Quest Mode: Guide to Formats, Worlds, and everything

[mastroego]

Quest is amazing.

I suspect the way I play it is somewhat peculiar.
I started months ago with M11 and Alara, and sticked with that "quest" ever since.
As the prices ratio in the shop become better you can begin snowballing, and collecting cards becomes A LOT faster.

Now it's become a challenge with myself to see how many full sets I can collect. I have several by now, a few entire blocks even... (Alara, Lorwyn, Innistrad...).
Mythic Rares are a pain, you need to buy a lot of fat packs to collect them The "sell spares" function helps a lot here

I did tweak the preferences somewhat, but I tend to play with 60 cards decks and no pets.
Yes the number of opponents is limited but by creating diverse decks yourself you will ensure that different crazy stuff will happen all the time.
Also, I hope more and more AI decks will continue to be added, even though it isn't maybe the highest priority for the team.

[Fizanko]

And don't forget you can "Travel" to the other planes, each of them have their own AI lineup (and decks) ready to fight you.

But i agree making multiple decks yourself when you get lots of cards is a great way to battle those AI, as it lead into so many different situation, difficult to prepare for everything.

[serrasmurf]

And don't forget you can "Travel" to the other planes, each of them have their own AI lineup (and decks) ready to fight you.

But i agree making multiple decks yourself when you get lots of cards is a great way to battle those AI, as it lead into so many different situation, difficult to prepare for everything.

Another cool "preference" you can use to make your quest start a little easier is to customize how you start:
- starting pool: custom format: select the sets you like most and include "legends" . You'll now probalby have a few very powerful spells, but moreover a lot of expensive cards to sell. (make sure you set the "prized cards" to unrestricted if you don't want your entire quest to be limited by these sets)
- starting pool: draft deck: do a draft first and then enter the quest with this draftdeck, which will have some more consistency and again a lot of money rares when you've just done a 9-pack legends draft

[Crowbot]

I'm having troubles with pack availability in the quest I'm doing (admittedly, I can't remember what settings I used). I'm trying to build Affinity, and I've been able to pick up plenty of Mirrodin packs and fat packs, but Darksteel appears less often, and I have yet to see a single opportunity to get a pack of Fifth Dawn, which is cutting me off of Cranial Plating. Similarly, while Zendikar and Shadowmoor are pretty consistently present, Alara and Lorwyn don't really pop up that much. Any idea what the issue is?

[Xyx]

I played through a dozen quests and only lost a handful of matches so far. Here's some tips:

General good Magic practice:

• Avoid inefficient or low-powered cards. No vanilla 1/1s. No pure lifegain. No auras. All your cards should be efficient threats, sick bombs, 2-for-1s, crazy combos and/or removal. Anything that doesn't fall into one of those categories, give it a long, hard look.
• Mind your mana curve. Make sure you have something to do during the early turns (deploying threats, deploying blockers or killing threats) and something during the later turns (either casting sick bombs or dumping mana into pumping creatures or whatever).
• Your manabase is half your deck; don't neglect it. Play enough lands; the generally accepted guideline is 17 for a 40-card deck (and 24 for a 60-card deck). If you want to build a 2-color deck (for instance because you're questing in Ravnica or because your starting pool contains a truly insane two-color bomb), then make sure you get the guildgates and the signets and whatnot to support it.
• Decide whether your deck should attack or block and choose your creatures accordingly. If you have a bunch of 6-drops in your deck, it needs to block so you live long enough to cast those 6-drops. If your curve ends at 4, you need to kill your opponent before his bombs overpower you. Keep in mind that a 3/1 is a better blocker than a 2/2. It can kill a 5/3. A 2/2 can block a 1/1 but who cares about a 20-turn clock? A 2/2 is a better attacker because it can't be killed by a 1/1.

