3.5 Release Notes *Updated (7/8/19)

Tremayne

@wereotter - great observation. Assuming you are right and the devs are following this path shouldn’t green land then convert more gems per land than other colours? 

I do not recall any difference in the amount of gems converted when comparing across colours. The method seems quite limited since we only have 10 cards in a deck in MTGPQ.

Tremayne

@starfall - yes it has (as your search showed)m however it is only now that I became aware of how prolific the effect is for blue (but perhaps also in other colours).

It seems to be counter intuitive that in a match3 game the ability to draw cards becomes more important than the actual matching of 3 gems (from a mana generating perspective).

ElfNeedsFood

Brigby said:

• The Exclusive Referral Cards (Cowl Prowler, Ghirapur Orrery, and Wayward Giant) are no longer incorrectly included in Basic Booster (Legacy) and Rare Card (Legacy).

Did they fix the referral packs at all yet?  It seems about time to put these in the general pool and put something newer in the referral pool...

Unknown

This content has been removed.

wereotter

Tremayne said:

@wereotter - great observation. Assuming you are right and the devs are following this path shouldn’t green land then convert more gems per land than other colours? 

I do not recall any difference in the amount of gems converted when comparing across colours. The method seems quite limited since we only have 10 cards in a deck in MTGPQ.

I would say that instead of converting more gems, land supports just shouldn’t reinforce. Then when green pulls the supports into play, they get more mana than other colors who cast their land supports as they draw them. 

Edit: Legendary Lands should still reinforce. So Vault of Calcatan or Itlimoc, as examples, wouldn't have multiples in play. They're already strong enough on their own.

GrizzoMtGPQ

starfall said:

The card changes are a mixed bag, but on principle I'm happy to see changes based on levels of play (so long as those levels are excessive). I can't see Counterspell or Fraying Sanity getting any more play now because they're still awful, but it's nice to know the dev team has their eye on some terrible cards. The game would have been better served by changes to Planeswalkers rather than bad niche cards but thank the lord for small mercies.

I'm baffled by changes to already powerful cards, however: Ball Lightning and Vindicate? These were unnecessary. Perhaps Vindicate was underplayed because the players who had it had access to Plague Wind, and Ball Lightning because the premier aggressive deck of Standard was Beacon Bolt+BSZ? But, these changes are small enough not to affect things much.

I tried counterspell for the first time. It works crazy well when you have Omni out. It's niche, I'll never play it, but it can be wicked cool when none of your cards costs anything anyway.

Tremayne

wereotter said:

Tremayne said:

@wereotter - great observation. Assuming you are right and the devs are following this path shouldn’t green land then convert more gems per land than other colours? 

I do not recall any difference in the amount of gems converted when comparing across colours. The method seems quite limited since we only have 10 cards in a deck in MTGPQ.

I would say that instead of converting more gems, land supports just shouldn’t reinforce. Then when green pulls the supports into play, they get more mana than other colors who cast their land supports as they draw them. 

Edit: Legendary Lands should still reinforce. So Vault of Calcatan or Itlimoc, as examples, wouldn't have multiples in play. They're already strong enough on their own.

Interesting idea, green having multiple lands in play would alleviate the situation and the lands would most likely be destroyed due to matches.

LordDorwin

I have little commentary here, besides two comments:

1.  Some of the cheapened "underplayed" cards are so useless that they would not see much more play were they priced at 1 or 2.  Certain cards are simply "filler" or worse, cosmetic (Best example of the latter in my collection: Kari Zev's Expertise [KLD])

2.  Regarding the Angrath nerf: Will Angrath still be able to steal-destroy tokens, albeit for no benefit bar the single strike?  There are certain obnoxious deck strategies relying solely on the manufacture of vast quantities of tokens, usually with the hope of having cast Divine Visitation beforehand.  
Also, certain cards(Josu Vess springs to mind) create preposterous amounts of tokens.  This ability was always a useful counter to such nonsense.

Most importantly, this question was posed before in these very fora, and it was confirmed that this was NOT a bug (https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/71807/angraths-third-ability-and-tokens [see comment by Tombstone]).  Consistency is vital in a game based on rules. May I suggest you reconsider this decision, especially based on the minimal benefit to general gameplay derived therefrom.

High power token decks should have a countermeasure in any case, lest they be even more overused.

Machine

Mburn7 said:

Dropspot said:

Really dislike the return of weekday coalition events

I really like the return of weekday coalition events.  To each their own I guess.

If weekday coaltion events is a permanent thing, I will quit this game. I've said it before and I say it now. This game is already a terrible grind during the weekend and I won't do the same during weekdays. I don't care if other players are going along with the developers to play more and more, but I certainly won't. I didn't like the weekday coalition events back then and was very relieved to see them go.

@Brigby: Can you confirm weekday coalition events are coming back permanently?

Machine

The nerf to Plague Wind is too harsh. It's an MP! It should be fairly powerful. If you compare it with Vona's Hunger, which is a rare and under the right circumstances is able to take out two creatures, Plague Wind should cost 13, 14 tops. 16 is just too much.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

madwren

starfall said:

Machine said:

The nerf to Plague Wind is too harsh. It's an MP! It should be fairly powerful. If you compare it with Vona's Hunger, which is a rare and under the right circumstances is able to take out two creatures, Plague Wind should cost 13, 14 tops. 16 is just too much.

There's fairly powerful, and there's too powerful Plague Wind is still an exceptionally powerful card which will see a lot of play.

