This feels like a false perception. In Return to Ravnica, 84 out of 274 cards were multicolor, which is not only almost exactly the same number but a slightly lower ratio of cards. The original Ravnica: City of Guilds contained over 300 cards, of which only 64 were multicolor. There were some cards with things like off-color activation costs and the enhanced spells, plus guild artifact and land cycles, to make up the difference, but even factoring things like that in, the number of cards with a "multicolor connection" still seems to be greater in the most recent Ravnica sets.
Ravnica block sets have many times more multicolor cards than the average set, but they don't completely dominate the card count because multicolor isn't the block theme; the guilds and their mechanical identities are the block theme.
There's definitely fewer hybrid-mana cards in Guilds compared to past Ravnica outings, but it seems as though R&D just wanted to focus on traditional multicolor this go-around, with things like the pushed uncommon cycle for MMNN. There are also design space considerations, as hybrid is much harder to design for than straight multicolor for the simple reason that multicolor is additive (can do things color A can do and/or things color B can do, usually in combination) and hybrid is subtractive (can do only things color A AND color B can do).
EDIT: Invasion, the original set to be marketed as "the multicolor set", had 71 out of 350 of its cards multicolor. Shards of Alara had 57 out of 249 multicolor cards.
Okay, fair enough, I guess I was leaning harder towards Alara Reborn than I thought. So let me rephrase, then: Do you think we'll ever have a set that's similar to ARB again? I actually loved the whole set being gold, and would love to see something like that, or close to it, come back.
I may be in the minority here, but does anyone else feel like more recent multicolor-themed sets aren't 'gold' enough? Looking at Guilds of Ravnica, only like 85/250 cards are multicolor, and that feels way too small to me. Maybe it's because I started playing magic with Alara block, and I loved the 5-color stuff in Conflux and Alara Reborn being all gold, but it feels like we haven't had anything like that in a long time.
I'm not saying a gold set has to be ALL gold, like ARB, but it seems to me like a gold set should at the very least be half multicolor, something like 125/250ish. Or more! Do you think we'll ever get another set like that?
Okay, fair enough, I guess I was leaning harder towards Alara Reborn than I thought. So let me rephrase, then: Do you think we'll ever have a set that's similar to ARB again? I actually loved the whole set being gold, and would love to see something like that, or close to it, come back.
I'm not saying a gold set has to be ALL gold, like ARB, but it seems to me like a gold set should at the very least be half multicolor, something like 125/250ish. Or more! Do you think we'll ever get another set like that?