Musings on low-rarity cards and Story Mode

Janosik

Today I found myself idly pontificating about some things in MTGPQ. I'm not sure anybody will care, but it seems a shame to waste all of it, so I'll write it all here

Hopefully by the end of it you'll see how the devs can:

• Make things better
• Maybe sell some more cards
• Do all that without doing any more work

Problem: Uncommons, and especially Commons, and are, in general, a waste of everybody's time.

99% of them are so low power that nobody plays with them; this wastes not only the player's time, but also the developer's time. Why spend time coding a card that nobody plays with? Oktagon in particular enjoyed over-designing cards that just end up cluttering up your collection making it take longer to build decks... look at all the words on Blanchwood Prowler, or Metropolis Angel, or Eerie Soultender.

Solution: Make Uncommons and Commons more powerful!

Pretty obvious really, isn't it? You can double the power levels of all Commons and Uncommons, and they still wouldn't be anything like as powerful at the top tier of cards in Standard, but, players would be a lot more likely to play with them and mastering cards would become a lot more enjoyable as a way to spend time in game, pushing up those lovely metrics!

I'd be interested to hear any other solutions to this problem that players might have. You can't just not print commons and uncommons, can you. I've always thought that, to save the devs time, many more commons could be printed as just vanilla creatures with no text and only evergreens, but I think if you make too many of those it looks a bit like you're phoning in your design work. The designers have to be seen to be designing cards in order to help create an environment that players want to spend time exploring

Problem: Making these cards more powerful knackers Story Mode

Story Mode provides a fun way into the game for new players, and if we just make all low rarity cards more powerful from now on it makes a mess of Story Mode, doesn't it. Rebalancing Story Mode would take some time and effort and we all know the devs are short of time.

Solution: Limit Story Mode to Origins cards

All the Story Mode levels were designed, after all, to be played when only Origins cards existed in the game. Okay, yes, there are a few Battle For Zendikar Story Mode levels... but they stopped making them after that. Hmm... maybe if BFZ and OGW cards were legal on the Battle For Zendikar Story Mode levels, it might encourage new players to buy a few of those boosters? I expect nobody's buying any of those boosters at the moment! Mmm, delicious revenue!

Problem: This discourages new players from buying boosters from the newer sets

If you limit Story Mode to only Origins cards, new players are less likely to buy cards from the latest sets, currently MKM and OTJ. And I reckon the developers would really like new players to buy boosters from those sets. What to do?

Solution: Events!

Easy one, that! New players can play their Origins (and BFZ and OGW) cards in Story Mode, but they can also play events in the event calendar, and that gives them a place to play with cards from all the different sets!

Problem: How do we make events just for new players?

TBH this might not be a problem at all. There might be plenty of easy PvE events for new players already in the events calender. But I do wonder if we might need to make some new events for new players. They'll be fine in events like Planechasing Fblthp, or AJTH, but they're going to lose a lot of games in Nodes of Power, or even Training Grounds.

So to encourage new players to buy more recent cards, it's possible we might need to run more events skewed towards new players. I think it would be unpopular to create events that only new players can play, us veterans probably wouldn't enjoy being locked out of them entirely. But if we veterans suddenly found ourselves with a bunch of new events to play, would the game economy be affected?

Solution: Runes in the Reward Ladder

It turns out, there is already a resource in the game that you can offer as prizes, which new players value and experienced players consider worthless: it's runes! If you fill the Reward Ladder in an event solely with rune rewards, then veterans won't want to play it, and they wont even feel like they're missing out!

Mainloop25

I think the "rune awards only" event is a brilliant idea!

