Developer Q&A - Battle for Zendikar (4/11/16)

LakeStone

Hi Everyone –

Battle for Zendikar is almost here (officially launches next week!) and we are very excited to start lifting up the hood and show you what is to come in Magic: The Gathering – Puzzle Quest. We reveal the first details today with a Developer Q&A and we plan to follow that up with a brief intro each day this week (with the next bit of info available later today) to reveal different aspects coming to the game, including new game mechanics, Planeswalkers, Mythic cards, and more. We recommend coming back to our forums each day to learn something new.

To help share this information, Hibernum’s Senior Game Designer, Jean-Charles Frenette (JC) takes a few minutes to answer some questions on what is to come in the update next week!

Can you give us an overview of how Battle For Zendikar (BFZ) will evolve the play mechanics of the game?

Battle for Zendikar introduces several play mechanics into the set. Our goal was to translate the abilities from the physical card game to MTGPQ so that they would be engaging and most of all fun to play with.

The biggest new mechanic that we added is the synergy between Ingest, Process and Devoid, with at their center a new gem type: Void. Ingest converts gems from your opponent’s color to Void gems, Process converts those Void gems back to your opponent’s color and fires off an extra ability. Void gems only grant mana to cards with Devoid in your hand, but otherwise does not grant any mana whatsoever.

We also added the Rally, Landfall, Awaken and Converge keywords to the game, which all interact with cards in many different ways. We can’t wait to see what players will come up with!

When you’re playing these new cards, what is a new strategy that should be considered?

Battle for Zendikar, thematically, represents a large war, with one side having Planeswalkers and the inhabitants of the Zendikar plane, and on the other the large and almighty Eldrazi. Eldrazi specialize in the new Ingest/Process/Devoid mechanics, so you can build decks around these to steal away their resources: building decks with Devoid and Process abilities will let you counter an opponent which is going all-in with Ingest to deny you mana, for example.

Another incredibly powerful ability is Rally - any card with the Ally subtype (which is easily visible now!) triggers Rally abilities whenever they enter the battlefield. This can make for extremely explosive decks.

Are there BFZ cards designed to work well with specific cards from the Origin set? Can you give us any tips?

BFZ introduces a new mechanic, called Landfall. Landfall triggers whenever you match 4 or more gems, and will fire off the ability that it is tied to. All the cards in Origins that convert gems are incredibly useful in BFZ as they will let you use Landfall much more often!

Any strategy or tips that I should be doing today in the game and with my current cards as I prep for the release of BFZ?

Just keep playing! Try to amass as many runes as possible, because all your current Planeswalkers will get a level cap raise to 60, with new rank 4 abilities, so you’ll want to be able to level them up quickly.

What should I do with my duplicate cards?

Duplicate cards can now be converted into Runes, which will greatly help you finish leveling your Planeswalkers. In addition, all Planeswalkers can now be leveled to level 60, with abilities now going up to Rank 4 - all these Runes certainly will come in handy.

Does anything change in Quick Battle with the introduction of BFZ?

We’re adding new thematic events and rewards - the order for the colors has changed (so weekend colors aren’t the same!) and we’ve updated their reward tables.

Will there be an extension of the story mode in MTGPQ with the intro of BFZ?

Yes. BFZ adds an additional 30 encounters in story mode, separated into 3 chapters. Chapter 3 is especially difficult, with bosses getting up to level 125!

Before we go, please give us a quick overview of the first Planewalkers and their abilities coming to MTGPQ?

The first Planeswalkers coming to BFZ will be:

Ob Nixilis Reignited

Ob Nixilis’s main color is Black, and his focus is on destruction. His loadout is very balanced and you can play him however you wish. As for his powers, at the cost of his life, he gains very strong abilities. For 3 Loyalty, he can sacrifice some of his life to draw a card - at max rank, he only loses 1 life to draw 2 cards! He can also sacrifice his life to outright destroy creatures on the board, a very potent ability, especially with the large Eldrazi coming to the game. Finally, his third ability puts a Support on the board (a first!) that deals damage to the opponent whenever any player draws a card. This ability is incredibly powerful, and combined with his first ability can make quick work of his opponents.

