New League Needed

corvosaurus

Just played Holiday Showdown 5 times and won once.  Yes, I could probably fill my deck with mythic and legendary beatsticks too and be competitive like the 4 players who beat me.  But that is not only boring but also not much better than flipping a coin to see who wins.  The first one to a mana flood wins. (Somewhat of an advantage to the living player since Greg misses a lot of opportunities.)

Anyway, after my frustration cooled, I thought why not have a split "Platinum" tier.  One for people who want to collect and buy all the most powerful cards and throw them at each other.  And one, entered voluntarily, with some restrictions on deck building to make the actual game play more interesting.  Say limit the number of mythics and legendaries (or even rares).  Or say you can only use your mythics once a week.  With all the data that developers have access to, they could even figure out which cards created the most wins and raise their mana costs on a temporary basis (and keep raising them if they keep winning) and only reset them occasionally. 

In many of the events, I find that half my games or more are hopeless if I'm trying to be anything like creative with deckbuilding. The only way to win sometimes is to build the same decks everyone else is building which basically build themselves by needing to respond to those same decks. 

Please make a game mode that emphasizes good play not just power cards.

Thanks
corvosaurus

P.S. This might be a good place to suggest a weekly "tribal" event again.  Please!?!  

Tremayne

Which decks are everyone building? I’m not being snide, but I haven’t seen anything like a generic deck that wins consistently. I’d say half the time I don’t even get to see more than 3 or 4 cards in a build and that doesn’t reveal anything about the opponents deck design.

I like your idea about an event where you have to be creative with the deck build. However, how you identify a “creative” deck is beyond me, what I have been playing for weeks maybe new to you. Particularly, if the key card(s) have just entered your library. I’d also hate that cards change price dynamically, because then I’d have to continually have to verify that the deck is still usable.

About the analytics, with approximately 5500 cards, I’d be surprised if the win percentages of each card will be significantly different. Anyways, there don’t seem to be enough development resources to fix all the bugs in this game, so I wonder where they are going to find the time to set up your great idea.

TomB

I think he means by creative something that limits mythics and legendaries (Masterpieces?) in the deck, but that's more like Pauper which some people find kinda boring when given in mass quantity. Personally when I approach an event that's Legacy I try to find a deck that's reliable and quick, especially when I need to win a dozen games in order to make progression. Does that mean I'm a big jerk for playing my HUF/Deploy deck, or my Avenger deck? Maybe, but there's only 4 Mythic/Masterpiece cards in the Avenger deck, and the win most often comes from a rare's effect, so limiting Mythics might not work that well...

Scrounger

A significant amount of this problem would be solved or ameliorated by creating a new mastery tier or tiers. There is a big difference between players who started playing in the last year or so who are platinum and thus who don't have any or hardly any of the legacy staples, and players who have been playing for several years and have all or most of them. If 8gon created one or more mastery tiers above platinum, this would properly discriminate amongst the platinum player base so that when legacy events are held, the platinum players who have mastered relatively few cards in comparison are matched up against similar platinum players, while the platinum players who have mastered many more cards in comparison are matched up against similar platinum players.

Gold requires 250 mastery points before you reach platinum. So why not make it so platinum players have 500-1000 mastery points until they hit the next tier (Diamond could be a good name). Depending on how many players have uber collections, they could potentially even make a tier above Diamond. For example, in my own coalition, the highest-level player is Level 394, and he has accumulated over 10,000 mastery points in each color since reaching platinum. My point is that there is lots of gradations that could be drawn within what is currently the platinum tier to better discriminate amongst players and help make it more likely that people with similar-size collections face each other in legacy events.

Fliggl

This is a good point. I'm playing this game for about 9 month and I'm f2p. Everyone who's playing this game longer than myself (and therfore has more rare+ cards) or is paying for this (and therfore has more rare+ cards) should be in another League. I'm not mad about loosing every other match or so, and I stopped playing ToP since I hit platinum, just because of this, and it's ok, but every now and then, when I met someone with a "mythic only" deck and I die after round 2 or 3, it's just a NPE. 

Give the ubers a diamond leauge or something else, and we fresh platinums would be happy!

Stormcrow

I tend to think Holiday Showdown is a poor example of this, because it's specifically (and intentionally) the most unrestricted format PvP event in the game - an anything-goes, 5-color legacy event with no objectives and doubled mana gains, all really encourages players to play really over-the-top ridiculously OP nonsense and well, most of us do. I feel like most players who have been around for a few years understand that and expect it, at least I know I do, and I always build my Holiday Showdown decks anticipating that. (Last year my holiday deck's theme was "steal the opponent's deck and play with it" which was really fun given the format; this year I used Agrus Kos and some other control stuff to just shut down my opponents completely, which was more effective but not as enjoyable.)

That said, while Holiday Showdown may be a bad example, the idea is completely sound. Platinum is overloaded with players, some of whom have years of playtime and literally entire block rotations' worth of cards over the newer players in the league. Spreading us out more could also help with the overcrowded event brackets; with another league, it'd split players up a little more so (hopefully) you'd be less likely to see 150 players tied for 1st place in every event.

Once upon a time, when they introduced the player level system, we were assured that the idea behind it was to fix matchmaking, but that's never really materialized as far as I can tell. I'd certainly much rather see something simple, like a new league at Platinum +500 mastery and maybe another new league at Platinum +1500 mastery or something like that, than have them go back to the player level system which has had some pretty disastrous effects when they've tinkered with it in the past.