Enhancements being a sad sad thing indeed

andrewvanmarle

My expectations may have been soaring I know, but how it actually works....meh....


Enhanced gems only give enhancements when you manually make the match, the swap. they do NOTHING with cascades after swaps or from conversion (land or spells). Further more they only enhance the first card in your hand and only when it has been maxed out will the gems add enhancements to the next cards.

This means having to hold on to cards multiple turns to get a certain amount of enhancements by swaps, AND hoping that your gem conversion doesn't ruin it.

please please, improve this: the result is a parasitic mechanic that only reall works if you build around it, and even then will be lacklustre.


Also you don't get enhanced gems from your first hand. This is also really really bad.

My suggestion:

Give enhanced gems from your starting hand too.

Have enhancements be triggered from more than manual swaps , also from conversion,

and depending on balance, have a gem give an enhancement to all cards in hand instead of just the first.

jtwood

It's Buried, but for cards in your hand and not your graveyard

And like Buried, it's generally not good

Tremayne

@jtwood - interesting take on enhancement. Then it is sort of DOA if @andrewvanmarle suggestions are ignored.

andrewvanmarle

Just tested:

Matching enhanced gems from a cascade doesn't have effect. Not even from your own swap

@Oktagon_Support could you confirm that this is or is not working as intended? TY! 

Volrak

Enhanced gems are at least working as described in the Training, which says an Enhancement gets +1 "whenever you match with a swap an Enhanced Gem".

The two kinds of matches (swap and cascade) are defined by Oktagon.  A swap is when you swap the places of two gems to make a match (with your finger), as opposed to a cascade, which is when gems become matched after falling down into a gap.

jtwood

andrewvanmarle said:

Just tested:

Matching enhanced gems from a cascade doesn't have effect. Not even from your own swap

@Oktagon_Support could you confirm that this is or is not working as intended? TY! 

This seems like a good time to share their updated rules/faq page!

https://d3go.helpshift.com/a/magic-puzzle-quest/?l=en&s=gameplay-questions---general&f=magic-puzzle-quest---gallery-of-rules-and-definitions

• Swap
• “Swap” is the movement made to change a gem’s position with another gem’s position before they’re matched.

As Volrak points out above, this gives us hard definitions we can now use to unilaterally evaluate game performance. Hopefully, this lessens the number of times we need to ping them to ask if something is working properly (and increases the number of times we definitively say "this isn't working as documented").

andrewvanmarle

Thanks guys!

In that case my hopes are dashed, that it's not as intended.

But....i do think in that case that we need a healthy discussion about the mechanic if the result is as expected.

Im of the opinion that it is not

Having to hold a card for 7 turns, making offcolor matches just to get the most out of a card is just not good. I am usually half way to winning my game by turn 7, if haven't won already.

This feels like one of those "Kill 5 of Greg's creatures" objectives, you have to hold off just to give that card a chance

Tremayne

@andrewvanmarle - I’m onboard for a discussion on the enhancement mechanism. But I must admit after @jtwood opened my eyes of the usefulness of enhancement I decided to just ignore it.

You are totally correct that keeping a card in hand for 3-7 rounds I.e. stalling a game, in order to use the full potential of a card is an aberration. Only in the most remote circumstances would it be beneficial to do so. Heck most games are over before that.

Now assuming the mechanism is as intended by the devs. it must mean that the effect of enhancement cards have been balanced accordingly. So if we suggest enhancement to be changed, then the effects will have to be adjusted also? Or are the cards so puny that it won’t matter?

jtwood

My take? Paper Magic has sucky mechanics. It’s okay for them to exist in PQ, too. Every mechanic doesn’t have to be, say, Landforming. 

BongoTheGrey

Having to hold a card for 7 turns, making offcolor matches just to get the most out of a card is just not good. I am usually half way to winning my game by turn 7, if haven't won already.

I'm not a fan of the mechanic at all. Like JTWood said this is a reverse graveyard gem mechanic where the gems affect the cards in your hand instead of the cards in your graveyard.

I'd love it if it worked as you explained on your first post where any match counts and not just swaps. But if after one year of graveyard gems the mechanic still sucks I don't have much hopes for enhanced gems. But hey, not all mechanics need to be top tier

andrewvanmarle

I'll list cards tomorrow and how long you need to hold them minimum to get a certain effect

JinQuiet

jtwood said:

My take? Paper Magic has sucky mechanics. It’s okay for them to exist in PQ, too. Every mechanic doesn’t have to be, say, Landforming. 

The only this that saddens me is that Planeswalkers tied to this mechanic aren't going to be bought by the players ever. There is no point, just like with Energised Nissa (Nissa, Vital Force).

