Mana denial

Roxton

One of the nicest elements of the Puzzle Quest formula is mana denial. The tutorial even references it.

But in this game, the best move is the one with the most cascades, with mana color being merely a tie breaker. Limiting your opponents' opportunities for cascades is rewarding and challenging, but it's not nearly as central to gameplay as mana denial in other PQ games (and derivatives).

I'd suggest making mana denial more important by requiring a particular color to charge your cards. Dual color cards would come at a premium. As with other PQ titles, when there are no advantageous matches for your hand, you can focus on either clearing advantageous matches for your opponent or take the risk of making cascades to introduce new gems to the board from the top.

Color-changing supports and abilities would be more important for increasing the availability of your colors, rather than simply creating a mana-gain lottery each turn. Elvish visionary would become playable.

You'd want to make the card colors of your hand visible in the collapsed view. I'm not sure, but I'd consider doing this for the opponent's hand as well (maybe only for partially charged cards?).

You could also allow off-color cards in a deck. Gaining one or two less mana on a match is a big deal with this change, keeping planeswalker decks diverse, with more potential for mix-and-match strategies. Although you might want to set the baseline to +0 on-color, -1 off-color, -2 enemy color.

While you're at it, you might consider allowing full 40 card deck construction, providing 4x of each base card when you unlock a planeswalker. While it's true that you reduce the ability to build a deck around a newly acquired rare, with the off-color change, you get a lot more interesting options for incremental enhancements when you open a pack.

The flood of Nissas in the leaderboard creates something of a forced metagame. While it would complicate the tutorial implementation, I'd suggest allowing players to pick their preferred planeswalker at the start, and then increase the cost of buying planeswalkers, commensurate with the increased value of their library of base cards with the off-color change.

Unknown

To be honest while I like the idea of simply playing MTG this isn't really the platform for it. I'm sure MtGPQ already lost a lot of casual players simply because it has deckbuilding and a lot of moving parts.

Also mana denial isn't really that useful when you consider stuff like MPQ has the best teams covering almost every element. In that one cascades rule the day too.

In fact because of the way that matching doesn't directly lead to wins, rather cards do, you already have a huge disparity in skill between people that know MtG and people that simply know/are good at puzzle quest.

So I think making it MORE like MtG would make even less people interested.

At the end of the day I want to play puzzle quest, not MTGO or equivalent. I'm okay with it being a bit easier and deck building being a bit less important. Constructed is like the worst way to play MTG anyway =P

Unknown

I think mana denial already factors in pretty significantly here. I can remember multiple times I gave up on cascades because I realized they'd give less mana as another group of pieces in my opponent's favored color.

You're offering quite a few fun suggestions, but a few of them sound like they'd turn this into a completely different game and be hard to incorporate at all.

Especially, I like the small deck size with only one ofs as-is. And though I like the idea of expanding deck building and changing how mana preferences work, it's hard to factor that in with how the game is designed now.

At least, with there only being 6 colors of pieces vs. the usual 7 or 8, the cascade manipulation game has some more agency in it compared to other PQ games.

Unknown

I think the simplified mana gain is actually very practical. While reducing the cost of cards nad making it so that you explicitly need a mana color would make things interesting, it would also embiggen the problem of bad boards and would pretty much replicate MtG's Mana Screw, which is something that can get even worse when your opponent gets a hand in it. Also, having this system would include even more tracking to be done which complicates an already quite loaded game even further. Cascades would have a drastically lower impact as well, since getting an off color random match would do nothing but advance the board

The mana system also makes things different when considering what to match. In MPQ, you will start my choosing your target, then matching to both advance your strategy and deny your opponent's most perilous abilities as you find convenient. In MtGPQ, it is almost all about the matchup, entirely depending on which is your color and how it relates to your opponent.

Consider that MtG uses a color wheel which goes in the WUBRG order ( ). Colors adjacent to each other are considered ally colors and give a minor boost, while colors not adjacent to each other are enemy colors and give you a malus (or just no boost at higher levels). As a result, the way it usually goes is the following:

-If you're in a color mirror, simply play to your best colors. It is worth noting that in this match up, your enemy colors will pile up very quickly, which is something you should look for to get some cascades/5-matches. You will be denying your opponent and advancing your strategy simultaneously since you run the same colors

-If you're facing an ally color, then your most important matches are both your color and your opponent's. Your opponent will not benefit as much from your other ally color, which means you can match it later (For example, in a vs matchup, you won't benefit from , but your opponent won't benefit from ). Your opponent still has a color open which is less desireable to you

-If you're facing an enemy color, the absolute most important match is whichever ally color you share (For example, in a vs matchup, both colors equally benefit from ). It should be prioritized as it both advances your play and denies your opponent's. This is the matchup where you will have to consider gain vs deny the most

What to do then depends on your position on the board. If you already have the board, then you don't need to put any more cards and you're better off making matches that the enemy needs. If you're behind and need to cast a big card to come back such as a Skynare Spider or a Languish, you have to find the plays that give you the most mana even if it means giving your opponent strong moves. It's a pretty sweet ebb-and-flow and the strength of cascades stays pretty flat in both cases, which I think is a good place to be