If you would rate your likelihood of recommending this game with start out of a total of 5 
, how many would you give?
Nope.
Puzzle quest great concept.
Magic the gathering great brand
This tho? Not as great as it should be.
Nope. I would have around the start of 2016, when the game seemed like it was bursting with possibilities. Remember when the devs used to do things like rebalance the planeswalkers, or raising the top level to 60? Who knows what they’d do next, maybe upgrade the AI, or the UI? Fix some bugs??
Card balance was clearly a problem in the early days, blue containing most of the worst offenders like Harbinger of the Tides, Claustrophobia and bounce cards in general, but these appeared to be mistakes, and as time went on those mistakes were being fixed (JC admitted to us what a mistake Harbinger was! Imagine that!) Besides, it took me quite a while to get hold of some of those cards as a free player, and so coming up against those blue decks gave me a solid challenge.
I guess most people would point to the halving in drop rates around v1.3 as the first warning sign as to the direction the game would take. I was invested at this point, and had a good collection, but this decision certainly made me think twice about recommending the game to my friends; this might have been when I stopped altogether. As we all know, drop rates would drop further in the future. How aptly named they are.
For me personally, the release of BFZ was kind of a shock. The set was chock full of utterly unplayable cards. Oh, sure, crazy people would come on the forums and defend the design of Zulaport Cutthroat, but these were clearly just the ramblings of mad men. Tellingly, JC took it upon himself to rebalance a huge swathe of common cards, and they all ended up still unplayable. He gave us some bizarre explanation of how this happened involving a ‘card budget’, as if somehow his hands were tied when designing cards by rigid systems of his own making. It would be some time before he would eventually admit just how little time he spent on card design.
In the meantime, of course, at the other end of the spectrum, broken cards and planeswalkers were showing up. What the hell were they thinking with Prism Array, I thought? Was it ‘we must make cards as broken as possible, otherwise people won’t notice they’re broken’? Or was it merely ‘this looks ok, that’s my 30 minutes done on this card, on to the next one!’. More disturbing than stupid power imbalances, however, was the way that they started to let people pay for them… and here comes Kiora. If I hadn’t already stopped recommending this game to people by this point, I certainly had now. $50 for a planeswalker that wasn’t even remotely balanced. Yeah.
I’d go on playing for a long time after that myself, for varying reasons, but I’d never recommend the game again, and, in fact, would tell them that while I still played and enjoyed it, they definitely shouldn’t start. You’d think this would be something of a paradox, but people know how mobile games operate, and they accepted my words as genuine.
I’m somewhere on the fence between 2 and 3; I still play regularly, but also feel as though I’m just hanging on, and couldn’t in good conscience recommend the current state of the game to a new player.
More and more as time goes on, I find myself inclined to take breaks from events, to look for another game (though not necessarily another community) altogether at least until the cycling metagame passes, and in general to come to terms with the apparent reality that despite how invested I or anyone else might be in this game and its community, every mobile game seems to either become a goliath or fade gradually after its first couple years into the indistinct abyss of boundless potential that simply couldn’t meet the funding expectations of its producers forever, at which point the development team will inevitably reduce and ultimately abandon support while working on the next title to repeat the cycle and try to either strike gold or at least refresh their war chest.
I’m still hopeful this game isn’t yet on its last legs (and even if it is, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it last another few years before the player base becomes too small to sustain the costs of production and maintenance), but the brand association with MtG seems at this point to be reflected mainly in the art and card/event names, not necessarily in the customer service, functionality, community-developer dialogue, and card design areas, and without those, it’s not enough to maintain interest amidst some of the game’s shortcomings (e.g. critical bugs, disappointing and ambiguous compensation policies, frustrating lack of tools for coalition management, no way for new players to target even specific commons and uncommons, too early and too steep of a progression wall, etc.).
In a lot of ways, 1.10.2 was a telling turning point for this game; it placed a lot of pressure on the core gameplay experience itself to attract and engage players in lieu of generous event rewards and other competition-based incentives, but while the game has a lot of strategic depth and interesting decisions to make in deckbuilding, hand ordering, and matching alike, those ultimately seem to fall short of the boundary between fun and frustration when matched against an AI whose greatest tools for counterplay are luck and collection (the former of which is a little hazy because it’s very easy to mistake our own blind spots in skills or probabilities as the AI’s luck, but the latter of which isn’t a “skill” that the current game allows for meaningful ways to grow past in the span of a couple months instead of a couple years, with or without premium purchases).