True, but I agree with Machine here. It's a masterpiece. There's an implied degree of cost efficiency that suggests it shouldn't cost more than Kaya's Wrath (13). Even Cleansing Nova is only 15.

13 would have been fine.

Something that's interesting, though, is that they clearly are looking at everything through a very narrow lens--commonly played cards in Standard. This cements the thought that they don't care much about the Legacy wilderness.  Otherwise it's foolish to leave Wrath of God at 7.

Narcoticsagent

madwren said:

starfall said:

Machine said:

The nerf to Plague Wind is too harsh. It's an MP! It should be fairly powerful. If you compare it with Vona's Hunger, which is a rare and under the right circumstances is able to take out two creatures, Plague Wind should cost 13, 14 tops. 16 is just too much.

There's fairly powerful, and there's too powerful Plague Wind is still an exceptionally powerful card which will see a lot of play.

True, but I agree with Machine here. It's a masterpiece. There's an implied degree of cost efficiency that suggests it shouldn't cost more than Kaya's Wrath (13). Even Cleansing Nova is only 15.

13 would have been fine.

Something that's interesting, though, is that they clearly are looking at everything through a very narrow lens--commonly played cards in Standard. This cements the thought that they don't care much about the Legacy wilderness.  Otherwise it's foolish to leave Wrath of God at 7.

Theres a huge difference between kill all creatures and kill all your opponents creatures and leave yours alive. You have compared entirely different effects. Wrath of God in paper costs 4 mana making it early to mid game plague wind costs 9 making it extreme late game and probably in the the top 1% of highest cost mana cost cards in the game. I think if anything plague wind in MTGPQ is still too cheap.

madwren

Narcoticsagent said:

madwren said:

starfall said:

Machine said:

The nerf to Plague Wind is too harsh. It's an MP! It should be fairly powerful. If you compare it with Vona's Hunger, which is a rare and under the right circumstances is able to take out two creatures, Plague Wind should cost 13, 14 tops. 16 is just too much.

There's fairly powerful, and there's too powerful Plague Wind is still an exceptionally powerful card which will see a lot of play.

True, but I agree with Machine here. It's a masterpiece. There's an implied degree of cost efficiency that suggests it shouldn't cost more than Kaya's Wrath (13). Even Cleansing Nova is only 15.

13 would have been fine.

Something that's interesting, though, is that they clearly are looking at everything through a very narrow lens--commonly played cards in Standard. This cements the thought that they don't care much about the Legacy wilderness.  Otherwise it's foolish to leave Wrath of God at 7.

Theres a huge difference between kill all creatures and kill all your opponents creatures and leave yours alive. You have compared entirely different effects. Wrath of God in paper costs 4 mana making it early to mid game plague wind costs 9 making it extreme late game and probably in the the top 1% of highest cost mana cost cards in the game. I think if anything plague wind in MTGPQ is still too cheap.

I respectfully submit that for a significant number of cards in PQ, the actual casting cost in paper is irrelevant. Both Oktagon and Hibernum have taken great liberties with cards of higher rarities at times, and trying to use paper cost as a rationale is an exercise in futility.

You are correct in that they are different effects. "Entirely" different is definitely an overstatement, however, since in practice the cards function similarly.  When I need to cast Plague Wind, it isn't because of the presence or lack of creatures on my side of the board; it's because Greg's are strong enough that it warrants a reset. 

Similarly, when I cast Wrath of God, or Hour of Revelation, or Fumigate, or Kaya's Wrath, or whatever, whether or not I'm killing my own creatures is extraneous.

Mooninja

I am curious as to why probably the worst MPs in the game weren't addressed? @Brigby
Lightning Greaves, and the other two that form the triumvirate are simply awful. An argument can be made that the greaves are worse than many commons and uncommons that perform a similar function. The 3 piece goal for the set is interesting, but requires 3 non-mana producing/fixing supports to be in the deck and in play. Is there any way we can get these updated? Or at least get feedback as to why they have been overlooked?

Unknown

This content has been removed.

Brigby

ElfNeedsFood said:

Brigby said:

• The Exclusive Referral Cards (Cowl Prowler, Ghirapur Orrery, and Wayward Giant) are no longer incorrectly included in Basic Booster (Legacy) and Rare Card (Legacy).

Did they fix the referral packs at all yet?  It seems about time to put these in the general pool and put something newer in the referral pool...

As of this moment, I'm unaware of any plans to rotate the referral cards out for different ones. If that changes though, I'll be sure to let players know of this change.

Machine said:

Mburn7 said:

Dropspot said:

Really dislike the return of weekday coalition events

I really like the return of weekday coalition events.  To each their own I guess.

-snip-

Brigby: Can you confirm weekday coalition events are coming back permanently?

Apologies for the confusion. It would appear that Ravnica at War is a weekly PvP Coalition event, as opposed to a weekday one. I have corrected this in the post.

Brigby

*Updated the descriptions for Ravnica at War and Proliferate

Horadrim

Machine said:

The nerf to Plague Wind is too harsh. It's an MP! It should be fairly powerful. If you compare it with Vona's Hunger, which is a rare and under the right circumstances is able to take out two creatures, Plague Wind should cost 13, 14 tops. 16 is just too much.

Except that Plague Wind also deals damage. Imagine killing a stack of tokens. But I agree that 13 should be the mana cost (for flavor... curse of 13) plus being a MP.

jtwood

starfall said:

Oktagon are still at the stage in the game that WOTC were 20 years ago; They're making spells too powerful and creatures too weak. Making powerful spells that kill creatures easily exacerbates this problem more than anything. Paper got through this stage and is much better for it.

I disagree with so much of this.