Addressing the community and the story of my creator journey.

Nalthazar

Hey, its me Nalthazar, and today I want to share with you all my story as a player of MTGPQ, how I became a creator, and what my experience/influence is like as a creator. I'll do my best to address this as the person, Michael, the player, Nalthazar, and the hobbyist/creator Nalthazar. I started playing MTGPQ about 8 years ago. I think it was in between the Kaladesh and Aether Revolt sets dropping. Like probably a lot of you, I was quickly drawn into the game. It is a really fun game. Honestly this format of Magic wound up appealing more to me than paper Magic, so I stopped playing paper Magic in favor of PQ along the way. I've always been a player who likes to win and who tries to be the best, and I was fortunate to find and get admitted to a top 10 Coalition early in my player experience called MTGGOLDFISH. I found friends and a community there. I am still there to this day 8 years later.

As my collection grew, my ability to achieve top scores in events increased and as I grew more confident with the game and my decks I started to post them in our socials before events with explanations to help our other players try to earn top scores as well. As I got more feedback from my community I started to post more decks beyond just what I was using for coalition events. Some time after War of the Spark released I created a really cool deck with God-Eternal Bontu and someone from my Coalition wanted to make the deck themselves and also understand how it worked as it was a bit tricky. They asked if I could just post a video clip of the deck in action, so I screen recorded it and tried sharing it in our Line social app. It didn't work. The file was too large. I tried finding ways of posting the short clip, and ultimately decided on making a YouTube channel so I could upload the video and share the link. To my surprise the video started getting more views than there were people in my coalition. Having people watch and talk about my decks was exciting and unexpected, so I tried making another video. The second video did even better than the first and then some people started asking for more videos. There were no real, successful MTGPQ creators of any kind at the time. The more videos I made, the larger my community became. I joined the TP9 group discord and even hopped around coalitions and made more friends as I went. I made friends and acquaintances along the way outside my coalition. Players like Scydrex, BongotheGrey, Julie (rip my friend), Jsabotin, TerriTrue, BruceJuicy, Gozmaster, Mainloop, Andrew VM, Aembury, and more. The list goes on and I'm sorry if I didn't add you to it. I have met so many amazing people along the way. The immersion with the community and the making of the videos lit a fire in me. It was so exciting! At the time, I was a teacher, and the way I was making the videos took skills from my profession and from my hobby and put them together. I made so many videos, and each one lit a fire for me to expand and make more of them. To date, I have 504 videos published to my YouTube channel. There are more that are private/unpublished/or are posted to other places. My being first a father and a husband, then a teacher, and then a Magic enthusiast, I wanted to make sure that my channel was something that anyone could watch. As a result all of my videos have been family friendly and I try to embody that in the way in which I speak to the community as well.

As my channel started to pick up steam and more people were subscribing and watching my videos I had an idea to try to expand my channel. I created a Discord and sent a message to the community manager from D3GO. I tried reaching out to Brigby (goodness that name is a blast from the past. He was the old community manager in the forums) to see if D3GO would be willing to partner in some way with my channel. Brigby told me that they would check in with the D3GO team and get back to me. I didn't hear anything for a long time. Around that time Hibernum dropped as the developer for MTGPQ and Oktagon took over. I tried my hand again at reaching out; this time directly to Oktagon. I found a contact at the studio from their website, wrote a message in English, had it go through Google Translate to become their native language of Portuguese, and then sent both together in an email to them. I heard nothing back on that front for some time, until one day I got an email from the CEO at Oktagon saying that they got a recommendation to watch my videos and thought they were good and that someone from their studio would reach out to me. That was one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me. It validated the passion, time, and work I was putting into my channel. I wound up getting another message from someone else in the studio with a request to do a video call with me to meet me. I spoke with two people at the studio, and they wound up sending me the first Will and Rowan Planeswalker to make a video on, and they explained their process in designing the walker. It was a test to see how it would go. I was so excited. That video got thousands of views, and from there they periodically sent me other products to make videos on. Something they outlined that made them want to partner with me and try it out was that I maintained a family friendly channel that promoted creativity and positivity.

A concern of mine early on when they started to send me products was that they would request that I would positively review products that were not good or that I would feel compelled to review them in a positive light because they were supporting my channel. I was relieved that they actually wanted me to give me honest opinions on the content and not just promote things that I didn't believe in. They weren't looking for a yes-man, but someone to honestly promote the game. They held that stance until their final day as the developer of MTGPQ and then when Webcore took over, they maintained that stance. I was ready to drop the partnership with Oktagon and then again with Webcore if I had to lie about the products. I have a strong moral compass and code and I don't believe in lying for gain. I proceeded to keep making videos; highlighting the things I thought were really cool and expressing a lack of enthusiasm for the things that I felt were sub-par. To this day my videos reflect how I honestly feel about the content I am producing the video on. I give my honest take on the cards, walkers, mechanics, bundles, events, and more that I make videos on. Some are positive and in others I try to provide constructive criticism. I really dislike being negative, so there were a lot of products that I received that I did not wind up making videos on. I didn't want my channel to be a negative space; especially with how the forums were and to me still are. Toxicity is not my way. I wanted to focus on the parts of the game that I was passionate and excited about, and so the bulk of my content focused on that. As a result my channel had an optimistic and excited tone; even during turbulent times. It took me some time to learn to become comfortable with making reviews on products that I didn't particularly like and how to convey my criticism as constructively, honestly, and respectfully as I could. I wanted to be true to my opinions and beliefs, but also be polite about it.