There are still plenty of opportunities remaining to reinvigorate this game (sealed/draft, head to head coalition wars, more collaborative raiding modes to replace current coalition PvE events, additional story mode rewards for newer players, and better universal access to in-game news are merely a few of them), and none of the issues are necessarily impossible to fix with enough time and effort, but it seems an open question with a potentially dubious answer as to whether the devs will find that a better use of their resources than supporting another project entirely at this point.
This game is a frustrating experience because the developers are sitting on a gold mine and refuse to mine it.
The income stream is already there. It’s just untapped. Real pvp would spice up the competitive nature of the game without having to give out insane rewards. Drafting as mentioned. Tournaments. These are all built into the Mtg franchise. Why they refuse to tap into it is beyond me.
I’m still playing it because for some reason it’s still attractive to me… But it could be so much more and that’s the major frustration I have with it.
I still mention the game to people I know who play Mtg. Despite the bugs and horrible decision making… There’s magic here(forgive the pun). They could still turn it around if they stop making stupid decisions.
This games used to be great. A cool adaptation of Magic the Gathering
You had some form or rewarding experience. Your card portfolio progressed. But now even when reaching the top event score you are extremely likely to get one Duplicate after the other. Would you buy a Premium Pack, certainly not. It has become a meaningless grind for nothing. So only one star.
I’m in a position where if asked if the game is good, I’ll say yes. I’ll give them the cliff notes version of the pros and cons, then have a more in depth conversation about the game once they’ve experienced the game a bit. I came in during the bfz block, which several of the og players laud as the beginning of the end. I thought it was great. Card availability was decent as a free player, the game was fun and it had decent rewards. Around kld I joined a coalition. That was when I caught the “sinking ship” bug. A bunch of dudes who were playing slightly longer than me complaining about drop rates and nerfed rewards. I fought it, but it affected me. Truth is that while drops rates are awful and rewards are even worse (I’ve gotten the same card for my reward for the past 3 toz), I still thoroughly enjoy the game. I’m established, though. Talking to the rookies on the team, they’re struggling, hard. While, on paper, nerfing rewards may help the new kids not know what getting pork slapped 4 turns straight feels like, it also makes mythic rares truly myths to them without dropping about 400 dimes. It seems like the pendulum may have swung too far in the other direction. Opening packs isn’t fun anymore, events get me a dupe and 10% of a mythic. I’m glad I started when I did so I got to build a decent collection before the game got stingy on me
I think you guys are way too harsh. Would I recommend someone join the game, progress through story mode, get exciting new cards and start realizing the possibilities? Absolutely. It is a really fun game from that perspective.
Where I think the game misses the mark is in the late game. The prizes are not that great, the drop rates are bad, the content is redundant, there aren’t enough things to spend money on, etc. Even color mastery was such a great concept executed in such a bad way that it’s actually better to not master cards in most cases.
Look at a former whale like @fiddler. He literally has nothing to do in game any longer.
Here are a few ideas to make the game better:
Introduce new modes of play beyond enraged… https://forums.505go.com/discussion/comment/642083#Comment_642083
Change the ranking system to an elo system rather than based on color mastery. This will enhance competition and improve the experience of newer players.
Use color mastery as additional ways to access rewards. Even if the rewards are stuff like background, borders, PW skins, etc. Mastering cards should be rewarding.
Better drop rates: Give us less packs but with higher chances of rare or better cards dropping. This would keep newer players in the early and mid game similar to the current game, but be more productive for late game players. This could also be done with a GOOD duplicate crafting system.
Fix freezes and crashes so that games can be re-entered once they have started. Crashes that cost you huge prizes are beyond frustrating.
Diversify the weekly content.
Include new ways to spend resources such as those listed in the color mastery idea.
Make the card costs more accessible. $40 for a card and some other junk is just too expensive. Lets stop whale hunting and make the game more financially accessible to more of the community members.
Anyway, I will stop there. But I think we need to recognize that many of us truly love the game and the great potential it has. And I would not balk at recommending it to anyone who I would think would be interested.
I still enjoy some of the MTGPQ experience, which is why I continue to play. However, the disappointments have piled up high enough that it’s no longer the first game I look to when I have a few minutes of time.At its height–as @shteev alluded above–it was an intoxicating combination of my favorite game and a mobile experience. We had communication, card balance concerns were addressed rather than defended, and it really seemed as if the license was in the hands of a group of individuals who cared about crafting a game as well-loved as its inspiration.
