Mana Echoes - Episode 1

Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest MtGPQ General Discussion
1

Greetings, everyone!

This is the first in a series of articles designed to share insights into the 2025 development roadmap for Magic: Puzzle Quest.

We’ll be the first to admit—communication hasn’t been ideal over the past few months. Some of the news shared wasn’t always the most exciting, nor was it delivered with the best timing. So, let’s start by addressing that!

Rise to the Challenge

Magic: Puzzle Quest is a unique gem among mobile games, and it’s on track to celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2025! We firmly believe in its potential to reach new heights, but to achieve that, we must overcome certain challenges. Let’s take a look at some of the key obstacles and triumphs along the way.

A Faster Release Schedule

When Webcore took over development, the time between the release of a Magic: The Gathering tabletop set and its arrival in Magic: Puzzle Quest ranged from 30 to 50 days. This delay wasn’t ideal—players naturally want access to the latest content as soon as possible. Through extensive collaboration with Wizards of the Coast (WotC), we’ve managed to synchronize our releases with the tabletop launch. Now, Magic: Puzzle Quest updates arrive the Tuesday following the official tabletop release. (We could launch even sooner, but we know the community prefers to avoid weekend version updates!)

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Keeping Up with More Frequent Releases

The number of sets released each year has also increased. In 2023, four new sets debuted in Magic: Puzzle Quest. In 2024, that number grew to six—and we plan to maintain that pace in 2025. Keeping up with this faster release schedule has been a challenge, pushing our team to improve processes across the board. While our priority has been delivering content on time, this shift had its (mana) cost.

Expanding Set Content

Another major improvement has been aligning the size of digital sets more closely with their tabletop counterparts. Previously, Magic: Puzzle Quest sets were often smaller. Now, almost every card from a new set that wasn’t already in the game is included—either in the main set or as part of event support. This change is significant because, as one of our Game Design leads put it:

“I understand that Magic: Puzzle Quest cannot restrict itself to the best Rare/Mythic/Masterpiece all the time. We noticed that part of the players enjoy building new decks as part of the process to face new challenges, and having options at these moments is crucial. Bringing more cards per set allows us to have more peace of mind when creating events with meaningful deck-building restrictions, such as Commoner Cup or [Redacted]”

Balancing Content with Stability

Delivering timely content is crucial, but ensuring game stability is just as important. We’ve made significant progress in fixing long-standing bugs, such as the consistent soft-locks when seed gems were used or the overhaul of the Outcast mechanic, but the increased update frequency initially strained our QA pipelines, leading to some persistent (and occasionally resurfacing) issues. However, through continuous improvements to QA routines and tools, the number of issues reaching players has significantly decreased over time.

Prioritizing Features That Matter

Another area impacted by the accelerated release schedule has been game improvements and revamps. A lot has changed in gaming since 2015, and Magic: Puzzle Quest has evolved through ten years, three development studios, and countless contributors. With over a million lines of code, introducing updates or new features presents unique challenges.

To maintain content momentum without neglecting quality-of-life improvements, we’ve prioritized features that offer high value and that could be implemented faster into the game. Some changes, like granting all event charges at the start of an event, introducing set-specific crafting to legacy sets, or implementing Invite Codes for Coalitions, have been well received. However, not every change landed as intended—such as the ability to purchase additional packs while still having unopened ones, which left some players puzzled.

This experience reinforced an important lesson: just because we can implement a feature quickly doesn’t always mean we should release it immediately. Moving forward, our approach to feature development will be more deliberate, and you’ll see the results of these refinements throughout the year.

Strengthening Communication

We recognize that you want more transparency from the development team. That’s why this article series will provide regular updates, complementing existing efforts like the Monthly Q&A. Speaking of which, we acknowledge that the answers to the questions submitted in December 2024 were delayed. They are now available, and we apologize for the wait—January was a busy month. Rest assured, the answers from January 2025 will be shared soon.

Looking Ahead

In our next article, set to go live two weeks from now, we’ll take a deeper dive into Magic: Puzzle Quest events—past, present, and future. Stay tuned!

Thank you for being part of this journey with us!

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Thank you for a peek under the bonnet. Much appreciated!

Looking forward to seeing more to you here on the forums.

You are saying that the number of sets AND the number of cards per set increases. Be prepared that some of the collectors will be unhappy about not be able to get every card. Also this change will mean less time to tinker with a set before the next set arrives. This could also be seen as a negative by some players.

I would love to hear something about the free cards/full mana problem and the combo issue, which hampers this game. I hope you’ll use this as inspiration for coming articles..

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VERY needed and appreciated update @Magic_PQ_Support_Team , this is a nice, “Set up” for what can hope to be a more open dialog of the future of the game, and IF you guys can maintain this communication pace, will go a LONG way to help the player base feel more involved and in the loop.

Thanks guys.

Now… make good on it.

GM

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This was pretty good. It mostly summarized the past more than it said much about what’s coming in 2025 though. Since it’s only episode 1 I’m presuming we’ll get something more future oriented next episode since it had that bit about past, present, and future in the Looking Ahead section.

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Really glad to see this in my inbox when I logged into the game this morning and I’m looking forward to seeing more in the future!

