Drafting and Sealed

Unknown

If we're going to be stuck with the random token system, I'd love to see draft and sealed play options, cribbed from Magic the Gathering.

A draft would start with everyone involved stocked with, say, 24 gold tokens. Open eight, choose one, pass the others, repeat until done. Do that three times, alternating directions around the "table". Pick your favorite covers, and the system will autolevel all characters to the max level (or some arbitrary level, whatever) for everyone, so the tactics revolve around picking a solid team and trying to focus your covers and/or cover the colors or build synergies.

You could certainly build a system without autoleveling, and grant an ISO pool that has to be spent wisely (and only in the competition), but autoleveling means less prep time and a more level (and interesting) playing field.

A sealed competition would see each player with, say, 40 gold tokens. Open them up and make your best team with what you're given, then compete with autoleveled characters (or not, whatever) as in a draft.

There could be a "play for keeps" where you keep what you draft, and a "play for prizes" where you're just playing to compete, and the covers that are part of the draft/sealed pool would disappear.

(Numbers are, of course, tweakable, and suggested only as a baseline for theorycrafting. Courageous tokens and other special tokens could be other handles to tweak.)

Dayv

Sounds neat, but man that's a lot of new systems and mechanics to code.

Unknown

Indeed, and I'm not really hopeful they will do it, it just seems like a natural addition to a game with random source gaming pieces, competition and a population that might wind up sitting in a relatively stale endgame. (or midgame, like the 2** to 3*** transition)

Unknown

If the drop ratio is the usual it wouldn't be really fun. The characters we have are not at all useful with 1-3 covers.

Unknown

Interesting concept, but the MTG (or MOTO) drafting process doesn't translate well at all to the asynchronous mobile world. Games like Solforge and Hearthstone have overcome that by building drafting pools based on people's pick order, so when you're "passed" your next pick, you're actually being given a pool of cards that roughly correlates to when a card is picked in the order. So you're presented with say 3 cards that are all first-pick worthy. Then you're next presented with 3 more cards that are sometimes first-picked and sometimes 2nd-picked, and so on until your last pick which is typically cards that no one would use (the Yelena's and 1* Hawkeyes).

So what they could do here is offer 10 picks of 3 covers. For a total of 30 covers. Your first 2 picks would be guaranteed gold stars, your next 3 picks would be guaranteed 2*'s, and your last 5 picks would be guaranteed 1*'s. After you're done, you could "trade down" your picks, so if you don't like your 3*, you can trade it down and get presented with another set of 2*'s to make a pick from (perhaps after you pick the 3*'s, you're given the option then so that you're always picking the cards of the same rarity together).

Regardless of which covers or how many of a given character you get, you could then normalize them all to level 15 to avoid the leveling mechanic.

However, the one thing I will say is that any form of sealed or draft where you keep what you draft is cost-prohibitive, even if they did give a steep discount for it.

Unknown

True, some sort of Hearthstone "draft" would indeed work better.

I'm not too worried about cost prohibitive "keeper" drafts. People are willing to pay cash for tokens. I consider that to be extremely poor value, even with Steam sales. There will be those who will pay for "keeper" drafts or sealed play. I wouldn't do so myself, but I'm certain that there would be a market for it.

Dormammu

What is this, fantasy football?

Dayv

Dormammu wrote:

What is this, fantasy football?

New 4* character suggestion: Shivakamini Somakandarkram

Unknown

Dormammu wrote:

What is this, fantasy football?

Just in case you're not trolling, here's a bit of reference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The ... ng_formats