Curent and future state of the game discussion

Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest MtGPQ General Discussion
1

Quick Battle Match Time
As in, as the developer’s of the game, is there a target you’re shooting for regarding how long an average PvP battle should take? I’ve seen some mention of how Nissa should be the baseline of how the game should flow, and for me that means QBs should take anywhere from 2-5 minutes. Would I be correct in assuming that ~5 minutes per fight is what you guys are shooting for?

Health Loss per Fight
This is something that hasn’t really been discussed yet. In Paper MtG (henceforth known as Vanilla Magic or just Vanilla) it doesn’t matter how much life you lose in a match as long as you win since your health resets at the end of the match. This means strategies that involve self damage aren’t as bad as they are in MtGPQ. In MtGPQ, your total health is an ever depleting resource that needs to be conserved as much as possible.

Certain Planeswalkers are great at mitigating health loss, namely Gideon (through Lifelink and Vigilance) and Nissa (through beefy defensive creatures like Skysnare Spider and Mantle of Webs). Jace is pretty good at mitigating damage but playing conservatively means your games take forever and his main ability (-6/-0 to target creature for 3 mana) is being nerfed significantly in the next patch.

Chandra and Lilliana are much worse at health conservation. Chandra wins games pretty quick but the lack of good defenders means she is usually taking a chunk of damage every match. Lilliana is even worse than that. Lilliana also suffers from a lack of good defenders and furthermore, some of her skills and cards actually deal damage to her. So even when you win, it can feel like losing.

I’m worried that the new Planeswalker Ob Nixilis, while he may be powerful and great for Story mode, will be pretty abysmal at sustained PvP matches because, like Liliana, he is most powerful when he uses his own health pool to fuel his abilities and deck.

Potential Solution: Return some or all of a Planesewalker’s health pool when you win a game. If you lose a game or quit the match it should work as it currently does, but winning a match needs to return health if you want self damaging Planeswalker’s to have a chance in the current meta game. If the changes go through as is, why would I play a Planeswalker that can’t self sustain and causes me to use a lot more healthpacks than one with lifelink or defenders? This is especially true if match time is normalized as per your stated goals.

Inability to Complete a Collection
Once you reach a critical mass of cards, it becomes virtually impossible to complete your collection by opening packs/bundles. Right now I don’t even try for a fat pack in QB anymore since I’m better off coming in 17-26th in order to win Crystals for a future BFZ Big Box purchase. If need be, I can have my statistician wife plot an actual data chart showing how unlikely it is that I’ll ever complete my collection now that I’m only 13 cards away from a full Origins set. There NEEDS to be a way to purchase individual cards with Crystals. I suggest something like once you have at least 65-85% of an Expansion (e.g. Origins or Battle for Zendikar), you can purchase individual cards from that expansion for:

  • Mythics: 200 Crystals ($10)
  • Rares: 140 Crystals ($7)
  • Uncommons: 60 Crystals ($3)
  • Commons: 20 Crystals ($1)

Purchasing cards would be expensive, but if you’re waiting on a single Mythic to finish off your deck it’s way more worth it to buy a single card than open 5 packs of duplicates in a Fat Pack. Also, consider giving out crystals for all PvP rewards from 1-27 instead of packs. That way you don’t have sandbag winning in order to get into a lower bracket which is what many of us are doing now.

How do you acquire older set cards once you move on to the next expansion?
I realize that people will still be able to buy them with earned crystals, but for newer players they’re kinda screwed. And since Vanilla releases a new expansion every 3 months, things could get very complicated. Has there been any internal discussion about how to address that? If there’s an OP chase card in Origins, but a new player started during Oath of the Gatewatch (the next expansion after Battle for Zendikar) are they doomed to be underpowered forever? Purchasing Crystals can be a great head start but they won’t help you if you’re looking for a single card and it’s unreasonable to expect any percentage of the playerbase to shell out hundreds of dollars in order to get a handful of cards they need from an older set.