You’ve done some really good things (all charges up-front, using the game’s inbox, not pushing updates on weekends) and some things that we just don’t understand at all.

I hope that you’ll incorporate some of the other QoL improvements that have been suggested and I hope that you’ll continue making an effort with the one thing that has consistently been at the top of our wishlist; better communication.

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Good to get some basic info on what’s coming up, thx!

The big change in 2025 in paper is of course to do with the Universes Beyond sets! Can you tell us how MTGPQ will deal with these sets?

And can you give us any more info on this ‘bigger effort to readjust how rewards work in the game as a whole’? Because all we’ve seen so far is you cutting our daily rewards which, you may have noticed, was not well received!

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“Through extensive collaboration with Wizards of the Coast…”

Interesting. Kinda liking the sound of that, and hoping it is good news.

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This is much needed and much apreciated. !

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Very interesting! As it was said, this was mainly a recap of how things have been going. I am looking forward to the next newsletter which will hopefully give more insight into where things are going next.

This was a welcome bit of communication though, and is a bit encouraging, so thanks!

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Great piece of communication, and it’s helpful to see things from your perspective. More of this please!!

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I’ll be reading these with much attention. Looking forward to them and thank you.

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Thank you for the time and effort put into this, very much appreciated! Makes me feel hopeful for the game.

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Wow, I really don’t like the changes. More frequent sets and bigger sets mean it will be much harder for players to keep up with their collections. It also means newer players will have an even steeper hill to climb to build their collections and work on older sets at the same time.

Unless they’re going to double the amount of resources players can earn, doubling the amount of cards in the game is really bad news.

On the plus side, I do appreciate the communication from the development team. I’d love to see you guys do a Q&A session. With Goz or Nalthazar (or Mainloop or Coach). Heck make the rounds and give them each 10-15 minutes. That would help generate buzz and give more insight on why you’re making the changes you are, communicate your design philosophy, and just relate to the community a little more.

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I got to agree with Undead44, more sets with more cards just means less opportunity to get those cards. I’m assuming all these sets will be standard legal in this game, so we are going to be juggling 15+ sets at a time as standard, where it used to be 6-8 (ignoring the perma-standard sets).

From past experience, bigger effort to balance rewards just means less rewards given. It’s rarely to our benefit (the original rising tensions event is an exception that got pulled from us to prove the point).

We have been told for years that larger QOL improvements were in the works, but it was a big undertaking so they could never give information on it. That can has been kicked down the road for so long that any mention of it now largely rings hollow. Unfortunately this game is on it’s third developer, so any talk about planned changes has the past reputation to over come, and it’s largely been empty promises.

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“Bringing more cards per set allows us to have more peace of mind when creating events with meaningful deck building restrictions” sounds like: We could add less unplayable “very bad” cards per set and add more balanced ones (instead a bunch of meh and 4 broken cards per set) so people could create more different strategies in their decks, but is more interesting add more sets and cards per set so will be more difficult to get the key cards that everybody is playing because the power level of standard is absolutely absurd. Also any new game format not so broken than standard will help people to enjoy with other kind of deck and strategies like sealed decks, Commander like games, playing only 1 MP/Mythic per deck, decks with 15 or 20 cards instead always 10 with restricted rarity… (lot of possibilities). We have only 10 cards to make our decks, it is even helpful have less cards per set if they are not relevants.
A little resume: No news about the future.
Where are really needed features promissed to the player´s life quality as for example?:

  • Interface changes (PW filter into the events, still not even color filter)
  • Import/Export decks and/or more deck slots
  • Changes with matchmaking: All new people who arrive to platinum must play vs the very best cards/deck in the
    format. Same problem when you stop playing and come again years later with no meta standard cards.
  • Anything about less or faster ingame animations for a better game experience?

These are not promissed but will be very useful too:
Any “mark card as favorite” system to not to search between all the useless cards?
More filters to the deck builder as "not showing cards with the keywords " like searching removals that not make “objetive”. There are lot of cases where would be useful.

With more than one year and a half there was no time to some of these features but yes to quickly add PM2 (more cards) to the game.

My feelings lot of time ago is the game became into a farming game (at least for free to play players as me) where you need to play a lot of games (same events once and again, zero freshness and creativity) every day to get a tiny amount of resources, so you finally play every game as fast as you can, not to lost a lot of time doing this instead of few matches and more enjoyable ones. Even doing this, getting a specific card requires a lot of resources (especially if it is a masterpiece).
So adding 2 more set per year and more cards per set (coupled with the reduction of monthly login resources not yet explained) in MY PERSONAL feeling means that we have to work even harder to get the keycards, and fill the game with more and more cards that actually we don´t need and also feels like the game is going to a “Pay to Have Fun/Win” step by step.

Also, and this is MY opinion, events feels like I am playing always the same match once and again only changing the objetives (which lot of times become annoying and make the match get longer as killing 5 enemies creatures, your creatures must die, win in 8 or more turns…). Will we have some new game system other than the current event system any time?. The 2 that really feels a little different are “Kalemne vs Daxos” and “Nissa vs Eldrazi” and I don´t remember the last time we could play one of them.

Looks like there are very bad news for me in this post.