Xibvert

I'm okay with the way the cards are being made now. Changing that seems a bit drastic. Events that make more of the cards playable seems like the better solution. Currently the go to method for that seems to be the pauper objective which works a little bit still leaves a lot or cards unplayed. It seems like sealed/draft events are more what we're missing that would make you play with all of those cards that you normally don't by giving you a small enough card pool to where they could actually be your best option sort of like when you first started playing and don't have many cards yet. I don't know if players actually want those or not but at least it's much safer to try. I wouldn't mind something like that to make story mode more replayable. The fights are all ready to go and mostly unused by players after they've collected all of the rewards. If you could buy in to replay it as a sealed deck event where you'd get some packs from whatever set you pick and some origins packs to build with, then it would be a lot more fun than just buying premium packs. it would also be nice that it's an event you could play at your own pace the way story mode was the first time you played it. Obviously it would need different rewards. The ones from the first time you play it are very generous with mana crystals since it was built to be a single use event. Might not be worth making if no one wants it, but figured the fights already exist so that eliminates most of the work. I would say there are probably better things for them to spend their time on at the moment since they seem to always be struggling to keep up with releasing the new sets and then fixing the bugs, but if we're looking to make the unplayable cards playable then I'd rather find a format that makes them playable instead trying to change the entire system for designing cards.

Sarah

I don’t hate the idea! We need a way to fast track new players to some amount of success or they will give up and stop playing.

Mainloop25

@Xibvert said:
I'm okay with the way the cards are being made now. Changing that seems a bit drastic. Events that make more of the cards playable seems like the better solution. Currently the go to method for that seems to be the pauper objective which works a little bit still leaves a lot or cards unplayed. It seems like sealed/draft events are more what we're missing that would make you play with all of those cards that you normally don't by giving you a small enough card pool to where they could actually be your best option sort of like when you first started playing and don't have many cards yet. I don't know if players actually want those or not but at least it's much safer to try. I wouldn't mind something like that to make story mode more replayable. The fights are all ready to go and mostly unused by players after they've collected all of the rewards. If you could buy in to replay it as a sealed deck event where you'd get some packs from whatever set you pick and some origins packs to build with, then it would be a lot more fun than just buying premium packs. it would also be nice that it's an event you could play at your own pace the way story mode was the first time you played it. Obviously it would need different rewards. The ones from the first time you play it are very generous with mana crystals since it was built to be a single use event. Might not be worth making if no one wants it, but figured the fights already exist so that eliminates most of the work. I would say there are probably better things for them to spend their time on at the moment since they seem to always be struggling to keep up with releasing the new sets and then fixing the bugs, but if we're looking to make the unplayable cards playable then I'd rather find a format that makes them playable instead trying to change the entire system for designing cards.

Jumpstart was an interesting idea, just implemented in the worst way possible

Keyler

I think a good way to use uncommon and common cards is adding a new gameplay mode as sealed decks. You buy a premium pack (for example) and you have an event to play some matches with decks made only with the given cards vs a random AI decks built also with the result of "opening" same kind of pack. So you can use this cards vs non OP decks and maybe mastering them. If this gameplay become very slow to win, would be possible to fight only with the half life points of each PW.

Janosik

@Keyler said:
I think a good way to use uncommon and common cards is adding a new gameplay mode as sealed decks

@Xibvert said:
if we're looking to make the unplayable cards playable then I'd rather find a format that makes them playable instead trying to change the entire system for designing cards.

I don't think this is going to provide enough of a solution to the problem of so many unplayable common/uncommon cards.

In principle, creating new formats which create an environment in which more of the printed cards are useful sounds like a good idea!

After all, this is exactly what happens in the Colors of Magic event! The mechanics of CoM create an incentive to play cards that cost 11 or less, and also a larger disincentive to play cards that cost more than 11. Cards that cost exactly 11 gain a boost in power from the event mechanics. Half decent, playable cards like Ray of Ruin or Conclave Naturalists become excellent, cards like Tolarian Geyser or Skyfisher Spider move further away from 'unplayable' towards 'playable', and a new top tier of cards is created like Painful Quandary and Paladin Class.