Gideon, Ally of Zendikar

This 2nd iteration of Gideon is focused very differently than his Origins incarnation. For one, his focus is mainly spell-based, but his abilities more than make up for this. His first ability summons an Echo of Gideon with haste that dies at the end of your turn, making it good for burst damage or taking down a Defender. His second ability summons Ally tokens which are perfect for triggering Rally off other cards. His third ability is a straight buff to every Ally creature you control, having very good synergy with his 2nd ability.

When will the update (v1.4) with Battle for Zendikar go live?

The update will go live next week. We do not have a set date as we are in submissions as we speak but players may see the update as early as April 18th. We will be sure to let everyone know when the update is live.

Thank you!

EDUSAN

well... its nice to hear new stuff is being added

but being able to convert duplicate cards into runes is stupid. Should have been crystals or another currency (like hearthstone) to be able to get the cards we need and we are being unlucky to get

Meto5000

LakeStone wrote:

What should I do with my duplicate cards?

Duplicate cards can now be converted into Runes, which will greatly help you finish leveling your Planeswalkers. In addition, all Planeswalkers can now be leveled to level 60, with abilities now going up to Rank 4 - all these Runes certainly will come in handy.

• Are there plans to add additional things that Duplicate cards can be used for? If not, will future duplicates be automatically converted into runes or is the technology not there yet?
• Will you be able to bulk convert all your duplicate cards into runes? I'm going to be super bummed/annoyed if I need to manually convert every single duplicate into runes as I probably have well close to or more than 1000 duplicate cards.
• Besides leveling, will there ever be another use for runes? Long time players have enormous stockpiles that will hardly be depleted by additional leveling requirements

Hibernum_JC

Meto5000 wrote:

LakeStone wrote:

What should I do with my duplicate cards?

Duplicate cards can now be converted into Runes, which will greatly help you finish leveling your Planeswalkers. In addition, all Planeswalkers can now be leveled to level 60, with abilities now going up to Rank 4 - all these Runes certainly will come in handy.

• Are there plans to add additional things that Duplicate cards can be used for? If not, will future duplicates be automatically converted into runes or is the technology not there yet?
• Will you be able to bulk convert all your duplicate cards into runes? I'm going to be super bummed/annoyed if I need to manually convert every single duplicate into runes as I probably have well close to or more than 1000 duplicate cards.
• Besides leveling, will there ever be another use for runes? Long time players have enormous stockpiles that will hardly be depleted by additional leveling requirements

Answers!

We do not currently have plans for additional things Duplicate cards can be used for, but this does not mean it will never happen. If you want to keep your duplicates for any reason, you can do so, and for this reason we haven't implemented an automatic conversion into Runes.

You can only bulk convert your duplicates. With the amount of cards we have in the game, with much more to come, it was incredibly impractical to make you convert cards individually!

There certainly will be other uses for runes in the long run. It won't come with Battle for Zendikar, but it should in the near future.

As a side note, costs to level from 50 to 60 are much higher and follow a different curve. And to add to that we are adding in multiple new Planeswalkers, so there are more places for you to spend your runes.

Rootbreaker

Do you know how much it costs to level from 50 to 60?

Keegan

Hibernum_JC wrote:

You can only bulk convert your duplicates. With the amount of cards we have in the game, with much more to come, it was incredibly impractical to make you convert cards individually!

Fantastic, thank you. I was dreading how this process could potentially look.

rulerhumankind

Are their cards with Ingest available for every color, or a limited few?

Hibernum_JC

rulerhumankind wrote:

Are their cards with Ingest available for every color, or a limited few?

Pretty much every color has access to every new mechanic. Some are more prevalent in specific colors, but generally each color has access to all the mechanics.

Morphis

Did you fix (or at least made some changes in order to try) the problem with planeswalker skills that leads to ppl not leveling on purpose?
Any news about ingame events? The events that should be in the event panel i mean XD

Overall good news so far, only thing bad I see is the way you decided to handle duplicates.
What I thought it could be was one of the following:
- a system to get random cards of different rarity levels. Each card destroyed gives a certain amount of "money" to spend for this based on rarity.
- a system to get a single card you want. Hearthstone like system.
- a change to the deck composition or any other change to game itself that would give use to duplicates.

