Rune Scarcity

DBJones

I feel like the disappearance of Quick Battles (I started playing a bit less than a year ago, and never played then FYI) has left new players without any good source of runes once they finish story mode. Boosting rune rewards in events (say double) would greatly mitigate the issue without making anything but leveling Planeswalkers more obtainable.

I was able to get several Planeswalkers over the holiday season, including Bolas. However, leveling them up is a rather intimidating undertaking. The biggest sources of runes I can see are daily rewards, (around 15K a month, quite good for minimal time investment) Training Grounds, (1450 for 4 wins, worth it just for the 15 crystals) and the biggest freely repeatable source, Heroic Encounters at 250 runes per win. The first two add up to almost 60K runes a month on average. Nicol Bolas costs over 320K to level all the way. Other events give some runes, but not really a lot. Maxing out Bolas could easily take half a year. I think three months would be reasonable for how good he is, but half a year just for him?!

Thoughts?

James13

Are you not playing any events ever?  You seem to be omitting a large influx of runes from other sources beyond TG and login.

Feels like with crafting being a thing now my rune influx has increased dramatically.  Every pack nets you more runes.  Hoarding and not converting is a thing of the past.  Each event match nets you an additional 100 (or 50 for a loss).  If you are participating in the constant flow of events you're getting a lot more than just TG.

Emanon2000

I've built an account that started after TG... No coalition... FTP.... I've acquired all the Planeswalkers... I've leveled 3 to 60 and the rest are between 23 and 45.  0 Runes remaining.   I don't feel that there is a rune shortage though...  I still have story and Daily to build my PW's.  I only use my high level PW's for the Daily and Story mode.  There are still opportunities to gain runes though...  I will say that adding any new PW's in the next set will definitely start to put a strain on this resource even more.

ArielSira

I can't get myself to grind Heroic for more than 4 matches in a row. I wish they'd have kept the double runes for TG at least, or make it repeatable (with runes instead of 15 crystals after the first 4 wins). Mastering cards could be a rune source, being in platinum makes that useless otherwise or (one can hope) full reset of Story mods after finishing them.

Kinesia

Just play.

The matching system has been fixed slightly and you can play your level 30 people in platinum even now. 

I _do_ want to see changes here, but the desire to have everyone at 60 is actually obsessive and not totally necessary.

(My personal desire is that when you master a card with a planeswalker that planeswalker gets a burst of experience _and_ you get a small amount of runes. It would drive people to actually play with the ones they want to level and I think that would be a good thing to drive.)

IM_CARLOS

If you want big or all PW you have to grind or wait. You don't have to get and max bolas. But you can get and max 1C PW easy.

On the other end are player with a lot of runes and no need or will to buy and max out any other pw. Where to sink the rune.

Or if you have every pw maxed out... 

Bigred5442

once you get to platinum, you should be able to easily level a single color PW every month.

i think i average ~100k runes a month, playing maybe 80% of available events, and collecting average amount of rewards hourly and all daily rewards.

i think that is a pretty good pace, you shouldn't be able to get every PW fully leveled in a short period of time, it gives you nothing to work towards. i don't have all mine leveled all they way (do own all of them) but with the recent lul in new PW its been pretty easy to get many of them topped off. (even with leveling bolas to lv 52)

best advice i can give, is figure out what the best place to stop is, and level the PW to low 50's, you get most of their power but save the huge investment in runes the last 7 or 8 levels take. that way you can have more high level PW's

Gotcha617

1.4 mil and counting. I’m sure there are plenty of ppl with more.

Matthew

Bigred5442 said:

once you get to platinum, you should be able to easily level a single color PW every month.

i think i average ~100k runes a month, playing maybe 80% of available events, and collecting average amount of rewards hourly and all daily rewards.

i think that is a pretty good pace, you shouldn't be able to get every PW fully leveled in a short period of time, it gives you nothing to work towards. i don't have all mine leveled all they way (do own all of them) but with the recent lul in new PW its been pretty easy to get many of them topped off. (even with leveling bolas to lv 52)

best advice i can give, is figure out what the best place to stop is, and level the PW to low 50's, you get most of their power but save the huge investment in runes the last 7 or 8 levels take. that way you can have more high level PW's

I've found this to be pretty much completely true, and that's almost entirely due to the fact that you win runes irrespective of what placement you get, especially if play every event to its full completion.

