Q&A with Oktagon - November Edition (11/27/17)

Brigby

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to the November edition of our Q&A session with Oktagon. We know the community has a lot of questions about Magic: Puzzle Quest's future, and how their vision will shape it.

Here to answer your questions is Pedro Estigarribia, one of Oktagon's Game Designers.
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What do you consider to be the best period of this game’s life, and what can the community do to help MtGPQ get back on its feet again?
We see this project as a brilliant idea fusing two distinct franchises, Magic: the Gathering and Puzzle Quest, and we believe Hibernum has done their best when creating the game. Our team has done a lot of work playing and analyzing both Paper MtG and Puzzle Quest MtG. This, and community feedback, will help drive the future of MtGPQ.

Community members have given us a lot of awesome ideas to work with, so what we ask of you is: Keep the ideas and feedback coming! We are always listening and looking for great ideas to implement!

Can we get an update on the fix for the Something Went Wrong error?
We are aware that the Something Went Wrong error has been a recurring issue for some time now. We are currently working to solve it. Due to the fact that there are multiple ways to trigger it though, it will take some time to completely solve. However, rest assured that the error will gradually disappear from the game; it will just take some time.

Can we get a sneak peak at the current ideas behind Booster Crafting?
Sure. No Duplicates!

We are currently working on an explanation of how the crafting system will work, and we plan to release this post in the coming weeks.

What are some of the expectations your team has for Ixalan?
Since Ixalan will be the first content release created and developed completely by Oktagon, we are all very excited! We have been working hard to capture the feeling and mood of an amazing set.

Will there be improvements / changes to Events and its schedule in the future?
We understand that it has been a while since new events were added. To put you all at ease though, we are planning to create events related to the world of Ixalan. 

Regarding formats, the game will continue to support two: Standard (most recent sets included) and Legacy (all collections included). We will be releasing a dev post explaining the formats, alongside Ixalan's release.

Schedule-wise, we are working on changes to the rotation variety, based on community feedback.

Do you agree with Mark Rosewater and "Designing Magic" that all cards should be balanced by mana cost, instead of rarity?
For the most part, yes. We believe that cards should be balanced around mana costs, with rarity slightly affecting the final values. After all, rarity should count for something.

Our overall design philosophy is very similar to paper MtG, as far as balancing the five colors and the abilities within them, so you can expect to see some changes in that regard. However, these changes will happen at a gradual pace to make sure the meta-game's stability. This is true for both Planeswalkers and cards.

We do plan to retroactively balance problematic cards, that are affecting the meta-game in a negative way, but this will take some time.

Are there any plans to improve or re-balance Planeswalkers?
Both. We plan on re-evaluating old Planeswalkers in the future, but initially the focus will be on the new ones. However, we can say that some changes to the design process were made to make them more in-line with their theme, mood, and feel.

Will Story Mode be expanded?
We can't say much right now about this, but we do plan to bring in MtG's vast lore into the game in new and exciting ways. We are all very excited about this.
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We hope you've enjoyed the November Q&A session with Oktagon.

As always, I will post a thread at the beginning of each month, requesting questions from the community. After a week has gone by, we will close the thread, and compile the Q&A list for Oktagon's review. Once they have provided us their answers, we will get it ready for posting on the last week of the month!

Please let us know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns. Cheers!