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.

Rootbreaker

So we need to play A LOT with bad cards to level up our mastery to access better rewards?

shteev

Rootbreaker wrote:

So we need to play A LOT with bad cards to level up our mastery to access better rewards?

I'm so glad you said that, it saves me the job of being the miserable bastard around here this time...

Rootbreaker

I guess if we focus on one or two colors, it's not as much of a grind. Grab your strongest planeswalkers, and see how strong of a deck you can build with weak cards to smash up heroic encounters to level up as quickly as possible.

It does finally give some incentive to play with the 80%+ or so of cards I've never touched.

Alternatively, the very slow way would be to rotate 1 or 2 cards through a good deck to do the same thing. That could take forever, but without so much risk of failure.

soultwist

Rootbreaker wrote:

So we need to play A LOT with bad cards to level up our mastery to access better rewards?

I'm not sure I really read it that way, but who knows. Mythics and rares are said to give more "points" or mastery or whatever so likely you can just play a lot with them if you have a lot. Also, its not really much of a burden to rotate a couple new cards into your deck.

If all you have are bad common cards yes you would have to use them a ton. But if all you have are bad common cards why are you trying to get up to a tier that you will get killed at?

Rootbreaker

Ah, I didn't catch that rare cards gave more points the first time around. Weird that they had a chart for number of times to win to level up a card, but no chart for that.

Morphis

I do not get the point of this screen in this contest

According to what I got from this, pve and pvp events will be affected.
Now the screen has 3 different events(right? 3 ends in/start in).

Is the third the next iteration of the first one?

Quick battle rewards will still be around or pvp event is meant to replace it?

Also final question: the silver reward screen shows ribbons and reward....
Is it a threshold reward system? I.e once you earned X ribbon you get the prize. In this case is it cumulative?

Or is it a "shop" system? Ribbon being the money to buy those prizes...?

Morphis

I would like to add that I don't like the grind this system requires.
Having a wall to avoid new player being destroyed is good.
The effective implementation is so "complicated" and also feels so boring.

Wouldn't have been better to just base it on the collection?
Think one of the meters of overall strength of decks is your collection for that color.
Yes, there are many mythic not good, while some other are hugely better than average.
With those **** mythics though you can still farm the encounters following your system, get mastery, and go up tier. So basically no difference at all.

To me you could have just done "all cards are already mastered" and balanced the tier entry levels accordingly(rebalancing just with new expansion release).

The effect, IMO, is the same.
Just without the mindless grind(that, I already did for 10 crystal color challange. One of the most boring thing ever!!!!).
You should really rethink it.

The intent is good.
The system is bad.

majincob

Do you have to *play* the card in a game for it to count, or just have it in the deck?

The Points/game is even across the rarities, with mythics/rares just taking more time to master or lasting longer before needing to be changed out if you'd prefer to look at it from that perspective.

Playing the Heroics you basically get 1 point per game per card rotating out cards as they become mastered (not including colorless cards and hybrid cards), so by the time you have your primary Mythics mastered (16 games) you are already at 160 points, well into silver, and would only need to play 9 more games to get gold. Not too onerous to get to gold with one or two colors.

Of course now I'm going to have to "Master" every card in my collection... wish the number of games to master a card was less and the point level for the tiers was adjusted higher to compensate, but I suppose it's not too bad.

And I assume there will be some sort of indicator when deckbuilding or looking at the collection of which cards were mastered.

Feagul

I guess I'll be the first one to say that I'm excited for more things to do in the game. It's quite odd that the quickest and most efficient way to increase your color mastery with every color is to play colorless cards, though.

khurram

I am excited about this. Regardless of how everyone seems to be focusing on the negatives i see potential increase in rewards... and thats always welcome. All those uncommons are gonna count to something now


What i want is multiple deck saving options now. I think its about time. In order to master all these cards players will have to constantly change their decks. And it is going to be kind of irritating having to edit decks each time you are switching among different events and qb.

Hibernum_JC

Rootbreaker wrote:

It does finally give some incentive to play with the 80%+ or so of cards I've never touched.