(There is, of course, also a disincentive to play Mythics and Masterpieces in the event, but this is a weaker disincentive, as it only affects the objectives, and not gameplay. I often see players playing with Mythics or Masterpieces in CoM, possibly because the rules of the event aren't made clear to them, or possibly because they just want to play with those cards)

Here's the thing, tho: The pool of playable 11 cost cards available to players, in CoM specifically, is actually much, much smaller than it looks. This last week I thought I'd try building a CoM deck (bottom node) with the Fblthp PW, and was surprised to discover how difficult it was. Here is an event with huge restrictions on which cards are playable, and yet so many cards like Pharika's Disciple, Defend the Celestus and At Knifepoint still languor unplayed in our card collections. I can barely fathom what the design of an event might look like that would make you really want to play with cards like these.

Ask yourself this question: do you really want to play in an event with a deck of 10 cards of the equivalent power level of Sorcerer of the Fang, or Pillardrop Warden? How would you feel playing this deck against Dakkon, or Liliana of the Veil, or Teferi, Chronoclast?

I just did a quick bit of maths (ok, it took quite a while actually!) and worked out (with a little margin for error!) that the average attack power of a common creature is 2.35, and the average cost of a common creature is 8.79 mana. That's very small when most Planeswalkers have 100+ life, and almost no Planeswalkers can generate 9 mana from a single on-color match.

Would it really be so bad if the absolute worst creatures in the game were a 2/2 creature for 8.79 mana, and the average common was more like a 6 mana 4/4?

Paper MTG, long ago, realised it had overcosted all of it's creatures (so many 1 mana 1/1s back in the day, and 4 mana 4/4s all had to have big drawbacks!) and it course corrected, and that game is healthier as a result.

Do the devs think that bad cards must be really bad so that we'll recognise the good ones? Trust me, if I'm comparing a 6 mana 4/4 with an evergreen, to, say, a Rakdos, Patron of Chaos, or a Drowner of Hope, or a Tainted Adversary, I do know which one is more powerful. I'm not going to be less excited opening one in a booster just because the commons it came with are no longer garbage.

I'm not saying there's no place for bad cards in MTGPQ. Mark Rosewater, paper MTG head designer, wrote a comprehensive article about why there should be bad cards in the game (link!). But I don't think he'd agree that there should be so many of them as there are in MTGPQ, and that they should be so bad.

It's OK to power creep the worst cards in the game! It's only when you power creep the best cards that you start creating a problem cough Ghalta cough

Janosik

Thinking more about this today.

Let's say we did want to address the problem of almost all low rarity cards being unplayable by designing an event: what might such an event look like?

Here's my first stab at it:

• All common cards cost 10 less mana and get +10+10
• All uncommon cards cost 5 less mana and get +5+5
• All rare cards cost 5 more mana
• All Mythic and Masterpiece cards cost 10 more mana

TBH we might need to ban higher rarity cards outright, because let's face it Ghalta still owns in this specific version of the event.

Still, I think using this as a rough draft of what such an event might look like, allows us to see some of the problems with using such events to address the problem.

You're still not going to play most terrible commons in this event. You'll pick the commons which are better than the other commons... probably, tbh, the commons which are already playable cards. So you'll pick Conclave Naturalists over Caustic Caterpillar every time, in almost every iteration of this event type... you'd probably only ever pick the Caterpillar if it somehow becomes 0 cost, generates mana, draws cards, and becomes part of a silly combo deck.

In fact: you're only going to play 10 cards in your deck, so you aren't really making a considerable number of unplayable cards playable. Even if a card like Maritime Guard is made 1000 times more powerful, if it falls below the threshold of 10 other cards you want to play in a deck, its going in the bin.

If Webcore were to design one event like this, they still end up designing, coding, and playtesting a considerable number of cards that nobody ever plays with, wasting their time. They could, perhaps, design, code and playtest 50 events like this, but that also seems like an awful lot of work, and no MTG developer has ever seemed to want to design more than a couple of events every few months. And would we want to play 50 new events like this?