[MtGPQ] Handover Announcement

@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.