Alternatively, the very slow way would be to rotate 1 or 2 cards through a good deck to do the same thing. That could take forever, but without so much risk of failure.

That is the goal, actually. We know that a lot of you don't even give a 2 second look at most of the commons and uncommons because they're considered to be mostly "bad". We hope that by encouraging you guys to include them in your decks, you'll end up actually figuring out new combos and new ways to use the cards that you never considered before.

And yes, you can easily rotate 1 or 2 cards through a good deck and just get the stuff slower, but with a higher chance of winning.

soultwist wrote:

Rootbreaker wrote:

So we need to play A LOT with bad cards to level up our mastery to access better rewards?

I'm not sure I really read it that way, but who knows. Mythics and rares are said to give more "points" or mastery or whatever so likely you can just play a lot with them if you have a lot. Also, its not really much of a burden to rotate a couple new cards into your deck.

If all you have are bad common cards yes you would have to use them a ton. But if all you have are bad common cards why are you trying to get up to a tier that you will get killed at?

It isn't that much (typically doing a few Heroic encounters, if you're at that level, will Master any common card.

Morphis wrote:

I do not get the point of this screen in this contest

According to what I got from this, pve and pvp events will be affected.
Now the screen has 3 different events(right? 3 ends in/start in).

Is the third the next iteration of the first one?

Quick battle rewards will still be around or pvp event is meant to replace it?

Also final question: the silver reward screen shows ribbons and reward....
Is it a threshold reward system? I.e once you earned X ribbon you get the prize. In this case is it cumulative?

Or is it a "shop" system? Ribbon being the money to buy those prizes...?

Alright, so here's the deal. This will go into effect, eventually, on both PvE and PvP events. PvE events will start having leaderboards, and you will compete for Ribbons in PvE also, albeit against non-played crafted decks. The third event, in that screen, is the 2nd iteration of the first one, like you said.

And it's not a shop system, it's a threshold system (much like MPQ, if you play that). It's progression rewards, where once you earn a specific amount of Ribbons, you'll gain a new reward.

Morphis wrote:

I would like to add that I don't like the grind this system requires.
Having a wall to avoid new player being destroyed is good.
The effective implementation is so "complicated" and also feels so boring.

Wouldn't have been better to just base it on the collection?
Think one of the meters of overall strength of decks is your collection for that color.
Yes, there are many mythic not good, while some other are hugely better than average.
With those **** mythics though you can still farm the encounters following your system, get mastery, and go up tier. So basically no difference at all.

To me you could have just done "all cards are already mastered" and balanced the tier entry levels accordingly(rebalancing just with new expansion release).

The effect, IMO, is the same.
Just without the mindless grind(that, I already did for 10 crystal color challange. One of the most boring thing ever!!!!).
You should really rethink it.

The intent is good.
The system is bad.

We looked into it - but we also want to give further goals to the game. The problem with just "hey once you get a card it adds to your Mastery" is that it rewards play instead of rewarding collection. Sure, if you have a lot of cards, you can master all of them and raise your Mastery to get into higher tiers, but at the same time we want to reward players for actually playing and participating rather than just passively for collecting.

You can also go at your own pace. If you don't care about the higher tier rewards, it's okay, and you can stay in Bronze all you want! You can take your time, Mastering a few cards as you go along, and not worry too much about Mastering your entire collection in 2 days. You can slowly master it using Chapter 1 fights, or you can try your luck as Mastering your cards in Heroic encounters. There's a lot of possibilities, and the point is you can set your own pace, make your decisions as to how you want to participate in the systems and if you want to go for rewards or not. It's 100% within your control.

I hope you end up giving it a try and I hope you enjoy what we've done.

majincob wrote:

Do you have to *play* the card in a game for it to count, or just have it in the deck?

The Points/game is even across the rarities, with mythics/rares just taking more time to master or lasting longer before needing to be changed out if you'd prefer to look at it from that perspective.