Back before Hibernum tanked, I found that the rate at which they released new PWs was just slow enough that I could earn the necessary amount to max out the newest PW to 60. This was true for both mono- and dual-color PWs (although, to be fair, a good bit of the runes needed for the dual-color PWs were rolled over from the surplus I had after leveling the newest mono-color). This held true all the way through the Amonkhet and Hour of Devastation sets. I didn't start paying attention to it until that point, because up until then, I was still chasing older PWs I hadn't purchased yet.

So if Oktagon keeps the flow of runes at their current rate, and doesn't inundate us with the five new PWs we're looking at from the Ixalan/Rivals sets, it's not terribly unrealistic to expect to be able to keep up.

Now here's the part where I acknowledge that my situation isn't that of an average player. I have played this game since shortly after it's release, so I've had a ton of time to get to this point. I know the flow of runes for newer players is pretty measly, and I think that needs to be changed to some extent. There need to be other sources of runes for these newer players, and even those who have been around for a little while, because from their point of view, reaching my point (I have all 30 PWs at 60 and 180K runes in the bank) must certainly seem like a Sisyphean task.

FindingHeart8

I think it's important to also look at the fact that not every planeswalker is optimum at level 60.

My Gideon1 is at level 10, and I'd say he's more fierce against planeswalkers even 10 levels higher than some of my level 60 planeswalkers.

For me, Samut is also optimum at level 58, before her 2nd ability is maxed (though I use her primarily for the long run against opponents with 250+hp and not as a kamikaze deck).

My Jace1 one is sitting at level 36, and I wish I could take every rune I put into that planeswalker and put them into anyone else. lol

Kinesia

FindingHeart8 said:

I think it's important to also look at the fact that not every planeswalker is optimum at level 60.

My Gideon1 is at level 10, and I'd say he's more fierce against planeswalkers even 10 levels higher than some of my level 60 planeswalkers.

For me, Samut is also optimum at level 58, before her 2nd ability is maxed (though I use her primarily for the long run against opponents with 250+hp and not as a kamikaze deck).

My Jace1 one is sitting at level 36, and I wish I could take every rune I put into that planeswalker and put them into anyone else. lol

Heh. I use Jace1 as a deck slot to meet "play x spells, play 0 supports", almost never use his abilities (don't need to) But I must say that playing with him early on was very very painful until I lucked into Thopter Spy Network. Back then that was almost all I could do in blue. (I know a lot more now though!)

FindingHeart8

Heh. I use Jace1 as a deck slot to meet "play x spells, play 0 supports", almost never use his abilities (don't need to) But I must say that playing with him early on was very very painful until I lucked into Thopter Spy Network. Back then that was almost all I could do in blue. (I know a lot more now though!)

well, it's comforting to hear that somebody found a use in him lol

Yeah, times have changed a bit.  Based from what I've read from your other posts, I'd presume you're a veteran whose been playing since mtgpq game-start or shortly after.

So...back in the day (lol), when planeswalkers were more limited (no Ajani, no Nahiri, no Bolas, no Samut, if Kiora was out she reigned supreme as the octupus-weilding tyrant of the land) Jace1 was significantly more useful as the only affordable blue planeswalker (runes were more scarce then) and the only walker with spell recursion, and if you lucked out and packed spy network, I could see why you went that route.  I made the mistake of choosing Liliana1 for my starter pokemon-planeswalker...and I lost a lot of battles because of her lol.

I didn't invest in Jace1 until about 6 months ago because I was bored and had a surplus of runes.  I also didn't get spy network until booster crafting (after already packing Sandwurm Convergence, Liliana's zombie factory Oath, and all the other token generators) so he was pretty useless for me

Kinesia

I've played since early on but not _much_ back then. I found it very very cludgy and painful to play any events or story until they brought in event decks. Even now I don't play story until they add event decks there.

But _after_ that I played a lot more and started recommending it to people. My wife getting interested accelerated my own commitment.
So I am a veteran, but I was asleep in the back of supply wagon rather than on the battlefield!

bk1234

I think that rune scarcity is the number one deterrent to retaining new players. It would be different if they could get their original 5 up to 60 -- you can be competitive with the original 5, however, I've seen new players grind day and night to do this.... and end up burned out. 

I have a huge excess of runes, but I have 2 years in this game and had a big stockpile when QB ended. Anyone who wasn't here for that is at a competitive disadvantage. 

FindingHeart8

Kinesia said:

I've played since early on but not _much_ back then. I found it very very cludgy and painful to play any events or story until they brought in event decks. Even now I don't play story until they add event decks there.

