Instead, because of the timing, it's a wedge issue and a distraction from what we really need to focus on right now.