Oktagon Official Announcement: Ability Change - VIGILANCE

Magic:PQ Support Team

Hello everyone,

We are excited to announce the upcoming change of the Vigilance ability. Vigilance will be changed to better represent the ability, and to increase the value of creatures that have the ability by allowing them to survive against deadly attacks, when blocking.

The current Vigilance hint reads:

"This creature blocks your opponent's creatures but lets creatures with Defender or Reach block first."

Vigilance will be changed in 4.1 to:

"This creature blocks opposing creatures only if it will survive combat damage of the basic damage step. It allows creatures with Defender and Reach to block first."

On that note, adding Defender to several cards was inherent to the Vigilance change. Therefore the Game Design team had already included this change. We are going to announce which cards will receive Defender, Vigilance or Berserker, in the next Pre-Release Notes, later this month on the Forum.

Vigilance vs. Other Evergreens

In order to both create simpler interactions between evergreens, and to make it easier for the old and the new players to understand the new version of Vigilance, its behavior was simplified to preserve its flexibility when combined with other evergreens. The main interactions are listed below:

• If a creature with Vigilance has either First Strike or Double Strike, it will check if it's able to deliver a fatal blow on the opposing creature first, and then block or not according to that creature’s power. However, the vigilant creature will not consider if the opposing creature has any of these evergreens (First Strike or Double Strike).
• In the case of Protection from Color, a creature with Vigilance will check if its toughness is equal or greater than half of the opposing creature's power, rounded up. And, if so, it will block. Otherwise, it will not block. An opposing creature with Protection from Color or Prevent Damage will not affect the Vigilance behavior, as the vigilant creature will only care about the opponent's power, and not its ability to mitigate damage.
• If the creature with Vigilance also has Prevent Damage, it will always block, regardless of the opposing creature’s power.

Also, please check out the FAQ about Basic Damage Step we sent via in-game inbox!

Thank you for playing Magic: Puzzle Quest!

Bubbles_CS

From the Basic Damage Step FAQ:

”During combat, if at leats [sic] one attacking or blocking creature has Fisrt [sic] Strike or Double Strike as the combat step begins, the only creatures that assign combate [sic] damage in that step...”

I try to be as positive as possible, but a simple spell-checker would help add some credibility to this change.

Kinesia

This is really well thought out and I like it. Simple to describe "will block if will survive" but the complexity is below the hood in the implementation to make sure the different cases survive.

I also like that you've recognised an _environment_ change is needed in concert and some cards will have their evergreens adjusted based on their intent. That is excellent.

Now for testing!

Mburn7

Thank you for taking our feedback  into our consideration on this.  This is a reasonable and (should be) effective change that will make Vigilance actually useful on a lot of creatures where it was a drawback.

Fingers crossed it will actually work as stated!

andrewvanmarle

will some creatures that have vigilance now be converted to defender?

jtwood

Other topics aside, I appreciate the detail that went into this post.

Mburn7

andrewvanmarle said:

will some creatures that have vigilance now be converted to defender?

Yes, and apparently Berserker too:
"On that note, adding Defender to several cards was inherent to the Vigilance change. Therefore the Game Design team had already included this change. We are going to announce which cards will receive Defender, Vigilance or Berserker, in the next Pre-Release Notes, later this month on the Forum."

FindingHeart8

I like the idea, now let's see if the programming actually pans out or it spawns hordes of glitches!

madwren

jtwood said:

Other topics aside, I appreciate the detail that went into this post.

Me too. Nice to see the thought process behind the changes. It all seems reasonable at first glance.

boopers

I have pretty high hopes for this change - both that it will be implemented thoughtfully and that it will allow more interesting battle mechanics and card design for past and future cards. 

At any rate, my initial dubiousness about it have been well answered by oktagon. Looking forward toward the next update. 

Stormcrow

I am going to reserve final judgment until A.) I see the list of cards that is going to be changed and B.) I see that the mechanic isn't buggy/doesn't cause a bunch of previously-working cards to be buggy/doesn't make the game more unstable and soft-lock or crash-prone. But with those (pretty large) caveats I think this is a very reasonable change..

Tilwin90

Too bad it doesn't cover deathtouch. Even if we don't really have many vigilant-deathtouch creatures (too lazy to check this actually but I'm convinced there aren't many if any), you can still grant vigilance to creatures and we don't know what future designs might come up.  

Wouldn't all this have been simpler with a simulated pre-damage step? Simulate the combat step, if it would reduce the creature's toughness to 0, it doesn't block! Simple and would cover all wacky scenarios, existing and future mechanics without having to bother with other crazy stuff. If your codebase does not allow this I have no idea how you guys coded this, but I smell some spaghetti (and it's not carbonara or bolognese) that needs some heavy refactoring.

ElfNeedsFood

I like it! 

I know this isn't paper, but there Defender means "cannot attack", but Vigilance is "can attack and block if you like".  Short of "select defenders", this is probably the best automatic selection process.

versemage

Here's a crazy idea; what if vigilance actually gave the player the CHOICE to block an incoming attack, just like targeting gives you the choice?

naabaldan

First: a creature with deathtouch is not considered as "it will kill me" so it is blocked

Second: in case the pw is low at life and blocking an attacking creature - even if the blocking creature will die - should be prefered over ignoring the attacking creature and the game is over

Reminder: the target of the game is, that the lifepool of my pw does not go to zero!