Mana Echoes – Season 2, Episode 1: The New Story Mode

Magic:PQ Support Team
Magic:PQ Support Team ADMINISTRATORS Posts: 3,652 Chairperson of the Boards
in MtGPQ General Discussion

Greetings everyone!

Welcome back to the second season of Mana Echoes — the article series where we share insights into the behind-the-scenes process of developing existing and upcoming features for Magic: Puzzle Quest.

In this week’s episode, we’re excited to talk about a major change coming with version 7.5.0: the new Story Mode!

Why We’re Making This Change

We decided to update Story Mode to make it more engaging, rewarding, and relevant to the current state of the game. Here’s why:

  • Many cards and enemies were outdated compared to the latest sets and systems.

  • Player engagement with the previous Story Mode was low.

  • Fewer than 25% of players reached the end of Chapter 1.

  • The chapter structure made later story content inaccessible to most players.

  • Difficulty progression was inconsistent — some fights were too easy, while others were too difficult.

TL;DR – The New Story Mode Arrives in Version 7.5.0!

  • Story Mode is being completely reworked to offer a weekly, replayable, lore-driven experience.
  • Each week, you’ll face a new sequence of battles — culminating in mini-boss and boss encounters — tied to stories inspired by Magic’s rich universe.
  • Rewards will refresh weekly, encouraging players to return regularly while offering valuable prizes for both new and veteran players.
  • Five new stages will launch with version 7.5.0, with more coming later — including special holiday events like Halloween and Holiversary!
  • The old Story Mode (Battle for Zendikar and Heroic Encounters) will no longer be accessible after October 14th, so be sure to finish them before then.
  • Get ready for a more dynamic and rewarding Magic: Puzzle Quest experience — and stay tuned for the next Mana Echoes, arriving around Halloween!

A Message from the Dev Team

Hi folks!
Before starting a deep dive into the feature, we would like to give you a short and sweet explanation of the goals and how we incorporated them into it.

The new story mode follows a series of goals, which we started introducing with the quest improvements, and will be followed by future feature releases.
These goals are:

  • Create weekly ritual activities for players
  • Reward players for active engagement
  • Discover new stories by playing every week
  • Make a game that feels alive and changing

Now, let’s get a quick rundown of the new story mode, so you can see how each goal is applied in it.

The new mode will be a weekly activity, where players engage in a series of battles that culminate with a mini-boss and main boss fight.

You can play them at your own leisure, just make sure you finish by the end of the week to get all the rewards.

Players will discover a new story each week, grounded in the Magic Lore, with its enemies, location, and scenario tailored towards the narrative.

Each story has an arch by itself, with a beginning and an end, so you don’t need to finish one to understand the next.

In terms of difficulty, we will have the normal mode at launch, which is tailored towards being comfortable to play by any player, but we have plans in the future to introduce more challenges to veteran players.

Nevertheless, the rewards you gain, which are earned after each fight and at the story completion, give great rewards, in line with the ones from daily/weekly quest completion.

The new story mode structure will enable the team to create more stories regularly, including special ones prepared with care for holidays like Halloween and Holiversary, which will be explained in another Mana Echoes.

We can’t wait to get this new story mode into your hands and get your feedback!

Story Mode Overview

The new Story Mode aims to create a more engaging and rewarding experience, giving players a fresh way to enjoy Magic: Puzzle Quest’s rich lore.

Each Story Mode stage consists of a series of sequential nodes, each containing one or more enemies that must be defeated before progressing.

Victories will award players with unique rewards both for the first completion and for any successful replay attempts.

Defeating all enemies in a stage grants additional completion rewards.

These rewards are designed to help new players progress through the early stages of the game while also giving veteran players a consistent way to earn resources through recurring weekly activity.

Each stage will remain active for one week, so make sure to complete it before the timer runs out and the next stage becomes available.

Replayability and Rewards

One major improvement over the old Story Mode is the incentive to replay content.

In the previous version, once players completed the available chapters, there was little reason to return.
With the new Story Mode, whenever a stage becomes available again, its rewards will reset, allowing players to earn them once more.

This gives the entire community a reason to revisit the feature regularly and continue earning valuable in-game resources.

Additionally, we’re introducing new daily quests tied to completing specific actions within Story Mode — plus a special surprise in the Weekly Rewards, which we’ll discuss in the next Mana Echoes episode.