Dologane

Yeah, it could have been an interesting mechanic, but as it is, it's rubbish. Willingly keep a card in my hand for 4+ turns and potentially force myself to do suboptimal matches for marginal effects? Or worse yet, become a liability if I don't enhance it enough times? Eff that. 

However, there's actually some hope that it's not working as intended, even though it seems to technically do so as described on the evergreen and tutorial (triggering only on swap-match), since the description on the release notes actually flies in the face of it:

"Widely used in Magic:PQ, Enhance is a mechanic similar to Activated Gems. When cards with this ability enter the player’s hand, a specific amount of gems receive the Enhanced effect. Each time one of these Enhanced gems is destroyed, the first card in the player’s hand that can be Enhanced has its value increased by 1."

But the mechanic is not really at all like activated gems, because those trigger from ANY destruction, like the description in italics would suggest. It's even worse than graveyard gems, since afaik those do work on cascades (or don't they?). If @Oktagon_Support can't be bothered to make the mechanic be worth getting excited about, they should at least fix the rather misleading description to avoid getting our hopes up.

Bil

Considering how widespread the mechanic IS in strix ans how disapointing the cards are so far, leaving it as it IS right know means that something like 1/3 of the set will probably never see play ... that's a lot of coding for nothing. 

On the other hand ... Players avoid buried cards because the mechanic IS sloppy ... But New buried cards are realeased set After set when devs probably realise those won't see play until the mechanic gets refreshed.

We'll probably never know the reason behind it, but that's a lot of Time spent around mechanics that look quite complicated to implement ... It would be a shame if it  remained a total waste of development ressources.

Tremayne

Follow up question. It seems that enhanced gems from drawing a card I not tied to the specific card, but to the title of a card. 

Here is what happened - I just finished a match where I drew “spirit summoning” from a learn effect. I got three enhance gems on the board, then I did it again, but this time SS did not generate enhanced gems.

So it seems that SS can at maximum give me 3 enhanced gems. Is that correctly understood (I assume, since the buried effect does it also)? It just make the enhanced effect weaker than need be.

Bil

After several attempts, it looks like it works as following.

An enhanced card that enters your hand by any mean (draw or fetch) will produce (for example) 6 enhanced gem on the board. 
If the same card enters your hand After that it wont create another 6 gems, it will just refresh the previous 6 gems.

With a single enhanced 6 card in your deck you will never be able to have more than 6 enhanced gems on board.

However, if you play several enhanced cards, each one of them will contribute to enhance the board separately. 

For example, if you play fractal summoning  (6 enhanced gems) and blue mastery (7enhanced gems) ... You will be able to have UP to 13 enhanced gems on board ... But never more.
If you draw one of your enhanced cards, it will only refresh the gems tied to the card. Which means you won't get 12 enhanced gems if you draw fractal summoning twice, even if you have a deck full of enhanced cards.

On that point both "lesson" vanguards (prof onyx and kasmina) are interesting because they can fetch diferent enhanced lessons, which means a lot of potential enhanced gems on the board at the same Time.

I'm not sure my explanations are clear enough ... But i tried though 😁

Sidenote : even knowing this ... Enhanced stuff IS a pain to play. The Real problem being that you Can only enhance by hand-matching gems (cascades and gems conversion matches will destroy your enhanced gems without enhancing your cards ... Slowing the mechanic instead of Improving it)

Tremayne

@Bil - thank you for verifying my suspicions. So it is as bad as expected, but your observation about the onyx and kasmina is interesting. Sadly, we have another mechanism that only shines (poorly) if you have the prerequisite mythics.

Narcoticsagent

I have the mythics and I still don't think the mechanic shines. The amount of micro managing in ordering and reordering your hand and disabling and enabling spells and taking bad matches to get enhances just make the mechanic bad. Even putting 10 enhance cards in a deck didn't result in reliably enhanced spells. 

madwren

I spent a goodly amount of time trying to make an effective deck with Will/Rowan, but it was just an exercise in frustration. The commons and uncommons are across the board poor, and most of the the rare Commands require too much work and are better served being a cheaper, unconditional card with a reliable effect.  For example, why use Quandrix Command when Turn Into a Pumpkin exists? 

To do anything worthwhile, you need to include a lot of Enhance cards, yet using the mythics isn't even grounds for success.  One of the strangest non-starters is that Ingenious Mastery autocasts off of a Fervent Mastery.  Why make any card that desires enhancement autocast?  

Certainly, not every mechanic will be a good one, but it's always mystifying when deliberate choices are made to hamstring one that could have been quite fun.

jtwood

madwren said:

To do anything worthwhile, you need to include a lot of Enhance cards...

And you really need Karn (aka Mr. 5 Spells), because the enhanced gems are randomly doled out. You need a PW that can take advantage of casting that RW spell from an enhanced black gem.