Latest feedback on Zendikar vs Eldrazi. (a.k.a., what the hell, Oktagon?)

arNero

So, I decided once again to pick Nissa for this event since I already have Eye of Ugin, which I do admit is a very stupid move considering there's so many things WRONG with this event.

Okay, Oktagon. You've heard people complaining that Nissa's secondary objectives cannot and should never be the same as Eldrazi's. Yes, it's kinda nice that you do make a change...... from "play with only expensive cards" into "play with only cheap cards" and keep the pauper objective....

What.

Herein lies one problem that you have completely missed out (or flat out ignored) about Nissa's secondary objectives: In a duel like this where one side has vastly greater card pool compared to the other, giving deckbuilding restrictions objectives (such as these "play with only cheap cards and commons/uncommons") on the faction with smaller card pool is, excuse me, dumb **** as ****.

(what I mean is, if the duel were, say, Elspeth vs Tezzeret, a.k.a, monocolor vs monocolor, having the same objectives for both sides is relatively more fair since they thus have about the same size of card pool)

Last event I was kinda lucky that the Eldrazi players I faced were kind enough to play deliberately bad decks and thus I lost no game, and even then Nissa still lost. I've run into a few The Eldest Reborn and Decimator of Provinces this time (I do NOT kid) , and suffice to say winning becomes impossible in that situation when trying to gun for those stupid objectives.

As of the current hour, Nissa's side is losing again, and I'm not too surprised, so seriously, if you ever think about bringing this duel event in the future, there's a few things you have to fix:

1) It's ok for the Eldrazi side to have the tougher objectives such as the "play with expensive cards only" + "play with commons and uncommons only" combination thanks to their full collection pool, but to impose the same level of difficult objectives on Nissa simply makes it pretty much impossible for Nissa to win if her supporters want to fulfill those secondary objectives, unless by some massive miracle NOBODY picked Eldrazi for one event, which I don't ever dare bet.

2) About the Pauper objective: Why, then, did you give those rare and mythic Zendikar vs Eldrazi packs when the objectives forbid us from playing them at all? Those cards are already legacy-only, and the current objectives give us even less incentive to bother playing with those cards. I mean, what the hell?

3) So this is the third time one side steamrolls over the other due to bad design. In light of this, I'd like to reiterate one point I made long ago: Give players the exclusive mythics (Mana Confluence and Eye of Ugin) simply by choosing sides instead of carrying their side to victory. Why? Look at this: Three times Nissa is losing, three times Mana Confluence has been unobtainable, and if you insist on running this duel event and putting bad, BAD objectives on Nissa again, that card will be lost forever, no one will ever be able to obtain it if Nissa must win for the card to be obtainable.

And if you dare say "but we want to reward players for carrying their team to victory by giving the exclusive mythic to winning team", can it, and change the reward so that instead of losing team losing out of exclusive mythic, make them simply gain less crystals/jewels/packs whatever; those are still more recoverable.

ArielSira

Don't you only have to do the objectives once and then simply win with whatever deck you like?

Avahad

I’m on Team Nissa (again)

I haven’t seen anywhere that playing the objectives over and over helps more in the scoring- therefore I hit each once (in separate battles) and then just pour my best legacy cards into the mix and grab easy(ish) wins til the end of the event.

One day Nissa will win.... one day........ and then I’ll have to decide when to join the battle to make sure I’m on the losing side to ensure a new card as reward.... still haven’t got my head round that bit...........

Brakkis

Nissa only won the first beta event and only then because of the smaller pool of players. With enough of us choosing to stack Nissa, it was just barely sufficient enough to push the odds in her favor. She took the lead in the final 15 minutes.

The objectives suck. But, they are irrelevant in terms of TED winning every time. It's because one PW is mono-color and the other is colorless. Sure, Nissa is the better walker of the two but TED offers so much more deck capability for the vast majority of players when playing Legacy.

There is so much wrong with ZvE and the imbalance of mono vs colorless is just icing on an already awful cake.

arNero

ArielSira said:

Don't you only have to do the objectives once and then simply win with whatever deck you like?

Avahad said:

I’m on Team Nissa (again)

I haven’t seen anywhere that playing the objectives over and over helps more in the scoring- therefore I hit each once (in separate battles) and then just pour my best legacy cards into the mix and grab easy(ish) wins til the end of the event.

One day Nissa will win.... one day........ and then I’ll have to decide when to join the battle to make sure I’m on the losing side to ensure a new card as reward.... still haven’t got my head round that bit...........