This game has always been a game to me. It is something I play for fun. I want to focus on what makes it fun. I want to showcase the things that make me want to keep playing. I hope my videos reflect that. A lot of the cards and most of the Walkers in this game are really cool and fun to play with. The more cards you have the more you can get out of them and the walkers. Being sent a lot of the Walkers and more recently the Exclusives has enabled me to experience a lot more of the game than I would have otherwise been able to. I can't personally afford to be a whale or a dolphin in a game. I imagine that many of you are that way too. When I review a bundle I do my best to state if I think it is worth getting; either for money, waiting for it to enter the vault for in-game currency, crafting it for orbs, or just hard passing on. I absolutely say that a lot of the things are really cool, because they are, but that doesn't justify spending money for a lot of people. I do my best to toe that line. I love getting to test out new things and play the game. I'm a player just like you guys.

Shortly after Webcore took over, they opened a Discord to be able to more easily talk about the products they were sending to me and some other creators. I emailed with people from Oktagon and had a friendly Discord chat with one of them as well. That private Discord chat with the lone guy at Oktagon was rarely about the game. It was a friendship. We talked about trips, family, and hobbies outside PQ/work. I now have something like that brewing with someone at Webcore too. The group Discord chat with Webcore is almost entirely about the cards, walkers, and spoilers they send to us. We try to ask questions about things we aren't supposed to know and the response we always get is . That is I think my least favorite word now. I just roll my eyes and chuckle. It cracks me up. Most days the chatter in there is almost entirely between us creators. I wound up making a separate Discord chat just for us creators that does not include the developers so that we can continue our chatter without having to plug up the other channel with idle chit chat. We have become friends in spite our differences. We support each other through hard times, and we have gone through some tough stuff personally as a group. Honestly Gozmaster and I almost never agree on anything game related. We are usually on opposite sides. With that, I still really like him as a person and as a player and I'm grateful that there is a contrasting personality in the MTGPQ community that is making content that is different from mine. I even brought his channel to the attention of the people at Oktagon to check out when he started gaining traction so that there would hopefully be more support for creators. At times the way he expresses himself rubs me the wrong way, but at the end of the day there is nothing but love there from me for him. We both just want to play a game and share our passion for it with other people in the community. This community wouldn't be the same to me without him.

At times I do give my own personal feedback directly to the Developer group. My voice is a drop of water in a bucket. If I had my way and they listened to what I had to say then there would be...

1.) A new Magic: Puzzle Quest app coming out to replace the one we have with better and faster animations and graphics and more stability
2.) There would be a massive overhaul for events to make them more engaging with objectives and permanent supports that incentivized and enhanced the mechanics of the sets they represent. Furthermore they would run differently and be prioritized based on their life-span as a set with the more recent sets getting their events more frequently
3.) Bugs would be less prevalent and would be fixed more quickly (they have done great on this one in my opinion)
4.) There would be frequent balance changes tweaking old Planeswalkers and dud set mechanics to make them more exciting
5.) Grist and Dakkon would be get small tweaks to (in my opinion) bring them more in line with the rest of the walkers in the game
6.) There would be a more robust new player experience with better early rewards to kick-start their collections and get them into the game
7.) There would be differences in brackets for scoring
8.) There would be seasons in the game like in most other mobile titles I play that made the game feel more unique and exciting to play
9.) There would be increased transparency and communication from the developers to the player base
10.) There would be more consistent and robust compensation when issues pop up

Honestly, I could go on about ways in which I could see improvements coming to the game and every so often I express them to the team. With that said, if you look at the list above of things that I have championed in the past few years the only thing we have really seen any movement on are bug fixes and the speed at which they have been addressed, and honestly that is almost 0% because of me. The closest I have come to having any real influence over anything was with most recently Kaito and the community feedback and reviews on him, and further back with one of the Chandras where I championed for them to lower the loyalty costs for her to be playable. They did, but not enough to make her good and my review said as much. I am confident that Webcore has a direction for the game and that it will continue to not only be a fun game, but that they will also improve and provide more quality of life changes as they go. I could see players feeling like creators like me have more of a say for the direction of the game or decisions that are made, but that seriously just isn't happening. Some of my feedback isn't seen here on the forums, but if you watch my videos and/or streams or are a part of my discord community you know exactly where I stand on everything. I'm an open book. The best way to push the needle and have your voice be heard is to express yourself respectfully and often. I hear that the team looks through all of the community spaces regularly; ranging from this forum, to the major group discords. They follow the trends of conversations to see how people feel about things. I have to guess that they make decisions based on overwhelming community sentiment. At times myself or another creator might direct their attention toward a topic that is being discussed by many people to make sure that there is awareness for things people are saying. If you want to be heard, be respectful and make yourself heard.

When we get cards and/or walkers early we are only allowed to play with them in the Training Grounds or Story Mode so that they don't potentially give us any form of competitive advantage that other players couldn't get themselves. Honestly us getting things early has been amazing because we ferret out a lot of issues with things before they drop and there is a solid chance that some of those things get fixed in time for everyone to play with them. It is a lot of work, but I love this game, the community of people I've met that plays it, and the team that I see working to improve it.

At the end of the day, I am one you. I am one of the people who plays this game. It is a fun game with some flaws, but I love it. I have two wonderful kids, an amazing wife, and a blessed life that is full of surprises and challenges. I have a hobby. I make videos about the game Magic: Puzzle Quest. My making videos supports me getting ViP once every other month, and sometimes less often than that. That's it. I have never received anything of actual monetary value for my videos from anyone but members of the community. I make my videos because I have fun making them. I make them for you all to hopefully share in that fun with me. I make them to meet new people and talk with other passionate members of the community. I really hope that if you watch my videos that you enjoy them and that you are one of the people who shares their passion for the game with me. If you have any questions for me, feel free to ask! Thank you all for reading, and I'll see you in the next post.

gozmaster

Great post brother.