Introduction to Color Mastery and PVP (7/22/16)

LakeStone

Introduction to Color Mastery

We’ve asked a few questions to Ben, the Game Director on Magic: Puzzle Quest. He is the guy behind the original concept and design. Along with the team, he’s been working really hard to deliver the best possible PvP experience in Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest.

Let’s have him introduce you to one of the main pillars of our PvP system: “Color Mastery”!

What is “Color Mastery”?

Color Mastery represents your potential strength as a player. We count each card you own and have played within each of the 5 colors to determine your potential strength and to seed you in events.

What is the Intention?

We want to make matchmaking fair and offer appropriate and meaningful rewards.

With our Event system ramping up, we need ways to give players fair challenges - and rewards! We have players at every end of the power spectrum, and our events generate unique uses of cards and planeswalkers. This means we need something granular, scaling with each player’s strengths and weaknesses: Color Mastery.

For PvP Events, both the challenge (your opponent’s difficulty) and the rewards scale up with your Mastery Tier. For PvE Events, only the rewards scale up with Mastery Tier… for now!

To sum it up, the more cards you own and know how to use, the more dangerous you are, and the more challenges we can send at you - all the while rewarding you appropriately for it! Since getting into higher Color Mastery Tier grants you better rewards, there is no reason to hold back!

You probably want more info. So hopefully the next part covers most of it - but let’s open up the conversation!

How Does it Work?

- Earning Color Mastery points
ONLY cards you play with earn you Color Mastery points for that color(s) - up to a threshold. And yes, before you ask, multicolored cards multi-dip and colorless cards splash a little bit in all 5 colors!! Also, the rarer the card, the more Color Mastery points given. Once mastered, a card remains so forever.

i.e.The more you play with red cards, the more you increase your Red Color Mastery (and so on for all other colors).

Cards you have never used do not count toward your Color Mastery. Should you want to get access to a better reward Tier, you might have to experiment a bit with those unused cards to gain more Color Mastery points. But remember, the challenges will increase accordingly!



Fighting more challenging battles will allow you to master cards more quickly. The following table shows how many wins you’ll need with a card in order to master it, as well as how many Color Mastery points you will receive. Colorless cards will give you half the number of Color Mastery points - but they will apply to all Colors. For example, mastering a Colorless Common card will give you 1 Color Mastery Point in Black, Blue, Green, Red and White.



Color Mastery in Events

Color Mastery is available for you to see in your player profile. You can see your progression in each of the 5 colors.



When a player joins an Event, the Event (on start) checks the player’s current Mastery level in the appropriate color (s). A monoblack event (requiring only black planeswalkers), would only use your Black Color Mastery. A Red/Green event your Red and Green only, and so on.

In case of multiple Color Mastery choices for the Event to pick from, the strongest Color is always chosen,



Color Mastery Tiers

At launch, we will release 3 mastery Tiers
Notes: the balancing may change prior the Release.
• Bronze
• Silver (requires 100 Color Mastery points)
• Gold (requires 250 Color Mastery points)

While all players will start at Bronze, regular players will quickly jump to silver and engaged players to Gold as they go revisit old cards and new alike to master cards and gain Color Mastery tier.






Since Color Mastery is a representation of the total amount of content in the game, the numbers to reach and maintain each Tier will be - to a certain extent - moving targets (with each new release having less impact than the last).

As we move forward, we will look into adding Color Mastery Tiers as needed to create more granularity.

Players can start seeing these changes in our v1.5.8 update coming next week with the first PvP event starting on Saturday, July 30th at 4pm UTC and ends at 4pm UTC on Monday, August 1st.