Ah, is that so? If the two secondary objectives can only contribute once to our scoring, it does mitigate the problem somewhat, but still, the fact that you still have to play one or two very bad decks means it's still possible for, like I mentioned, Eldest Reborn or Decimator to screw you completely over during the first few matches, especially considering that Nissa's new objective (play with only cheap cards) is disastrously hazardous as that locks her out of some of her best tools (including, most importantly, her only true kill spell, Scour From Existence; I've had enough trying to make Rabid Bite work).

But yeah, hoping to get that exclusive mythic when you have to worry about your side being steamrolled is just not fun.

ArielSira

Normally I choose to get both objectives in one match but this time I took 2 matches to get them, it made it a bit easier that way.

The first 2 times I used TED, after that Nissa. Still waiting on that win like you guys

Tilwin90

Brakkis said:

Nissa only won the first beta event and only then because of the smaller pool of players. With enough of us choosing to stack Nissa, it was just barely sufficient enough to push the odds in her favor. She took the lead in the final 15 minutes.

The objectives suck. But, they are irrelevant in terms of TED winning every time. It's because one PW is mono-color and the other is colorless. Sure, Nissa is the better walker of the two but TED offers so much more deck capability for the vast majority of players when playing Legacy.

There is so much wrong with ZvE and the imbalance of mono vs colorless is just icing on an already awful cake.

Funny thing... I actually find Nissa to be a much better planeswalker than TED. In the first phase I always have a much easier with her than the darned colorless deck TED plays. Her abilities are far superior, as are her mana gains.

It's the stupid "play 4 colored deck" vs. "mono-green" in legacy that makes no sense in this event and leads to the imbalance. Now if TED were restricted to one color or maybe even only colorless cards, it might be interesting. The downside for newbies is that they would need to have at least 10 11+ costed colorless cards and win a match once to make it worth for them.

But I think it's the average that gets to complain here. Because on a personal level
- If you're a noobie, you can go ahead and pick TED. You have a much larger card pool and at least you get some decent rewards out of it.
- If you're an elite, go ahead pick Nissa. It's more challenging to get the side objectives first, at least the pauper one (the 11+ is a joke if you have Revelation + Renewal + Hour of Promise). But after that, mono green is stupidly overpowered in legacy. No problemo building a super-winning deck there.

Personally I went with TED just because I don't care about Confluence and I see TED winning each time. So better rewards -> I'm in! I barely play any matches anyway, so my decision has little influence on the grander scheme of things (I play a total of 2 matches in phases 2+3 combined)

Machine

To the OP, as far as I know, you only have to get the secondary objectives once. I'm not aware of nailing them each time will give more "points" to the team you're on. I didn't play the first Beta and choose TED the second time, winning his / her / its exclusive card. Since that time, I've been playing Nissa and will do so until she wins. Even though her exclusive is not that exciting, I still would like to collect it. And... it's not that hard to win with N4 as she is a very strong walker and has access to one of the game's most powerful spells: big green gem changers.

I've got one question though: where are the DD card packs? Even though Nissa seems to lose again, I still would like to reward myself with buying one mythic of each team.

Talahamut

Brakkis said:

She took the lead in the final 15 minutes.

How do you see who's leading and by how much? I can't see anything in game that shows that...

GrizzoMtGPQ

Talahamut said:

Brakkis said:

She took the lead in the final 15 minutes.

How do you see who's leading and by how much? I can't see anything in game that shows that...

You have to get out your micrometer to see which side of the bar is longer. If it is green Nissa is winning. HINT: Nissa is never winning.

Kinesia

ArielSira said:

Don't you only have to do the objectives once and then simply win with whatever deck you like?

We believe so, but have no proof of what happens in the backend scoring, it's probable though.

The problem is that this is NOT made clear to people who keep trying to meet them, unless their coalition tells them or they just guess. (The ticks are a slight indication, but not a guarantee.)

An even bigger issue is that, in the 2nd round, you are NOT told that you can edit the decks, you have to work that out too, which is misleading since in the 1st round you absolutely cannot.

Kinesia

I agree that Nissa is better overall, though, I enjoy playing her normally too especially with Path of Discovery and tokens.
My non-pauper deck is still really close to pauper with Slimefoot being the main exception, most of the green removal I'm using is still common and uncommon anyway. (It's especially amusing when TED casts huge dinosaurs and Slimefoot just absorbs them into his infinite mass...)

Stormcrow

Sometimes there are posts which make me realize that my experience of playing this game is very different from other peoples' experience playing this game. I sided with Nissa, slapped together a deck made entirely out of commons and uncommons that cost 11 mana or less, and went 8-1 with it, never bothered to change it up (despite discovering that Knight of Autumn doesn't get the +2/+2 when you reinforce it ) because I was winning so easily. My one loss was to a janky deck that just happened to drop Radha first turn and just rolled over me a little too fast.

