Arena - How to Improve

babar3355

So I am one of those who actually likes the Arena events.  I like how they force you to play PW's you wouldn't always play.  I like that the objectives are intended to highlight the PW, even though some have fallen short. But, the devs could use a hand with these objectives because they are missing the mark by quite a bit. 

Recommendations for this past weekend event:

Sorin: Cast 3 or more vampires, Gain 50 or more life.

Sarkhan:  Do 60 or more damage with dragons, Kill 2 or more of your own creatures.

See, they actually make sense for what the PW is trying to do.  Not super easy, but not just infuriatingly counterintuitive.

Next week:

Dovin Bane: Energize 30 gems, Overload 20 or more gems

Saheeli Rai: Create 8 or more constructs, Cast 2 or less creatures from your hand

Just spit balling, but the idea is to not have asinine objectives tied to PWs.  G2 should be allowed to cast spells.  Sarkhan should be allowed to kill enemies.  Sorin should be allowed to gain life. etc.

Laeuftbeidir

To begin with: I'm not sure about your ideas for Sarkhan, meaning: I don't know if the game is actually able to count those!

For Sorin: I'm okay with the vampires, but would replace gain x life with "get 90 or more damage" - hard to get, but not nearly impossible at all

Sarkhan: maybe something like lose x creatures ( basically your idea in a way that I know is working) / the 6 dragons objective in a way that counts the tinikitty tokens


Dovin Baan (Bane as Planeswalker could be funny ) : Energize x, loose only y creatures

Saheeli : only cast two creatures sounds good, win in x rounds


Maybe a bit less easy to get numbers, but I totally agree with your Idea that it would be way more fun when you could actually do what your planeswalkers are there for.

@Brigby , if the players here find good Ideas I hope you can pass them to this mystical creatures called the "devs"

shteev

I, too, like the Arena events! In fact, thanks for starting this thread because I can't start threads at the moment while I'm in jail I have a few reasons for liking this event:

1) I own the right cards.

Not to be underestimated, this one. I see a lot of posts on facebook from people who just don't own any dragons at all. I own 3, and only Avaricious Dragon is actually any good (he does a great job of sorting out Sarkhan's poor mana generation). The same thing happened with Gideon2 and his allies.

2) I haven't had to fight a lot of difficult opponents.

The objectives in the Arena are crazy hard. And, as has been pointed out before, generally counter to the whole ideology of each planeswalker. Sarkhan wants to kill with dragons, Gideon2 wants to kill with Allies. But playing 6 of them and somehow not managing to kill your opponent before then? Not easy at all. Infuriating, sometimes, in fact. I think if I'd been put up against a bunch of Baral decks, or creatureless Ob decks, or Kiora Waterveil decks, these objectives would have effectively become impossible for me in those games, and I'd just have cried. But luckily (at least, I imagine it's not by design), most of the games I played were against fairly average decks, often with cards much less powerful than mine, and so I had a fighting chance of clearing the objectives. I like challenging more than I like impossible.

3) I don't care about losing.

The pressure is very much off in this event. The objectives are killer, but the penalty for failing to do them is minute. As such, I devoted myself to trying to get the objectives at every opportunity, even losing games on occasion because I'd shot my own creatures in order to avoid winning too fast, and then been overrun by my opponent.

There are a lot of reasons for this; flat prize structure, bad prizes, smaller brackets, low player interest. Most of these reasons currently apply to EVERY event, but I don't think that's healthy. It's nice to have one event which doesn't feel competitive, but at the moment, nothing at all in the game feels competitive, and that's one reason so many people are bored with it and downvoting it in the app store recently.

4) It's different every time

Variety is the spice of life, and the spice must flow. PvE events like RatC are getting terminally boring now from constant repetition. PvP events like NoP are a bit less boring, my opponents vary, but the restrictions on my own deck building (node color and objectives) are always the same and are quite tight, so I really don't get the opportunity to vary my decks that much (not if I want to score points for my coalition, at any rate). But the restrictions in the Arena are tight, and (mostly) change every time, making each one a different deck building challenge. Sure, a lot of them are STUPID deck building challenges, but they sure are challenging. There is absolutely no point running that 3rd node exactly the same every time, though, is there?