*****Magneto (Brotherhood Leader)*****

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ Character Discussion Speculation and Concepts
1

This is my first attempt at building out a 5-star character, so my numbers may be WAY off.

Deflection - Yellow passive
Magneto turns every scrap of nearby metal into a shield to deflect incoming attacks. Whenever magneto takes damage, reduce that damage by 600 for every Yellow AP his team has, then Magneto consume up to 2 Yellow AP.

At the start of his turn, Magneto converts 1 basic blue or green tile to yellow.

Level 2: Converts up to 2 basic blue or green tiles to yellow at the start of his turn. Reduces damage by 680 per Yellow AP.
Level 3: Reduces damage by 740 per Yellow AP. Magneto can now convert special tiles to yellow.
Level 4: Converts up to 3 blue or green tiles. Reduces damage by 800 per Yellow AP.
Level 5: Converts up to 4 blue or green tiles. Reduces damage by 860 per Yellow AP.

At max level:
Level 3: Converts up to 3 blue or green tiles. Reduces damage by 2500 per Yellow AP, then consumes up to 2 Yellow AP.
Level 4: Converts up to 3 blue or green tiles. Reduces damage by 2800 per Yellow AP.
Level 5: Converts up to 4 blue or green tiles. Reduces damage by 3200 per Yellow AP.

Magnetic Assault - 8 Purple AP
Magneto uses his mastery of magnetism to hurl metallic projectiles and bind his enemies in scrap metal prisons. Lashes the enemy team for 550 damage twice, then stuns the strongest enemy (enemy with the most health) for 1 turn.

Level 2: Lashes the enemy team for 575 damage, twice.
Level 3: Lashes the enemy team for 625 damage, twice, then stuns the strongest enemy for 2 turns.
Level 4: If the strongest enemy is already stunned, stuns the enemy team instead.
Level 5: This power deals double damage to enemies that are already stunned (before firing the power).

At max level:
Level 3: Lashes the enemy team for 2400 damage, twice, then stuns the strongest enemy for 2 turns.
Level 4: If the strongest enemy is already stunned, stuns the enemy team instead.
Level 5: Deals double damage to enemies that are already stunned (before firing the power).

Army of Mutants - 10 Black AP
Whatever his goals, Magneto deploys the most powerful mutants to carry them out. Choose one:
Avalanche turns the tide of the fight, stealing up to 3 of the strongest enemy attack, strike, or protect tiles.
Toad disrupts the enemies, destroying 3 chosen basic tiles, each destroyed tile steals 2 AP of its color.
Mastermind unravels enemy plans, eliminating up to 3 random enemy trap, invisibility or countdown tiles.
Regardless of the choice, Sabertooth then savages the weakest visible enemy (enemy with the lowest health) for 3200 damage.

Level 2: Affects up to 4 tiles. Deals 3600 damage to the weakest enemy.
Level 3: Affects up to 5 tiles. Deals 4000 damage to the weakest enemy.
Level 4: If there are fewer than 3 tiles of the chosen type to affect, this power restores 5 Black AP.
Level 5: Deals 4800 damage to the weakest enemy.

At max level:
Level 3: Affects up to 5 tiles. Deals 16,000 damage to the weakest enemy.
Level 4: If there are fewer than 3 tiles of the chosen type to affect, this power restores 5 Black AP.
Level 5: Deals 19,000 damage to the weakest enemy.

2

My design goals:

Deflection
Yellow conversion should create some matches and cascades, which will trend toward Magneto’s colors as he’s draining the board of green and blue. I don’t know of a character with a passive color swap, so I thought that would be a fun experiment. His deflection defense should get pretty intimidating at high AP levels, but it can be drained quickly by a series of small hits. A cascade chain of 3-4 would drain 6-8 AP, so even if you let his yellow AP pool grow too high, there’s a path to defeating him.

Magnetic Assault
This hits everyone twice, which can double-dip on strike tiles, but also get double-punished by protect tiles and reaction passives. My goal was for it not to do stellar damage, but for it to scale to punishing levels when combined with stuns. There is an obvious combo here of stunning the strongest enemy, then using this power to stun the enemy team, then using this power again to do some pretty terrible team damage. I’m really not sure if the AP cost and damage of that combo is properly balanced to 5-star tier.

Army of Mutants
Ah the ubiquitous power that does lots of different stuff! i was trying to approach this from the standpoint of choices. I wanted the player to have some interesting strategic options (as Magneto is all about strategy, right?) that were still pretty quick to choose and pull off. The 5-AP refund leads to a little tactical trickiness as you might deliberately choose one of the “useless” options (removing traps/CDs that don’t exist) to get the cheap damage.

I also thought it would be fun to make a character that can’t actually pick his targets with his powers. This is a trade-off between making the player choice a bit more limited (or at least focused on different things) and making the AI player more consistently effective. But maybe that’s not fun, in which case it’s pretty obvious how to undo that decision.

3

I think his powers are a bit convoluted. I get you’re trying to make the different ranks offer build choices… But the brain space to remember which level does what weighs the build down.

The damage reduction on Yellow, or maybe the passive green/blue conversion, is really strong, maybe too strong… But Yellow isn’t a strong color in the 5-tier so it’s probably ok and an interesting counter to Blue/Green. Like you said a cascade of a few matches would drain their yellow AP completely, plus -3000 damage is only like 20% or less of many attacks. Probably fine. Pretty cool!

I’d suggest Magnetic Assault just has passive “Magneto Deals double damage to Stunned characters”..or some reasonable amount (+80%)… the “if the strongest is stunned, stun the whole team” bit is complex and I like it, with fun combo ability and not too hard to grok. I’d just make ranks 3-5 be 2-4 waves of the same low damage, actually, 3-5 waves of the listed damage would still be low for max level.

I like Army of Mutants a lot but I’d make Toad’s random, but 3 AP per tile. I don’t like having to select him then select some tiles.

4

by “up to 2 yellow AP” do you mean that it will protect up to 8 ap’s worth of yellow but only drain 2. Assuming team had 8 yellow ap.

I also think Toad’s power should be random. I like choice powers, but I also like matches going faster and in this case the choice is very strong (maybe over powered) and would take too much time to choose. IMO.

Magnetic Assault sounds good, but too world. Probably too difficult to follow. Which if you’re playing a 5 :star: might be ok, since I think it is fair that they be a bit more complicated. But simplicity is also good.

5

I really like the idea of stunning the team if the main guy is already stunned.

6

The damage reduction would be fine but the passive tile change is op. 64 tiles on the board, divided by 7 tile types means an average of 9 for each tile. 4 green/blue lost per turn means the green/blue average moves down to 5 to 9 on one turn with a 1in 7 chance of generating a new one from falling tiles. This leads to near no green/blue on the field with normal matches. You’re relying on Cascades to replenish these through large number theory returning things to average, but cascades would have to clear board for that. Which is clearly imbalanced for the AP generation.

I think a functional alternative would be something like black bolt. Charge tiles each turn up to a point and have him reduce incoming damage for each charged tile. Maybe do something like matching a charged tile also swaps a blue and red and then deals damage. Would make him a strong predator against charged tile characters and a great Ally for them.

7

Overall, I like the build. I feel like yellow is too strong, but I really don’t know, especially when it comes to 5*'s.

The main problem I see is that black uses multiple characters that D3 would have to get lic for, and since their X-Men, and it looks like there is a bias against those mutants, I doubt we would see it anytime soon… :frowning: