My Thoughts on the state of the game

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I'm a big MtG fan, and I got burned out on Marvel Puzzle Quest for very weird reasons, so I was willing to give this game a shot after I got a phone that could handle it. I found the basic gameplay very solid, the mechanics do well to blend MtG with the simple match 3 system, there is plenty of room for combos, and there is no mana screw to speak off, which is a nice start. However, there are some things that I'd like to address about what I think about the game in its current state. Because there is a patch confirmed and incoming and we still haven't seen what events look like, I will focus mostly on the gameplay aspects of the game

1. The Runes Dichotomy

The first thing that I noticed immediately when I started doing the story mode is that the game wasn't giving me cards, but it was giving me . This sounds like a good thing at first since it gives you the choice of leveling a planeswalker over getting cards but that's the problem, there's a choice, and when there's a choice, there are bad choices. Buying cards for me has proven to be the good early option: The matchmaking does its best to put you against even-leveled 'walkers in quick match and having a better creature is much better than having 4 extra health. The game doesn't gives you a solid enough foundation of cards so you have wriggle room to muck around with your Planeswalkers other than their starting decks, which means you have no outs if you get stumped and used your runes on leveling them. The early campaign or something else should offer a base of cards that players can improve their decks from

2. Defenders and Attackers

I looked through the cards and came to the conclusion that, on average, defenders suck. With a few exceptions such as Skysnare Spider, the average defender has a very low stat baseline and no useful abilities. There are creatures such as Charging Griffin and Gilt-Leaf Winnower that are strictly worse because they have defender, Defender is not a reason to make a creature's stats subpar. The reason Gideon is so good is because he can give creatures with ACTUAL good stats Vigilance at will, and since chances are there will be no way to choose whether creature block or not since that would pace the game down, there's something that should be done about it. By all means, Berserkers should have lower stats on average because you have the innitiative with them, you're the one that choose when to play them and when to prime spells to aid them breaching through, but when you play a Defender into the enemy's turn, then you'd better hope that Defender is a good standalone card and as of right now, most aren't

3. Pacing and Hand

The game's pace is actually very volatile, it starts slowly, but once a relevant creature sticks, it goes downhill very quickly. This is an about accurate representation of a game of Magic, but the problem here lies not in that, but in the hand. The average usable card in this game, save for strong utility spells, costs 8-10, which means you need 2 to 3 decent matches to get it on the board, which is an about good pace to play things considering cascades and other factors. However, this make playing expensive cards painful. There are a bunch of really cool cards in the rares and mythics, even in the uncommons, that just become arduous to even get to try out because you'll stop drawing cards. Every expensive card in your deck is a card that you can draw one too many times and thus clog your hand, leaving you without options, this is essentially the mana screw of the game and with no option to manually choose to discard cards you can very often lose to your favorite card. Heck, cantrip cards (Cards that draw you a card) can actually be detrimental for the same reason, as they don't really reduce your handsize. I think it would help the game for the average card to cost less, speeding up the rate at which creatures hit the board and spells are primed would reward both good deckbuilding and match decision making

4. Creature Balance

I understand that not all cards were made equal, cards of different rarities and different colors are granted different benefits, but it seems like even among the same rarities, cards are given little to no thought about balance. There are terribly overcosted defenders (Valeron Wardens, Thornbow Archer), overcosted cantrip cards (Dark Dabbling, Hydrolash) and just cards that have terrible stats and would never be considered not even by people with a starving collection. I understand that common cards shouldn't really be competing with higher-ups, but when there are 2/2s with marginal abilities that show up and have the gall to cost 10, no one is happy about them, not even the beginners that might actually need common creatures to help

5.