However, instead of moving towards a more balanced environment, instead of facilitating card acquisition and colleciton-building, instead of empowering new players in an increasingly difficult environment, they continually chose the wrong path. They gave us overpowered cards, nerfed drop rates, lowered rewards, more difficult progression, and little communication except for a bimonthly visit to promote the new set and answer questions for a couple of hours before disappearing into the aether once again.
All of these have combined to create an exhausted, embittered player base that seems to be slowly dwindling to nothingness.
So, lately, I’ve been playing another game, and just checking into MTGPQ for coalition events. I’ve enjoyed Strength and Ambition, though Zeal murders any desire to play for several days thereafter. I’ve come to the realization that the current iteration of MTGPQ works well as a “play a couple of events a week and ignore it” type of game. No longer is it a must-play, no longer do I spend hours brainstorming decks or thinking wistfully about what cards I want to get. Why would I? Those endeavors are fruitless. While I can’t speak for others, I think maybe some others are in the same boat–that part of our disappointment is because we realized that MTGPQ simply isn’t going to be the gameplay experience we hoped it would be, and that it’s best served as being “just another game”.
I voted base purely on the original question: Would I recommend this game?
Obviously I still play it daily and enjoy playing, in fact I wish I had more time that I could play it.
However I can’t in good conscience recommend the game to anyone looking to progress towards end-game content for reasons better expressed above by my team-mates.
I will say that on a personal level the enjoyment I get from the game has decreased over time. It’s hard to tell if that’s a function of decreased engaging playtime, effort/reward reduction, poorer personal performance, or any other contributing factor.
I’m currently not recommending this game to people because I don’t think it’s designed to engage new players or set them up for success. Everyone I have tried to get into it just quits after a week or so.
Five of the nine comments above mine are from my teammates. That’s a rather telling statistic, when you look at what they all have to say.
The majority of them have voted quite negatively in this poll, and have expressed their opinions as well. These opinions have nothing to do with our position as the top team, and the comments they have left are evidence to that fact. There’s not much I can say that hasn’t already been said by @shteev, @Dodecapod, @madwren, or @majincob, so I won’t beat a dead horse. Suffice it to say that the current iteration of the game is such that any new players will eventually hit a wall that is extremely difficult to scale unless they manage to make it into a coaltion that can regularly place in the top 10. That in itself is a nigh-impossible feat, as the competition for entry into any of those coalitions is quite stiff.
On top of that, the reward tiers have been flattened or nerfed or whatever you want to call it, to the point where even being in those top 10 coalitions doesn’t do you much good unless you’re in the top two, and even then, it remains difficult to stay motivated because the payout does not justify the necessary effort (I’m talking specifically about Trial of Zeal here).
I can’t recommend a game like this to my friends because the barrier to entry is just too steep for someone who didn’t start playing a year ago or more, and the experience has pivoted more and more from thrilling competition to onerous grinding.
I still play daily. Imo it could still be a really great game again. Maybe I’m being too optimistic but I just keep holding on.
I have, in the past, recommended this game to friends and family, however that was back when soi just came out and I was having fun. Unfortunately @bken1234 is on point about new player experience, and because of that most of the people I did recommend MTGPQ to were gone within two weeks.
As it is now, I will not recommend this game to anyone. I’ll even go so far as to say that I would actively discourage it.
I rated it a 2. It feels like work. The pack opening experience should bring joy not dread. The bugs should have been squashed a year ago. The marketing is terrible.
As a native mobile developer, lifelong magic player, and puzzle game lover - I WANT this game to be a 5 instead of a 2
I have actively discouraged friends and my son from downloading it
I voted that I would not recommend. In reality, I recently discovered a friend of mine had started playing and I not only enjoy playing with him, he’s having fun. But he’s a pretty hardcore mobile gamer and is fine being F2P. I think the newplayer experience would be far too frustrating for most people though, which is why I could never recommend it in its current state.
I genuinely like most aspects of the game but there are a few parts I don’t like. Maybe it’s ok to not like everything about something and still appreciate it as a whole.
Echoing the idea that the game has had a lot of untapped potential.
Too many bugs. Heroic encounters still crash almost every time. “Something went wrong” during events. Opening pack failures. Not to mention dupes on dupes on dupes without the promised booster crafting in sight.
Wish I could lower my rating right now.
Just lost two matches in today’s Emergency Ordinance. One because the app just froze and the other because my life level planeswalker was put against a level 60.
Yeah I’m a little sore at the moment so, no I definitely would not recommend this game to anyone.
If there were a person whom I hated with all my passion, I would show them this one kindness and recommend that they do not install this waste of good storage space that calls itself a game.