The Normal difficulty has been balanced to offer a gradual increase in challenge, allowing new players to progress comfortably while still providing engaging battles leading up to the boss encounter.

Launch Details

At launch, the reimagined Story Mode will feature five new stages, each exploring different moments in Magic: Puzzle Quest lore and offering a steady stream of fresh PvE content.

More stages will be added in future updates, including special limited-time stories for holidays like Halloween, which will feature unique encounters and rewards.

Important Disclaimer

As with the launch of other features, such as the rework of the quest system, the new story mode is being released as a beta version. We’ll be monitoring the specific indicators for this feature, and may push adjustments on an “as-needed basis”.

What About Training Mode?

Don’t worry — the Training Area isn’t going anywhere!
It can now be accessed directly from the main menu.

Important Dates

If you’d like to complete the stages from the old Story Mode (Battle for Zendikar and Heroic Encounters), please do so before the release of version 7.5.0 on Tuesday, October 14th.
After that date, they will no longer be accessible.

Coming Next

That’s all for today’s episode!
We’ll be back around Halloween with the next Mana Echoes, where we’ll be talking about Planeswalkers — both old and new!

In the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts — are you excited for this new version of Story Mode?
Share your feedback in the discussion below!

Comments

  • ArielSira
    ArielSira Posts: 576 Critical Contributor

    Back when I started in 2016 I remember progressing through the Story and the Heroic battles. I enjoyed the experience, but yes, after the rewards no reason to come back. I love that you're breathing new life into this part of the game and even more ways to earn rewards.

  • madwren
    madwren Posts: 2,263 Chairperson of the Boards

    I'm also glad that story mode is finally getting some love. It always had so much potential considering the vast array of mtg lore available.

  • JTK421
    JTK421 Posts: 49 Just Dropped In

    I’ve been using the very first Story Mode chapter for the “Deal combat damage with [mechanic] five times.” This is good incentive to play story mode beyond that

  • dmmyccnt
    dmmyccnt Posts: 2 Just Dropped In

    I'm really not a very competitive player, but I am very much enfranchised in the lore and worldbuilding of Magic, so I am definitely the target audience for this update.

    I really appreciate the team for thinking of and implementing this change; I'm excited to try it out.

  • Mainloop25
    Mainloop25 Posts: 1,979 Chairperson of the Boards

    I love it!

    Will the training section get a revamp at some point? It suffers from a lot of the same issues addressed in the reasons for revamping Story Mode

  • gozmaster
    gozmaster Posts: 353 Mover and Shaker

    SO Jazzed about this, VERY WELL DONE @Magic:PQ Support Team !

  • Keyler
    Keyler Posts: 107 Tile Toppler

    Very happy to watch news in this game, feels good to have more variety at last and get more resources for the effort. Thanks to the Support team for the last changes, listening the community requeriments, were late but arrived. This is the way.
    Also with more kind of formats we need more slots or import/export funcionality to manage decks for each format without having to take screenshots and create each deck again in each event. This is a deck-building game, so we need a proper deck storage system, just like any other card game currently has.
    As said well done with the last adds into the game, diary/weekly mission system, planar chaos event and this new story mode. Congrats!!

  • NickBKK
    NickBKK Posts: 100 Tile Toppler

    Excellent! 100/100!

  • Janosik
    Janosik Posts: 835 Critical Contributor

    This looks pretty neat tbh. I've always wanted to see some maps in MTGPQ (it was a core feature of the original Puzzle Quest:COTW, after all!) and while this trail features no branches and it more akin to a list of PvE levels like we've seen in the past, maybe it opens the door to that kind of thing in the future.

    (YFAE has a branching structure but it's honestly not very well implemented and quite confusing to new players)

  • fenelope
    fenelope Posts: 33 Just Dropped In

    Hey @Magic:PQ Support Team because the wording in this post was unclear, a lot of us focused our efforts on Battle for Zendikar & Herioc encounters believing that we’d still be able to complete the original Story Mode and Training Grounds. This is really frustrating!

    The old Story Mode (Battle for Zendikar and Heroic Encounters) will no longer be accessible after October 14th, so be sure to finish them before then.

  • Janosik
    Janosik Posts: 835 Critical Contributor

    Regretting my decision to play through Story Mode this week now that a bunch of Story Mode quests have starting showing up in the Quest Journal ^_^

    You'd think that the quests would add an extra incentive to play the Story Mode, but really they add an extra incentive not to play them, at least until some new Story Mode quests pop up in your Quest Journal.