Think first one would have been better choice since requires the least effort(I think) of the three and still not not guarantee you get the card you want or one you need at all to avoid being too easy to accomplish full collection.

Your solution is... Meaningless. I will not care cause runes are easy to gather and the only use is for planeswalker leveling that is(of course) limited.
Only If 3 cards pack were still in sale for runes this would have been a good move.
Anyways looking forward to the update to come back to the game(beside daily login I did not touch it in 2 months I think)

Hibernum_JC

Morphis wrote:

Did you fix (or at least made some changes in order to try) the problem with planeswalker skills that leads to ppl not leveling on purpose?

Yes, that is overhauled so that it's never advantageous to not level your Planeswalker.

Morphis wrote:

Any news about ingame events? The events that should be in the event panel i mean XD

That's coming in a future update!

Morphis wrote:

Overall good news so far, only thing bad I see is the way you decided to handle duplicates.
What I thought it could be was one of the following:
- a system to get random cards of different rarity levels. Each card destroyed gives a certain amount of "money" to spend for this based on rarity.
- a system to get a single card you want. Hearthstone like system.
- a change to the deck composition or any other change to game itself that would give use to duplicates.

Think first one would have been better choice since requires the least effort(I think) of the three and still not not guarantee you get the card you want or one you need at all to avoid being too easy to accomplish full collection.

Your solution is... Meaningless. I will not care cause runes are easy to gather and the only use is for planeswalker leveling that is(of course) limited.
Only If 3 cards pack were still in sale for runes this would have been a good move.
Anyways looking forward to the update to come back to the game(beside daily login I did not touch it in 2 months I think)

From our internal data, Runes are really not the easiest thing to gather. A ton of players are starved for runes. With the addition of the new Planeswalker level cap to 60 and new Planeswalkers coming, you'll have plenty of Runes to spend.

loroku

Hibernum_JC wrote:

From our internal data, Runes are really not the easiest thing to gather. A ton of players are starved for runes. With the addition of the new Planeswalker level cap to 60 and new Planeswalkers coming, you'll have plenty of Runes to spend.

Does your internal data take into account the intent of those players, though?

From a player perspective, runes are easy enough to gather and have a limited purpose (leveling PWs). There is no motivation to gather runes right now because 1) leveling most PWs is a poor choice right now and 2) there is a finite amount of runes you can spend. So calling someone "starved" for runes seems like a potential misinterpretation of the data. I haven't maxed all my PWs and I do not consider myself starved for runes because runes have no value to me.

By contrast, crystals are infinitely useful. There is never a moment when you don't need more crystals because there is never a moment that you couldn't use more cards (until you have them all, which is nearly impossible).

I agree with the general sentiment that two things that hurt the game from a player's perspective are: changing the 8 crystal story reward to runes (crystals are always better) and removing the ability to spend runes to get 3-card boosters (thus limiting the effectiveness of runes). If you changed the latter back then I would agree that we could always use more runes. Until this changes runes are not a worthwhile resource, regardless of what the XP cap is on PWs. (There still isn't a clear reason why you changed it in the first place, other than to slow down player progress.)

I really regret not blowing my entire rune store on packs in the week leading up to that change, as it is still far and away the best use of runes.

loroku

Hibernum_JC wrote:

Yes, that is overhauled so that it's never advantageous to not level your Planeswalker.

Can we please get a list of PW powers and cost/description at each level for all the PWs now? There is no practical reason to hide this information. (What you get at each PW level and XP cost per level would also be awesome, as I mentioned before.)

ChrisTot

Loroku's sentiment on runes is spot on. If I wanted to farm runes I could play more quick battles. If runes are hard to farm for new people it's because the 8 crystals were taken away (and thus about 21 packs worth of cards for new players).

People need cards, not planeswalker levels. And the leveling of planeswalkers scales with getting new cards. I have the 2-3 I want leveled and don't want to level the rest either. But if I did I could play as much as I wanted to get the runes. You can't play as much as you want to get the cards and come the next round of quick battles, I imagine that my card collection will be far superior to the collections of anyone who wasn't able to get 8 crystals per origin story.

