EnderHomer Hey. The recipe used to be a lot cheaper (just emeralds instead of the emerald blocks) but due to the popularity of ArtMap, and how it can be quite resource intensive (in terms of the systems CPU usage for the server) we decided to up the price of the canvases (I originally wanted it to be diamond blocks..) to help reduce the amount of smaller art maps overall on the server, but still allowing anyone to create anything they want, without staff having to tell them otherwise. Emerald blocks aren’t that rare to come across, if you trade for them in the Discord’s #marketplace or get a villager to trade for emeralds! 😀
Perhaps we can further change the recipe to something else, but it’d still be something ‘expensive’ like emerald blocks.. one netherite ingot?? 😛