    I find myself, honestly, thinking about the new player experience... Is this really what a new player to the game wants? Far less content tailored to their needs than we had before, with an added pressure to ignore that new content for days after it shows up?

    I remember grinding through Story Mode when I was a new player and I don't think the new lack of content would have hooked me as much at the start of my MTGPQ career. But maybe I was atypical.

    I appreciate that statistic about 'Fewer than 25% of players reached the end of Chapter 1'... but do they really mean players, people who are still playing the game currently? Or do they mean people who downloaded the game, tried it out, decided it wasn't for them and immediately uninstalled? You'll never get 100% of the people who try your game out to stick with it forever... 25% seems like a pretty high number in that case.

    Really, doesn't it seem like they could have introduced the new system, AND kept the old system, for extra content?

    And no, I'm not just saying that cos I want extra prizes... I already farmed all the prizes from the old Story Mode to buy Puzzle Masters 1 cards with ^_^

  • Anarchangel
    Anarchangel Posts: 61 Match Maker
    edited 17 October 2025, 20:40

    Perhaps we might receive compensation of some sort for playing through New Story multiple times after having finished it before the first (of what is currently four) Quest objective(s) was even presented.
    -Edit- On second thought, it's a much lesser issue than the others already presented about New Story, and others that have not been brought up yet

  • Magic:PQ Support Team
    Magic:PQ Support Team ADMINISTRATORS Posts: 3,652 Chairperson of the Boards

    @Janosik said:
    Regretting my decision to play through Story Mode this week now that a bunch of Story Mode quests have starting showing up in the Quest Journal ^_^

    You'd think that the quests would add an extra incentive to play the Story Mode, but really they add an extra incentive not to play them, at least until some new Story Mode quests pop up in your Quest Journal.

    @Anarchangel said:
    Perhaps we might receive compensation of some sort for playing through New Story multiple times after having finished it before the first (of what is currently four) Quest objective(s) was even presented.

    Hey folks, just to clarify that I'm understanding correctly, what you both are reporting is that you cannot complete the story mode-related quests because you already defeated the nodes in this week's stage?
    You should still be able to replay them in order to complete the quests.

    If replaying a defeated node doesn't count towards the quest completion, I'll notify the development team so they can work this issue out.

  • TheHunter
    TheHunter Posts: 372 Mover and Shaker

    @Magic:PQ Support Team said:

    Hey folks, just to clarify that I'm understanding correctly, what you both are reporting is that you cannot complete the story mode-related quests because you already defeated the nodes in this week's stage?
    You should still be able to replay them in order to complete the quests.

    If replaying a defeated node doesn't count towards the quest completion, I'll notify the development team so they can work this issue out.

    Hi @Magic:PQ Support Team perhaps an incentive like getting 20xp mastering points, instead of a very mean 2xp, might encourage players to revisit Story mode? We used to get 20xp on every match in Revolving Planeswalk which made playing it very rewarding.

  • ertaii
    ertaii Posts: 232 Tile Toppler

    @Magic:PQ Support Team said:

    @Janosik said:
    Regretting my decision to play through Story Mode this week now that a bunch of Story Mode quests have starting showing up in the Quest Journal ^_^

    You'd think that the quests would add an extra incentive to play the Story Mode, but really they add an extra incentive not to play them, at least until some new Story Mode quests pop up in your Quest Journal.

    @Anarchangel said:
    Perhaps we might receive compensation of some sort for playing through New Story multiple times after having finished it before the first (of what is currently four) Quest objective(s) was even presented.

    Hey folks, just to clarify that I'm understanding correctly, what you both are reporting is that you cannot complete the story mode-related quests because you already defeated the nodes in this week's stage?
    You should still be able to replay them in order to complete the quests.

    If replaying a defeated node doesn't count towards the quest completion, I'll notify the development team so they can work this issue out.

    I think what they are saying is that they completed the new story mode in a whim as soon as it was available. Now they get quest requiring to play once more the games they have already completed, which is time consuming with no other point than completing the quest. In order to avoid playing the same games again, they would consider NOT playing store mode UNTIL the story mode related quest is assigned. Instead of enticing players to play story mode as soon as possible, it has the opposite result: delay it to avoid clearing the same games again and again.

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