Playing the Heroics you basically get 1 point per game per card rotating out cards as they become mastered (not including colorless cards and hybrid cards), so by the time you have your primary Mythics mastered (16 games) you are already at 160 points, well into silver, and would only need to play 9 more games to get gold. Not too onerous to get to gold with one or two colors.

Of course now I'm going to have to "Master" every card in my collection... wish the number of games to master a card was less and the point level for the tiers was adjusted higher to compensate, but I suppose it's not too bad.

And I assume there will be some sort of indicator when deckbuilding or looking at the collection of which cards were mastered.

Cards just need to be in your deck to count - you don't need to play them. And if I recall correctly (I'm hard at work on other features right now and Ben was spearheading this one, although I was part of all the initial discussions about Color Mastery) there is an indicator on a card that says you've mastered it in your collection. I might be wrong though, so don't take my word for it

Overall everyone at Hibernum (and I'm sure our friends at D3go) is really proud of this feature and where it's headed. It's a major problem in many, many games where players just cannot compete on equal footing on a lot of game modes, and we really hope that this system ends up changing the way we play these types of games.

span_argoman

Rootbreaker wrote:

So we need to play A LOT with bad cards to level up our mastery to access better rewards?

Well I guess thematically you can't be said to have mastered a colour if you only constantly do 5% of what the colour is capable, no matter how many times you do it.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the new tiers are going to be implemented. Although I can imagine that it is going to be a pain playing in the QB Gold tier thanks to the increased frequency of playing against multi-mythic Kiora decks. Hopefully the rewards will justify it.

khurram

span_argoman wrote:

Although I can imagine that it is going to be a pain playing in the QB Gold tier thanks to the increased frequency of playing against multi-mythic Kiora decks. Hopefully the rewards will justify it.

Wait.. the tiers are just for events or are they going to be implemented in the qbs too?

zolesz

I'm generally happy for the new ways of playing, big thank you for the developers!
On the other hand:
Mastering cards requires us to build and play several decks we otherwise wouldn't use. Which means every time we want to switch back to our strongest deck (e.g. for Story mode, QB), we'll have to rebuild it (and vice versa, when we switch back to Color Mastery).
Imho the new play mode really, really shouts for introducing deck slots, or at least the possibility of saving one (two) default deck per planeswalker!

alextfish

I for one love the idea of being encouraged to play with all the junk commons and uncommons. It would definitely work better with saving/loading of decklists, but nonetheless, it sounds great. And coming with a built-in way to avoid paying against the horrible decks stuffed full of annoying mythics is a great thing too!

shteev

alextfish wrote:

I for one love the idea of being encouraged to play with all the junk commons and uncommons.

I really can't stand that idea. Everyone in QB playing with substandard decks? It's hard enough getting a decent challenge with the way things are.

khurram

shteev wrote:

alextfish wrote:

I for one love the idea of being encouraged to play with all the junk commons and uncommons.

I really can't stand that idea. Everyone in QB playing with substandard decks? It's hard enough getting a decent challenge with the way things are.

Then why not try to win against a substandard deck with a substandard deck if your own making?

That could be a challenge... maybe

EDHdad

I like it. It makes the game more like Draft than Constructed. In paper Magic, people who draft are always playing new things. People who play constructed formats often play the exact same deck for 20 years. I have over 400 cards, but if I want to win, I'll play the same deck with the same 10 cards. Some of the new cards I've never even looked at. It will be nice to have a reason to test them out. It will be nice to have new ways to win crystals and packs. And it will be nice to get a new card even if it's strictly worse than a card I already have, just so I can "master" it and move the needle on my stats.

madwren

I think this has a lot of potential, and look forward to trying it out.

That being said,I agree that having the ability to save decklists would be a godsend. I know that it's partially laziness, but I've been resisting deck modifications because I have a standard rotation for the Oath of the Gatewatch events and achievements, and don't feel like rebuilding all of the decks every Thursday.

Theros

So how is this system gona help ingetting runes at faster rates? Im personnaly more interested in getting runes than crystals to tryout different PWs for fun. Crystals an d cards can be aquired over time and some spending. Grinding runes is more painful than grinding crystal especialy with events