We’ve heard a lot of feedback and sentiment from players, when it comes to the new Ixalan event, Race to Orazca. The team has definitely been reviewing them, and with the release of 2.5.0, players will be seeing some changes to the event that should make the experience much more appealing.
What’s Changing:
Event Duration will be reduced to 46 hours, as opposed to the previous 70 hours.
Recharge rates are now set to 8 hours
Initial Charges will be set to 2, and Max Charges will be set to 3
Objectives have been adjusted slightly to be easier
In addition to these changes to event settings, we will also be running the event during the weekday, as opposed to the usual weekend schedule.
I completely agree with this. If max number of charges is 3, you should start off with just a single beginning charge. It puts a lot more pressure on people to get their first round completed if they only have 8 hours until they’re maxed out rather than 16.
All great changes; however, 2 starting charges and max of 3 charges on nodes is high pressure. Only gives 8 hours for people to play before they lose time.. well probably technically 14 hours (depends on end time)
I like the idea of 2 or 3 starting charges with a max of 5. This allows one to clear all nodes and free up a lot of extra time to go do other things, i.e. family time, etc
At minimum, I would settle for 1 starting charge and a max of 3.
P.S. I hope the blue node objective was adjusted because I think it was cast 2 or less spells but the node bonus for merfolk was when a spell is cast this creature gets +1/+1. Unfortunately, these contradict one another.
Ok, now that I have a bit more time, let me qualify my initial statement.
If you’re reading this @LakeStone, @Brigby, please take note, as this applies to all events.
The Pacific and the American West Coast Time Zones are usually 20-hours apart.
To allow your MtGPQ players some degree of flexibility in when they play their nodes/charges in an event, you need to allow flexible times.
Starting charges does nothing to help this, but increasing the maximum holding charges does.
For example, if an event has 8-total charges, players can now choose to play 2 sets of 4 or 4 sets of 2, or some inordinate amount of sets of charges of their choosing, if you set the starting charge to 2 and the max charge to 5, that is 2/5.
Please take into consideration the need for sleep/rest, and other activities (work/study) when designing current and future events.
I propose a minimum of 24-hours between the starting charge and maximum charge for all events, starting with the revised Race to Orazca event.
But anyhow, i dont think i minded the blue node. It was just that the node was pretty much encouraging tribal play a bit but then the objective made merfolks a no-go since your limited to 2 spells. Of course with the tribals being pretty weak against other nontribal cards, it was not the most viable option to begin with.
//Removed Off-Topic Comment That Deviated Thread -Brigby
I don’t understand the reasoning behind moving it to the weekdays. The event had a lot of things going for it - just make some small mods to make it great (align objectives with the static supports, shorten runtime). No need to also move to weekdays or, really, to make the objectives “easier”. Simpler is better here I think.
Can we get some clarification… are the objectives “easier” as stated above, but equally obnoxious, or did they actually change them to be less obnoxious?
I think it would be fine if instead of “take less than X damage”, the objective read “end the game with more than your initial life minus X”. That way you can recover with lifegain.