I’ll cut to the chase: this entire event needs to be an addition to Story Mode.
This is the history of the game that this app is based off of, and story mode has been drastically neglected for years.
We’re almost done with this nostalgic ride (I’m guessing there’s one more cycle before it’s over and as we pass through the Odyssey block. (Judgement through Legions?). And then we’re planet-jumping to Mirrodin, not to see Dominaria again until now (Time-shift was a weird set and I doubt they’ll touch that).
Having spent a good portion of my childhood growing up through these MTG chapters, I got nostalgic seeing some old faces in the battles. It would be sad to see such an important piece of mtg lore, already designed, sink to the depths with all the other nameless events we hardly remember.
@Brigby please pass this idea onto the team, this addition wouldn’t require a lot of work but would go far to satisfying a certain sector of the player-base who’d like to see some form of continuation to story mode.
I like this idea a lot.
Actually, the whole concept sounds like the perfect integration of story into this game for me :
Introduce the story chapter by chapter as an event to make sure everybody can enjoy it (and I do enjoy it, a lot! the current iteration has one of the best boss fights ever), and then add it to the story mode.
I prefer having them as regular events while Dominaria is in Standard, and once Domina leaves would be nice to have them in History. Could be a nice add to the game.
What story does it tell to those who aren’t already initiated?
I started reading the stories on the Magic homepage after playing this for a while. And the connections were there but the story is lost to me by just playing and reading the bits and bobs you get on the loadscreens. And some of those you don’t get to read fully without replaying a fight multiple times to see the screen again.
I’m mildly interested but the game doesn’t really show much to deepen that interest.
One of the (few) additions I’d recommend Octagon makes if they add it to story mode, is to add a brief summary of Dominaria’s storyline progression in the loading screen before each event. So new players can get the rough basics and it would make each battle make a bit more sense.
To clarify: I don’t mean what we currently have summary-wise, which is just a very vague overall summary of the entire thing that doesn’t change as you progress through each event-battle; I mean a different piece per battle, giving a short explanation of what’s happened since the previous in regards to the story
example (hopefully Octagon adds more detail than these short pieces):
The brothers war: Urza and Volrath don’t like each other
Ice Age: Lim-Dul gets necromactic powers and tries to conquer the world. Zombie snowmen wampa stuff
Phyrexian Invasion: Yawgmoth tries to turn Dominaria into Mirrodin (though Mirrodin doesn’t exist yet). Weatherlight funsies
Mirari: Everybody wanted it, Cabal had it. Did funky things
Due to a “A big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff”, as the leading expert in the field of time anomalies explained, several dom characters are at various levels between dead and immortal.
I would love the opportunity to play some of these matches more frequently, they are significantly more interesting than the existing Heroic battles. Perhaps instead of the traditional story mode benefits (complete the match, then complete it with all colors and meet two other secondaries and you’re done), we can have something where playing these matches in Story Mode gives you a fixed reward the first time you beat them, but you can earn bonus runes (and maybe even a trickle of orbs?) by winning the secondaries multiple times. Right now players can get 250 runes for grinding through a Heroic Encounter over and over. Doing something like 250 runes for winning, another 250 runes for meeting a relatively easy secondary, and 5 crafting orbs for meeting a more challenging secondary would give players something interesting to do when they’re out of events to play, and let those of us who are relatively new to the game start making a bigger dent in the overwhelming number of runes and orbs required to max out the nearly 40 planeswalkers the game has produced, and work down the number of Legacy cards which we may never get access to (but will always be at the mercy of in TG and other Legacy events).
The best part of the journey is the rewards. If you add them to story mode you lose all of them unless you change the structure of story mode. Liko OP I believe story mode needs done love, but not by losing some rewards in the process
My suggestion isn’t a replacement to the events. I’m not sure theyll do this runthrough again but I wouldn’t be opposed to it. Story mode would be an addition to running this as an event, for the generous rewards I wouldn’t mind the redundancy
Doing it with this type of reward as an event and then later introducing it into story with more “storylike” rewards is totally fine.
I had an idea for the event that would work both this way and in story potentially.
Have the 4 fights as is, but after you’ve unlocked them you have the exact same 4 fights but with brainy Greg (Announced on the screen as clearly “Hard Mode” or something of course). If people can’t handle it they can just redo the easier ones, like now, but those who want a challenge might get one.
Adding anything to Story Mode is useless, unless there’s some way to reset Story Mode, or unless there’s some way to set Story Mode to spit out anything other than runes.
If I could toggle a switch which allowed me to indicate if I want runes, gems, orbs, cards from Story Mode, then I’d be playing Story Mode all day long.
If I could pay some price like $5 or $10 cash to reset story mode (possibly at a higher power level), so that I can farm gems, I’d probably consider it. If they charge some Puzzle Quest price to do this like $59.99, then I’ll probably skip it, but others might pay it.