Pack Percentages
I just want to reiterate that it’s a very sour point for us players that the developers do not publish the percentages for packs, e.g. Fat Packs have 1% chance for mythics, 5% chance for rares and so on. Your sister game MPQ already does this, largely because the players kept asking for it over and over again, and nobody revolted or died. At the very least, could you make it so that you can’t get duplicate cards in the same pack. I once had a single 5 card booster that gave me 3 copies of Bonded Construct, and it was beyond frustrating. Since duplicates are essentially worthless it really is a crappy feeling when you get multiples in a single pack.

And finally,

Jerry Seinfeld Voice, “What’s the Deal with Events???”
Game’s been out for over 5 months now…I think you’re probably as tired of the empty “Events” tab as we are. If events aren’t making it into this patch can you at least talk about what events will be like when they soonventually come out? (With the caveat that things may change of course). Even if events were just rotating chapters of Story Mode with an added degree of difficulty it’d be nice to have SOMETHING to do once we finish the base story mode content.

2

RE: Health loss - I think their idea is that you should play different Planeswalkers. If so, I think there are better ways to incentivize this. For example, if PvP mode gave out an extra bonus point if you play with a different Planeswalker than you did last match. Or, if you could earn extra crystals in Story Mode if you beat a challenge with a different Planeswalker.

RE: Single cards - there absolutely needs to be a way to get single cards. I don’t think this can be emphasized enough. It will absolutely kill the game if people can’t get singles. Some possibilities:

  • A new type of pack, which contains one card which you don’t already have.

  • Prize payouts in the PvP mode should be a card you don’t already have.

  • The ability to trade duplicates for a card you don’t already have. Even if it’s something ridiculous like 1,000 duplicate cards gets you a non-duplicate.

My assumption up to this point has been that there would be some way to convert duplicate cards into non-duplicate cards. I don’t really see the point of playing for hours to win a fat pack, and then the fat pack yields 20 duplicate cards that I can then trade in for 500 runes, which I then can’t use for anything once my Planeswalkers are all upgraded.

3

Thanks for putting all of this together in one place and stating it so well! We can quibble about details but I think this hits the most important topics on the head.

I really wish it was OK for some PW’s to be slower than others, to reflect different color philosophies and styles, but as long as QB races are the primary way to play, I can’t figure out a way to make it work that doesn’t have unintended negative consequences. (Maybe 20-battle minipods that gave a prize to everyone who went 20/20? But even then faster players would be able to enter more pods, or you’d have to limit how often they fire, and it’s never smart to discourage people from playing your game as much as they want.)

I do agree that it would be a real shame if PWs who pay life as a resource (like Liliana and Ob Nixilis) are too uncompetitive - not sure if the right solution is healing between battles or a bonus for switching out.

And yes, a way to complete our collections is really important, whether it’s something like your suggestion or EDHDad’s. No sense designing awesome cards that people can’t play with, even if they’re willing to pay. Doesn’t have to be immediate gratification - it’s also fun to have to work for something - but something more reasonable than what we have.

4

I too would like the ability to complete a set. I currently have 233 cards in the Origins set (missing, I think, 13). But I also have over 1400 duplicates. I would definitely pay or trade for the missing pieces. Especially in the non-mythic groups.

5

Best way to get dupes - based on the upcoming change to allow you to break dupes into runes - is to pay runes for them. This would allow PvP rewards to stay the same, give value to runes, avoid “pay to win,” and generally do a lot for the game in my opinion. I’d expect the prices to be high but it’d still be worth it.

I also think some PWs having powers based on health loss is a development oversight. They may think it’ll be better once Events comes around, or they may figure out a way around it. It may also be that if this game is still going in 6 months we look back and think, “oh right, you used to damage yourself in games sometimes - boy was that silly.”

Pack percentages. Seriously.

Thanks for the roundup! Great issues here.

6

I dont think a pack percentage is needed. Hearthstone doesnt have it and i never felt i needed it.
the problem is this feelings we have been getting for some time now that it seems the % are ridicolously low
If i could find a rare every 2 packs or a mythic every 8 packs maybe that would fix it. But nowadays the feeling is that i buy a bigbox just to get 3 rares, which are dupes and no mythics.
If i could feel im advancing in my collection more often i wouldnt care for %

7

Can someone explain to me the furore over planeswalkers which damage themselves / take more damage to win fast?