I'm not trying to brag, I just don't really get the complaint about card pool size; considering that Nissa can win with a deck that has Path of Discovery and 9 blank cards in it, she cares less about the card pool and the deckbuilding restrictions in it than literally any other walker I can think of.

arNero said:

2) About the Pauper objective: Why, then, did you give those rare and mythic Zendikar vs Eldrazi packs when the objectives forbid us from playing them at all? Those cards are already legacy-only, and the current objectives give us even less incentive to bother playing with those cards. I mean, what the hell?

I do agree with this, however, and I put basically the same thing in my feedback during the beta test. You can see how much that helped!

Also, every time this event runs I find myself wishing the same: "Man I wish they would fix Ambuscade."

NickBKK

It’s time for the Dev to creatively change things up. The structure is already there, perhaps regularly tweaking the contents shouldn’t be too difficult?
How about a “red” VS “green” PW event?, mono blue VS mono black?, how about Gideon VS Liliana? 
Be creative!

arNero

NickBKK said:

It’s time for the Dev to creatively change things up. The structure is already there, perhaps regularly tweaking the contents shouldn’t be too difficult?
How about a “red” VS “green” PW event?, mono blue VS mono black?, how about Gideon VS Liliana? 
Be creative!

Well, as I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I would have approved of both sides of the Duel having the same objectives if they also have relatively even power in theory (the "in theory" here is important; you know some colors are just straight out better than others, even if the number of cards each color can play by itself is the same), and monocolor vs monocolor is one such situation where each side has relatively similar card pool size.

Frankly, I don't quite support the idea of having new Duel events again for now, if only because seeing the exact same result for Nissa vs Eldrazi three times kinda dampens my interest on similar events in the future. But, you know, further tweaking or proper changes to the objectives and such is definitely needed indeed; Nissa's most recent change is just downright stupid.... what next? Cast only supports during the match?

Laeuftbeidir

Set restriction. Let's make this at least a tiny bit interesting.

Mburn7

I never find the secondaries too challenging for the one time I actually meet them, but then again I have pretty much every common and uncommon in the game, so it's a bit easier.

That being said, I agree that those objectives, which separately are quite fun to have in an event, are together very un-fun to play with, especially in a beefed up legacy format that only gives rares/mythic that are rather costly to use.

My biggest issue with this event is the complete lack of change in it.  In all the runs from the first Beta to now:

-The pre-made decks have not changed despite numerous complaints
-The event structure has not changed despite numerous complaints (phase 2 and 3 should be more different)
-The secondary objectives have not significantly changed, despite numerous complaints
-The special node supports have not changed (although I don't know if anyone's complained about them)

Really makes me wonder why they bothered asking for feedback.

And for everyone who is complaining about the 4 color vs 1 color thing, that's actually pretty on point from a story/theming perspective.  But Oktagon has said that they will be making future duel deck events, so we'll get more interesting combos eventually.

Gabrosin

Perhaps the game devs can share some metrics with us to help explain why Nissa keeps getting defeated.  I'd be very curious to know how many players are on each side for these runs, and their average score.

madwren

Mburn7 said:

-The pre-made decks have not changed despite numerous complaints
-The event structure has not changed despite numerous complaints (phase 2 and 3 should be more different)
-The secondary objectives have not significantly changed, despite numerous complaints
-The special node supports have not changed (although I don't know if anyone's complained about them)

Really makes me wonder why they bothered asking for feedback.

Yup, all of this. Clearly, to them "beta" means "see if the event crashes", not "solicit meaningful feedback and change from the player base".

James13

Suggestion for the Duels format:

Incrementally degrade rewards of the winning side on subsequent run(s) to discourage consecutive victories.  Reset to full amounts on loss.

This will encourage players to experience both sides over multiple runs of the event.

As is, we will never see the Nissa side win.

Mburn7

James13 said:

Suggestion for the Duels format:

Incrementally degrade rewards of the winning side on subsequent run(s) to discourage consecutive victories.  Reset to full amounts on loss.

This will encourage players to experience both sides over multiple runs of the event.

As is, we will never see the Nissa side win.

I think the bigger issue is the card rewards.  The Eldrazi exclusive is significantly better than Nissa's, but the Zendikar rares are much better than the Eldrazi rares.  So people don't care much for winning with Nissa, but quite enjoy losing with her.  I'll bet there are more people playing Nissa, but they are playing fewer fights.