Bait and switch? I definitly feel like i've been had (colorless pma)

Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest MtGPQ General Discussion
1

I can understand tweaking the mana costs of cards but this is something else and it does NOT feel right:

I looked at the card gallery on FB the past days and had quite a good picture of the cards, so when I got my chance i went and got them all (except for the lotusses), and to my surprise i find that the casting costs are radically different from what was shown on FB.

suntouched myr goes from 1 mana to 18 mana
Mox opal 5 mana to 18 mana
mox lotus 5 mana to 21 mana
argentum armor 5 mana to 20 mana

And so on.

Oktagon even removed the old card gallery to replace it with a new one without ANY notice.

This feels like they got me excited on purpose and then switched the product at the last possible moment.

@Oktagon_Support I really hope someone over there is emabarrased that they made a mistake, becuase if this is on purpose and to be the way customers are treated, then i’m out. no more VIP, no more gold, no more game at all. I’ll be honest, i feel scammed at this point.


2

They called the cost increase “Balancing” but the increase they did made the cards go from really good and super valuable for any and all PWs to barely usable and not worth their casting cost at all ..

Just look at Darksteel Citadel for example, in the initial card gallery the cost was 5 mana, meaning new Karn could play it from one single swap.

Now it costs 21 mana to play, meaning it takes new Karn 5 turns to fill it with only regular swaps..

And the bad thing is this is just an enabler card that lets you make an effect happen when you cast something ELSE!

So now we have a minimum cost of 21 mana + whatever colourless cards you choose to add to your deck, to remove a single support…
While Demolish for 3 mana already exists!! Permanent Standard!

And for vanguards in current standard there are multiple options so the ability to target those doesn’t really matter at this point

tl;dr
This “balancing act” has only helped us players NOT want the cards and not need them by a mile..

I hope you see this and take notes Oktagon!
@Oktagon_Support

3

They did said that they were changing the pictures in the card gallery before doing it:

https://forums.505go.com/discussion/86783/release-notes-5-6-0#latest

But it still feels like a scam. To me it was false advertising because they post the pictures themselves of their official site just to then say that it was a balancing issue.

I couldn’t agree more with @KrizzB, this makes most of the cards unplayable. Or at least unplayable if you are trying to win the matches :smiley: And like I mentioned in another post, this “balancing act” is just a waste of everyone’s time. It is wasting the designers and developers time making them create a product (design and code a card) that no one will play. And it is a real shame because most of the cards would be playable if they were way cheaper. The effects those cards are interesting and definitely have room in the meta. If they weren’t so unnecessarily expensive to cast.

Arcbound Wanderer is now a 14 mana 1/1 defender that can get bigger by matching activate gems and when it dies it gives +X/+X to another creature where X is its power. That was an interesting card when it cost 2 mana to cast because most of the time you are just dropping a 1/1 that is designed to die. You could drop it in the early game and maybe match one or 2 activate gems before Greg cast any creature that would destroy it. Now it costs 14 mana. That is a real joke. Most of the time you will be investing 2 or 3 turns to drop a 1/1 that will die on Greg’s next turn because it is a 1/1 with defender. Even a Saproling token will destroy it and by the time you cast it Greg definitely already has something in play. That means that you won’t be able to pop any activate gems and you will only be transferring a +1/+1 buff to any other creature (if you have any). Why on earth would anyone want to play that? Specially when they also designed a Planeswalker that makes you start the match with 2 1/1 cat tokens in play for free. That’s 2 times what you will get from Arcbound Wanderer. How is that “balancing” a card? A complete waste of time.

We can give you a whole Planeswalker that creates tons of tokens for free or heals you every turn and that is completely ok. But a 1/1 for 2 mana that can grow if you match specific gems is completely unbalanced and will break the meta.

4

Actually it took a post from madwren after the set was released for them to aknowledge that the preview was incorrect.

And I honestly don’t really care if the first shown pics were beta and this is the rebalanced set: they should have told us before releasing the set. I most certainly wouldn’t have sunk the cash into it that i have had I known…

If there is no response from oktagon, i’ll consider a refund request.

5

In general, I try not to assume malicious intent when the same action can be explained by incompetence. I think that was the case here.

When I first saw the cards, I was excited, and shocked at how cheap they were. The four cheap creatures particularly excited me—on the heals of stuff like Healer of the Pride, Jareth, and Pride Guardian, they were absolutely believable as first-sight cards.

Same for the supports. Mox Lotus was the only one that stood out as “wow, this will power creep the other Moxen” There was no reason to think that Mox Opal wasn’t going to be 5. There was no reason to think that enabler cards like Darksteel Citadel and Basalt Monolith weren’t going to be 5. Black Lotus and Lotus Blossom self-destruct, so again, no reason to assume they weren’t in the “Mirrorpool” class of cheap supports.

I looked at them over lunch, got excited, and then waited for release in a few days. Maybe if I’d taken more time I would have thought it was peculiar that they were ALL 5, 1, or 2. After all, most of the other PMA sets contain a lot of overpriced/non-competitive cards that are just filler for the good stuff, so this set would have been an exception.

Still, I was excited, and when I updated the app, I happily purchased Karn2 and spent some crystals, and after the second pack thought “wait a second” and then sighed, and posted on the update thread for everyone to beware.

I regret purchasing the cards (though I do enjoy Karn2). I think the vast majority of them won’t get played with, and based on some of the design decisions, it’s hard to envision that they understand why.

Anyway, it may not have been intentional, but I don’t expect them to make it right. It’d sure be nice if they did.

6

I have to agree. To me it feels like false advertising. Make the cards cheap in the initial gallery, but at release the actual costs are drastically changed.

It’s hard to believe this has not been done on purpose. I would not go as far and call it a scam, since the spoke about cost changes, but it’s definitely a bait move, trying to make ppl spend their currency and RL money on stuff they thought was way better than the stuff they actually bought.

I think I will contact supports and ask them about it. It just does not feel right, since I only saw the changed cost after I had already bought them in game.
And I also did not notice that they told us about their plan to change the cost until I had purchased anything.

7

Yes, they said they are going to change the Facebook gallery pictures.
But they only said that, after the set was already released and madwren had already pointed at the drastically different casting costs.

That’s some shady business practice right there.

We can’t let this happen without consequences.
What’s the next move they have in reserve?

I am all about supporting the developers and their families with my money, but what I thought that I would get for my money and what I actually got is not even close to one another.
Refund the money, or change the cards to at least playable in the long term.
There is no other way out of this.

8

Yeah how hard would it have been to a small disclaimer to the Facebook post saying something like "mana cost of cards is subject to change it something like that? Still would not be a good thing to do, but at least they would have a leg to stand on with some plausible deniability. As of now, it really reeks of deceptive business practices, even if it doesn’t hold up in the court of law.

9

Hopefully no one buys them and they realize how big of a blunder this is and re-re-do them. I definitely feel cheated buying a pack after seeing the initial gallery then got my card and was super bummed.. then I got my bota pack and was bummed as it was missing content… definitely a swing and a miss this week.

10

Well the deafening silence on oktagon’s part speaks volumes.

I turned VIP off, and wont tirn it back on again.

Fool me once…