But _after_ that I played a lot more and started recommending it to people. My wife getting interested accelerated my own commitment.
So I am a veteran, but I was asleep in the back of supply wagon rather than on the battlefield!

haha snoozin in the back

Yeah my initial experience was mtgpq was a rough one.  I invested in my planeswalker before investing in packs, convinced that Lily's 2nd and 3rd ability would give me a significant competitive advantage (and not realizing she was probably the 2nd to worst planeswalker of the starting 5).  Then I bought a few boosters which had absolutely 0 synergy, and proceeded to take my level 8 Liliana to quick battles with hopes of loot glory......I lost a lot.

After some very humbling experiences (and facing enough Gideon/runaway-carriage combos to last me a lifetime), I went to story mode and worked my way to completing all the levels, giving me enough runes to buy all the planeswalkers available at the time and a handful of the large packs.  After that, I had enough decent werewolf cards to be able to hold my own against elite player decks, though I was only sporting a 60-40 win ratio (mostly because again...runaway carriage).  It wasn't until after another half a year of playing that I lucked out and packed Deploy the Gatewatch and really got a boost to my competitive play.  Never got that blasted Runaway Carriage until after they nerfed it.

Point is, story mode really should be what the game pushes new players towards initially.  In addition to giving them enough crystals to actually have options, it gives new players a solid base to start out on, with gradually increasing opponents (that should more-or-less match their planeswalkers increasing level).

I'm also a fan of a storyline expansion, maybe including some Innistrad, Amonkhet, or Ixalan when it's released (we can skip Kaledesh, too many energy counters on the board could be overwhelming for new players).

Stormcrow

bken1234 said:

I think that rune scarcity is the number one deterrent to retaining new players. It would be different if they could get their original 5 up to 60 -- you can be competitive with the original 5, however, I've seen new players grind day and night to do this.... and end up burned out.

I've said this before, but if they're not going to buff the original 5 to catch up to the power level of more recent planeswalkers, then they should go all-in on the idea that "these are the PWs for newbies" and reduce the rune cost to level them. Offhand, I'd say reducing their leveling cost by half seems about right.

FindingHeart8

I've said this before, but if they're not going to buff the original 5 to catch up to the power level of more recent planeswalkers, then they should go all-in on the idea that "these are the PWs for newbies" and reduce the rune cost to level them. Offhand, I'd say reducing their leveling cost by half seems about right.

To be fair, back in the day some of them were still competitive walkers in the game (even when tezz1, gideon2, etc were out).

I wouldn't mind seeing some *slight* boosts, mostly because I'd actually like players to see some hope in using them for tournament play and not as a death sentence, also because I'd like to face someone different besides the continuous high-frequency of Bolas and Kioras I seem to be encountering almost every battle

Irishme

I nice option for runes would be for training grounds to have rewards for ten battles instead of four.  Just add rune rewards for going past four.  That way those that don’t need them can stop or those that do can go to ten.  

To anyone who says it’s easy to lvl PW’s needs to tell me there secrets.  I do every single event every time and heroic encounters at least 50 times a day and don’t even half of my PW’s lvl’d yet.  

TheDragonHermit

Irishme said:

I nice option for runes would be for training grounds to have rewards for ten battles instead of four.  Just add rune rewards for going past four.  That way those that don’t need them can stop or those that do can go to ten.  

To anyone who says it’s easy to lvl PW’s needs to tell me there secrets.  I do every single event every time and heroic encounters at least 50 times a day and don’t even half of my PW’s lvl’d yet.  

It's easy, just not fast. Focus on the PWs you use most and stop in the early 50s. For a game like this it going slowly is good, you can figure out your play style with TG or HE and then take them to events. Most of the time level is less important than the cards you are using with the exception of very certain PWs.

ElfNeedsFood

@Irishme I just bought new walkers slowly at first. Maybe 1 or 2 per month. When I picked up three at a time it did feel like I was always lacking runes. As TheDragonHermit says, just bench a few planeswalkers if you picked up a bunch while they were on sale last week and focus on a couple of them. 

Irishme

I went after PWs, it’s a thing with me.  I have all 30 now.  It does go very slowly trying to get them usable.  

I disagree @TheDragonHermit.  For newer players like me not having a fully leveled PW often means a loss with the cards I have.  Most of my battles are a constant struggle where the difference between a win or a loss comes down to a few hit points or mana.  Most new players don’t have endless cascading, cycling, or a bunch of mythics to get easier wins.  I even have one PW deck with only one rare, the rest are below, because that’s what I have. The little bit of extra mana or health I get from being lvl 60 really matters there.