[MtGPQ] Handover Announcement

Janosik

@Sarah said:

So I play on weekends. And it’s the same decks over and over again. At least with legacy there would be a variety of decks to face!

Here's an insane idea: when other games want to keep their players engaged, they release new content. Not just the same old content with a few cosmetic changes, but actual new content.

One thing I wish I could really impress upon Webcore about Oktagon's event design is that Oktagon seemed to believe that by giving each event a permanent support, that started in play, with a lot of complicated words written on it, that each event would play differently; that's not the case at all. A Timeless Voyage is an outlier in regards to event supports... most other Standard events are, functionally, identical to each other in how they are to play.

I'll bet nobody can remember what a lot of the event supports do. I've played Break the Powerstone every time it's been run, and have only a vague recollection of what the event supports do. Standard events are defined by the extreme power levels of cards like Bladecoil Serpent, Jodah the Unifier, and Teferi Hero of Dominaria, not by these largely meaningless event supports. In fact, more often than not we have to avoid using effects on event supports, since they might make our attacking creatures too powerful and cause us to win the game too quickly, failing to achieve the level objectives (this happens in *checks notes* The Harvesttide)

Long ago, events were more defined by difficult objectives. Some of them were awful to play (The original version of Emrakul's Corruption required you to play, I think 8 eldrazi and 6 vampires/werewolves, which lead to everyone noodling around with their power decks for hours, with no danger of losing, getting bored), but some of them created a fun experience... Most notably, I'd say, "Play 0 supports" or "Play 0 spells", although in these days of silly combo decks in Standard you probably could still build a silly combo around Bladecoil which played 0 supports, or a silly combo built around Jodah which played 0 spells.

Colors of Magic has an interesting event support which basically changes the fundamental rules of MTGPQ, creates it's own unique format with a different subset of top tier cards, and inherently prevents combo decks. It's a favourite event of mine, and while I'd like to see one or two more events designed along these lines, I wouldn't like to see too many of these events, because I'm here to play Magic Puzzle Quest, not some other weird game with weird rules!

Perhaps one solution to the problem would be to further limit the number of sets you play in events? Recently Standard rotation was changed so that Standard contains the previous 3 years worth of sets rather than the previous 2. This has made MTGPQ rather boring recently. However, there's no reason why every Standard event should allow all the sets that are currently legal in the format. Sure, we want a certain number of full Standard events, so we can play our favourite decks. But I definitely think that this would be a good way of creating new events that feel different. We have very few "block" events (that is, events in which the legal sets are not just "all of Standard" or "all of Legacy"), and they do feel different to play. Seize the Day certainly feels different to play than any other event. I think Ravnica at War might be a block event too, I can't remember, we haven't played it in ages. But that's about it, and we're all very, very bored of Seize the Day now because we've been playing it for years.

The more different events you create, the more different decks we have to play, which means we have to buy a wider variety of cards! Cha-ching, right?

Or... you could follow the Oktagon plan of making one stupidly overpowered card every couple of sets and creating the bare minimum of identical events, which keeps MTGPQ ticking over but means that we're probably spending our time, and cash, on other games.

Mainloop25

Yeah that's a great point. Make the perma-supports actually do something interesting. Colors of magic has too many charges to play, but the permasupport idea is a novel one and therefore mostly fun. Look to paper magic and even other games for inspiration if you need to, but above all, we want you to have more creativity than Oktagon when it comes to events.

Opperstamper

Maybe this is a good time to focus on this part of my post from a while ago.

https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/89028/boosting-mtg-pq-player-insights/p1

4: There is a lack of new content.

A. There are no new events. A lot of old events are discontinued, even though most are still usable. Some may need a tweak in objectives to fit for standard format, or a fix for a certain bug.
Possible solution(s):

• Create new events for us, and don't be shy about variation. Event-rules supports are fine. Have some complex ones, some simpler ones, and even some events with no event-rules supports at all. Give us PvE, PvP, Block restricted, change the number of nodes, etc. The non-coalition events seem well covered, but the coalition events need more spice to them There are so many possibilities. And there's no need to rush, but a (slow and) steady supply of variation will keep things interesting.
• Revive older events. Tweak them for the current environment, repair them when necessary, and let us play them.
• Add content to Story Mode, add epic boss battles, etc.

Janosik

It occurred to me today that there were two other common restrictions on coalition events that Oktagon just forgot about:

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1) Many older events have single color nodes, limiting the number of planeswalkers you can play. All of Oktagon's coalition event nodes from the last few years have been 5 color.

Mind you, over the years, an increasing number of 3 color Planeswalkers have been released, so single color nodes feel like less of a restriction now than they did back then, but that's a different issue. Oktagon never really understood that while being multicolor in paper MTG is a restriction (whether on a planeswalker, or any other card), being multicolor in MTGPQ is an advantage. I don't think 3 color Planeswalkers need to be powered down, people enjoy their power, and they are something that new players aspire to acquiring later in their careers, so they therefore represent progression through the game. But conversely they enable stagnation in the careers of veteran players who find themselves playing the same tiny subset of their Planeswalker collection everywhere. Skoti Bloodlines was a reasonably successful attempt to address this problem, as it forced players to play single color Planeswalkers (altho the event was subsequently ruined by rotating it into Legacy)

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2) Many older events just didn't allow you to select the same Planeswalker in each of it's different nodes.

Skoti Bloodlines in particular would have benefitted from this. The Dragon War, I think, was particularly successful in making me ponder which Planeswalkers I wanted to play in which nodes. TDW has been mothballed now, but I believe that's because people didn't like the huge number of charges they had to play in a weekend across 5 nodes(?), a problem which I think ought to have been fixed rather than discarding the entire event (decreasing the total number of charges in each node, and maybe even increasing the spawn time of the nodes)

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Should these posts be their own thread? I feel like these posts should be their own thread. @Magic:PQ Support Team can you split off this thread starting from the post I made above this one, please