I didn't finish every second objective, but i definitely got an advantage from that. If that's a server side change that can be made, I'd say revert it back. You won't regret that decision ever, imo.

Plastic

I recall reading that the speed of matches is being looked at/changed to be at a quicker pace. With this in mind, will there be any adjusting of old card casting costs that are insanely high/unusable?

Hibernum_JC

Plastic wrote:

I recall reading that the speed of matches is being looked at/changed to be at a quicker pace. With this in mind, will there be any adjusting of old card casting costs that are insanely high/unusable?

Only if it's an absolute necessity.

loroku

Similarly, have you considered changing HP levels to make matches go faster? Gaining +3 instead of +4 HP each level that granted HP would also make a big difference to match speed.

For what it's worth, I've only won a game with <10 HP like, twice ever - in 300+ wins. Losing more than 50% of my HP in a match is a very rare occurrence (even against red) so I don't think it would make the games more swingy.

Hibernum_JC

loroku wrote:

Similarly, have you considered changing HP levels to make matches go faster? Gaining +3 instead of +4 HP each level that granted HP would also make a big difference to match speed.

For what it's worth, I've only won a game with <10 HP like, twice ever - in 300+ wins. Losing more than 50% of my HP in a match is a very rare occurrence (even against red) so I don't think it would make the games more swingy.

That's another venue for how we can balance speed. There are many things we can do, so we'll see once this patch is out and see how things pan out.

EDUSAN

is there a plan maybe not now but at some point, for players to obtain a specific card they want/need and not leave it to the infinite chance of getting it?

another question, is the value of crystals being reviewed? i think its agreed by the community that the price of crystals is too high (specially knowing how hard is to get a card we want or a mythic, even if you open a big box)

Meto5000

EDUSAN wrote:

is there a plan maybe not now but at some point, for players to obtain a specific card they want/need and not leave it to the infinite chance of getting it?

another question, is the value of crystals being reviewed? i think its agreed by the community that the price of crystals is too high (specially knowing how hard is to get a card we want or a mythic, even if you open a big box)

The closer you get to a complete collection, the more disheartening it is to know that the only way you're going to finish a set is through luck or...an extremely ridiculous amount of money. Like...thousands of ridiculous dollars. I'm currently 13 cards from completing Origins (233/246) and it's extremely rare to get a new card even though I'm averaging something like 1.75 fatpacks per week. I'm currently missing 11 of 24 mythics and 3 of 46 rares.

Once every two weeks I have a guaranteed shot at a specific color Mythic. In Blue, I'm only missing a single mythic. Which means, every two weeks, I have a 20% chance to win my last remaining card if I come in First during each Blue event. Even after 5 events, AKA 10 weeks, I still only have a 67% probability to actually get the card I'm looking for. The chances of getting what I want from a pack is basically nill.

There really needs to be a way to purchase individual cards once you reach a certain point. Something like the following:

Once you have at least 85% of an Expansion (e.g. Origins or Battle for Zendikar), you can purchase individual cards from that expansion for:

• Mythics: 200 Crystals ($10)
• Rares: 140 Crystals ($7)
• Uncommons: 60 Crystals ($3)
• Commons: 20 Crystals ($1)

Otherwise, people aren't going to have complete sets even after playing for months, even after spending large quantities of money.

EDUSAN

yes

and you are even considering finishing ladder 1st. I know i dont have the time to play the amount of time needed to aim for rank 1... my best tries have always been to get to the 2/6 rank ....so thats even HARDER to get to the mythics

loroku

Meto5000 wrote:

There really needs to be a way to purchase individual cards once you reach a certain point.

I know. I really like the way Hearthstone does it: cards break down into dust you can use to form other cards. Eventually, if you get enough cards, you will always be able to get that last card you want, and it indirectly encourages spending because you can use up all the dupes to make new cards. Even if it were crazy expensive it'd still be worth it. I think this game has the opportunity to do something similar, especially if they can do that before "dumping your cards for runes" goes live, especially since that feels so valueless. That system works better in MPQ where you have scores and scores of characters, and the things you are dumping are also ways to level up characters. In this game, the CARDS are what you want. Leveling PWs is fine, but the cards are what you're really going for.