This goes back to the previous point and is something that I need addressing. When I started playing this game, I expected Blue to be back to its old tricks: Countermagic, bounce, power manipulation, the usual. It has it, which means you got that part right, but it appears that while they were informed that Blue was considered the stronger color in MtG, nobody informed D3 that they're supposed to have the worst creatures. Every single Blue card I face seems to have been pushed to its absolute limit. Scrapskin Drake is strictly better than defenders from , AND simultaneously. Mizzium Meddler is a 4/7 for 9, stats unrivaled by literally any creature in the game, and he STILL has an absurdly destructive effect. Sigiled Starfish and Jhessian Thief both have very relevant stats and provide card advantage on perhaps the one color with efficiently costed spells. Harbinger of the Tides...Harbinger...of...the Tides.

If their creatures weren't pushed enough, then you'd have to consider that their otherwise tempo-based suite is only made even more destructive by the hand system. Why kill a creature, when you can return them to the enemy's hand where not only will he have to gather resources again to cast it, but will clog their hand and prevent cards from being drawn? Why even bother with using the countermagic cards when Sphinx's Tutelage and Jace's Sanctum just prevent your opponent from positively doing anything at all for the comfy cost of 11 mana and two cards? Talent of the Telepath not only gives you stronger card selection than even Black cards, but it essentially costs -1!

Blue cards demonstrate that balance is all over the place, which is unnaceptable even for a game as new as this. Some companies say they'd prefer integrity and bow never to nerf or modify already existing cards. I really hope this isn't one of them



That's about it for now. Hoping to see that the new patch brings us some new events, rewards and maybe a playable black deck

Unknown

To be fair Jace is probably the worst planeswalker. Not by much, but he isn't that good. His abilities do very little to influence the game (aside from making drake fantastic).

But blue's deck is by far the strongest of all of the decks. I had trouble ranking the other decks' cards because none of their S tiers were anywhere near blue's. In MtG though blue doesn't have the "worst" creatures, all the colors have strong creatures. Blue is notable for its inclusion of big flying fatties which has always been a thing.

I think the whole berserker - defender - attacker dynamic is not working. The main reason is that in magic defenders (walls) weren't designed to outright kill cards - they're to stall. But in this game they either completely decimate the opposing side (without letting them have any ability to not attack) or they keel over immediately to a bigger berserker.

There is one really easy fix to this: allow players to double tap a creature to mark it as "disabled" in which it will neither defend nor attack. This means it doesn't break the game for casuals with needless options (they can simply never tap their creatures).

This also lends itself to other strategies. Perhaps you'd like to reinforce a creature before letting it out. Perhaps you're caught off guard and want to take a few hits from their big creature before you can deal with it, etc etc.

Berserker creatures can and will still kill "disabled" creatures, because that is their job. But defenders won't block things they have no chance of beating, and attackers won't throw themselves meaninglessly at walls.

Unknown

I like that suggestion panda, something simple and easy to implement, although I would think the problem with that is the casual player will easily forget this key ability unless they can think of a good way via UI to kind of remind the user that this is possible.

Unknown

I think most casual players don't even hold cards, so its not really that much of a worry.

However this will bring an even bigger issue to light, how incredibly bad the AI is lol.

It'll take a lot of work for the AI to use better strategies, even to simply hold cards/have better card order.

Perhaps if we can design our decks to have a "default" cast priority, the AI will be slightly better.

Unknown

Blue does have big, sweeping creatures that take the sky and rule the game thereon, but their lower curve isn't so powered. The average stats and abilities of a blue creature that costs, say 2, will not outstrip those of a white or green creature in MtG, which is clearly not the case here. Even otherwise utility creatures like Sigiled Starfish have a very competent body, which is the problem I see with blue

I do agree on the whole disabling your own creatures and holding them back, that would actually open White the chance to make you eat Swift Reckoning, which is an interesting dynamic. There is a game that has a very similar creature combat like this one and does allow you to do that (Kingdoms CCG), which is why I also find it an elegant answer to that particular problem

I do like Jace's loyalty abilities, even if they are in fact quite meek at doing anything to the board, but that's how blue operates. Max level Confusion gives -6/-0 which basically reads "Disable Target Creature", which is excellent for buying time