As a new player, I can definitely say that the lack of runes is a significant disadvantage. You can buy cards, but not progression… but the progression on PWs is a significant time suck.
In my opinion, the card mastery system makes sense. Use the card, learn it, gain mastery… why not build on that? Earn color points for mastering cards and use those points to level PWs of the appropriate color
Using mastery points to level PWs is actually a good idea.
Alternatively they can keep everything “as is” and reduce leveling cost
Leveling cost has been the same as long as I’ve been playing, and possible since release. Changing that is probably a bad idea, and is probably why the whole “gain xp while playing” thing won’t happen.
Giving us more runes for assorted things, however, would be a serviceable workaround. Its been suggested several times that mastering a card should give runes as a reward/incentive, I think that would work perfectly within the app as is.
Now that I have though more about it, rewarding runes with card mastery would be great accept that we expose another issue with progression. Racing to higher tiers of overall color mastery is actually bad for a new player. I am at gold right now. I would love platinum rewards, but until I get a better collection, I don’t want to increase my grind with losses against mythic and masterpiece decks in PvP platinum. It is almost counterproductive. The whole progression experience needs to be smoothed out
Remember, the purpose of the tiers is both to separate new players from the old and to reward top-level players. There are already a ton of things incentivizing people to go up, this would just be one more. And if you have the collection to master that many cards quickly, you’ll probably do fine at platinum anyway.
If most of these events were standard only, I would agree with you. Training grounds are not. Across Ixalan is, but you still have to have the cards to put together a deck. I went from bronze to gold pretty quickly. I didn’t even really try
part of the biggesnt thing on mastery is not that you have used x amount of cards but you have a better understanding about the mechanics of the game and can make decks that can be competitive even with sub par cards
There isn’t much more for me to add to this discussion. I have asked month after month if they are going to implement a better system for runes.
Today, I started my Karn grind.
For those who think vet players have an advantage, I’ve been playing since the first couple weeks, I was a pretty heavy QB grinder, I had a decent stockpile when it ended.
As of this morning I needed 160K to max Karn. I’ve managed to grind 10K in Heroic encounters in the past 6 hours (with breaks for real life). I’m so bored. It makes me resent the game.
I don’t mind grinding for runes – I actually love it. I used to take a whole day once and awhile and grind QB for 8+ hours – binge watching something in the background – rare “me” days when I didn’t have to worry about kids and could do whatever I wanted. That’s what I wanted to do.
I’d still like to do that, but I want a fun way to do it.
QB was fun because I never knew what I was going to play against. I could cycle through all of my PW, or just grind with one or 2 and see how many points I could get in an hour.
I had more to show for it than just runes, I had my win % and my total games – I was proud of those all-time stats.
Now – we have Heroic Encounters. Thirty possible decks, the same thing over and over – once initial achievements are met, there’s nothing to show for it. It is literally playing to play – not playing to meet a goal or have fun.
I could master cards… I guess. But what’s the point? I’ve been in Platinum for a year and a half, there’s no where to go with that.
I’ll grind all day long, but please, give us an interesting way to do it.
that is what i do bken, i work nights so i have the time but it can get mindnumbingly well mindnumbing, does help i fell into the trap and got a lot of the better new pws, vraska is leveled h2 no karn 24, angrath 30, and now more will be out soon? hmm yay looks like grinding is the only way to have a chance.
Yeah, we need Quick Battle back! @Oktagon_Daiane @Brigby
As an alternative, I propose keeping Training Grounds, raising the runes (maybe to 300), letting us keep our all time battle record and win % and giving us some kind of leaderboard with other rewards every 3 days.
It doesn’t have to be called Quick Battle, right?
300 per win is still too low even if we’re desperate for runes. TG does not have to match QB and suggest upping it to 500 or more runes a win.
Much easier for both new and vets. pvp is much harder than heroic; higher reward makes grinding less painful.
What about redesign of xp entirely? Create new currency (convert existing runes on some announced ratio so users may decide to spend it earlier). Each win in pvp event give you 1-2 tokens. Each win in pve 1-5 (depending on difficulty of such node). Each story 1-3 but no more than x daily. Use this currency as now: for decks (10 tokens?) or to level pw but with flat rate (lvl 1-10 - 5 tokens, 11-20 - 10) or similar progressive like currently (amount of tokens = level to get)? Of course values are just examples. I’d love to have situation when I could level any pw 1-60 within one month just collecting monthly reward, playing tg and ai daily)