Say in 1.4, the average QB game takes the following time for the following planeswalkers:
Ob Nixilis: ~3 minutes per match
Chandra: ~4 minutes per match
(Nerfed) Nissa: ~5 minutes per match

You’re still gonna gain more points by playing Ob and Chandra first till they’re out of health, then switching to Nissa or whoever your main is. And if you cycle between 3 planeswalkers, chances are they will be mostly healed up by the time you cycle back to them.

It’s not like we’re restricted to one planeswalker per QB. So what’s the big issue?

8

The game has 2 kinds of currency, runes manarune.png
and crystals manacrystal.png
. Runes should only be associated with ‘playing the game’ stuff (like planeswalker experience and health regeneration healthpack.png
) and crystals are for buying new cards cardpack.png
.

To address the health question, simply allow healing potions healthpack.png
to be purchased with runes manarune.png
.

As for converting duplicate cards into runes, they should instead be converted into crystals manacrystal.png
since all you can do with them is buy more cards.

However the issue of getting those last few cards in a set is still an issue.
I suggest that making a new kind of pack that GUARANTEES at least 1 non-duplicate per per pack cardpack.png
.
To prevent people from only buying those packs, or making them wayyy to expensive, how about making a new kind of currency - say crystal dust or gems iso8.png
, and you can only buy those special packs with the new currency.

The only way to get this new money iso8.png
would be by converting duplicate cards into it…AND the new packs cardpack.png
can be unlocked to be purchased with regular crystals manacrystal.png
when a players collection reaches 70% of cards in that set. After that point its diminishing returns on your chances to get a new card in a pack, so with these new packs unlocked at that point both players and developers are satisfied. It also quells the pack percentages issue since there is a solution to getting your missing cards once you have a critical mass of cards in a set. Maybe even give the ability to upgrade regular packs to special ones at a cost.

I hope with the expansion that there are many new objectives in story mode, and since you get runes for playing any match, all secondary objectives should be in crystals.
I also wanted to mention that I am very impressed with the rebalancing of the planeswalkers so all abilities cost the same and increase in power as you level. That is a very good solution to getting people to level up. I do think that the 9 cost first rank abilities could be reduced by 1 or 2, however with going to level 60 and adding a 4th rank, we shall see what interactions with planeswalker points are introduced, such as bonuses and cards that interact with them. I would really like some feedback on the ideas I suggested above.

9

You’re misrepresenting what I said. I stated that if all Planeswalkers have normalized match times, as in they all take the same amount of time to finish a match, why would I use a PW that will require healing much more often than a Nissa or Gideon. If the trade off for self damage was faster matches then I wouldn’t have an issue with the mechanic. If however, all PWs are more or less the same for match speed then, again, why bother with the self damagers?

Maybe you’d get more people to diversify their PW choice in Quick battle if you could see who you’re about to be matched with and change your Planeswalker based on that (like you can do in Storymode) since different planeswalkers have better/worse matchups vs other planeswalkers. The bottom line is I’m going to want to use whatever PW is fastest and if Ob Nix or another non sustainable PW ends up being #1 for speed than Ill use them. If all PW match speeds are the same, I’m going to use the PW I enjoy playing the most and is the most consistent.

10

Well of course if they end up balancing all the planeswalkers to have the EXACT same average match time and variance then yes it would make no difference in the planeswalkers. But I think we are overestimating what the developers can do if we assume that is possible.

Jace will always be slower because his abilities do not speed up the game, they work better at slowing the enemy down. This is opposed to Nissa who has her +5/+5 to all ability and ramp cards which at the very least will speed up the match slightly unless they nerf it to dust. Or compared with Chandra who can deal direct damage and has burn spells and creatures with good offensive abilities.

There will always be a difference due to the difference in the cards of each colour and the planeswalker abilities. I believe they are just trying to reduce the differences between planeswalkers so there isn’t one clear best option to go with for QB all the time, and (for Jace) there aren’t ridiculously annoying planeswalkers to play against.