Quest planning:

• As a guideline, at the start of the quest, build a mono-red deck. Quick beaters and burn. Sell everything else, including the good cards. If you have a truly sick bomb in another color (like a planeswalker) then you can hang on to it for later, but you should probably just sell everything. You should also hang on to the tournament quality commons (Preordain, Squadron Hawk, Elvish Mystic, Doom Blade, etcetera) since they're only worth 1 credit anyway. You'll probably not be able to scrounge together 23 red playables, so you should buy whatever red or colorless playables you can find. And maybe some additional Mountains. In a pinch, I will run as many as 20 Mountains to avoid having to add a second color. Expect your first deck to suck hard. It'll improve quickly.
• Whenever you win cards, sell everything that doesn't immediately improve your deck unless it's tournament quality. By the time you can afford to build a deck in another color, you no longer need to settle for mediocrity anyway.
• Always visit the Spell Store after each duel. There might be a Lightning Bolt, Sol Ring, Strip Mine or Mishra's Factory on offer.
• The first few duels can be a little hairy, but you should be out of the woods after just a few duels and no longer in immediate danger of losing to a bad draw. Now's the time to look to the future. Raise your standards and save some cash for the good stuff.
• Decide on your "ultimate" deck. What do you hope to be playing by the time you'll be facing the Very Hard opponents? Grab everything that goes into that deck when you get the chance; it might be a while before you get another opportunity. Don't get too ambitious; it's almost impossible to collect a good combo deck. Be flexible and stick to something practical like "GW Populate", "UW Control" or "White Weenie". A very easy "best deck" is blue/red with Control Magic, Mana Drain, Lightning Bolt, Strip Mine, Mishra's Factory, Manabarbs (card's crazy) and all the Chandras, Jaces and Power (including Sol Ring and Library of Alexandria) you can get your hands on. Buy that stuff when you see it!
• Try to buy every planeswalker, piece of Power and dual land that you can afford, even if it's not your color(s). They're hard to find, and you never know; you might just luck into a good deck that you weren't planning on.

Tweaks:

• You can tweak the Quest Preferences. I haven't yet decided on a good balance, but I prefer to see more boosters added to the Spell Store later on so that I can keep upgrading my deck. It's very easy to get into a rut where you never find anything worthwhile anymore otherwise (without extensive traveling).
• When setting up the quest, you have the option of choosing Fantasy Quest or not. If you choose Fantasy Quest, you start with only 15 life but you can buy various upgrades, including extra life and a bunch of pets. The pets are ridiculously strong! Basically, if you buy a pet, you get a free token creature at the start of every game (even if it died in a previous game). The plant is mostly just a chump blocker but that still buys you a lot of time. You can have the plant and one of the familiars. The white wolf is the best. I would buy the level 1 plant and wolf ASAP and upgrade the wolf whenever you have some spare cash. Upgrading your life total is much less important. You might want to save up and shell out for the store discount thingy sooner rather than later, too. To me, using pets feels almost like cheating.
• You should decide whether you want to use the "updated card prices" or not. If you downloaded the updated card prices, you'll find that all the good cards (Power, etcetera) are now forever out of your reach. You'd have to win like 200 duels to buy one card. I didn't like that one bit, so I eventually decided to delete all-prices.txt (which was difficult to find; it's in <users>\AppData\Local\Forge\Cache\db\ if you're wondering). Using updated prices is easier at first (you get a lot more cash from selling off your initial card pool) but a lot harder later because you basically won't ever get Power.

Exploits:

• Traveling resets the Spell Store. You can find any card you want if you travel enough. Travel back and forth between the Main World and Shandalar to collect all the cards you ever wanted. I've personally barred myself from traveling altogether; makes things much more interesting.
• The AI is extremely reluctant to trade, so you can usually swing your Dark Confidant into its 1/1s for free damage.
• The AI is blind to pump and manlands, including clearly visible on-board stuff. You can easily set up ambushes with Mishra's Factory (which can even eat 2/2s by pumping itself after blocking if it's not summoning sick). Just pass the turn and the AI will happily swing into it with its Llanowar Elves or whatever.
• The AI is trigger happy. If you suspect a counterspell, cast something unimportant. If you suspect removal, cast a sucky creature to soak it up.
• If you try tweak the Quest Preferences from within Forge, you'll run into some arbitrary limits like "can't be more than 25". You can circumvent those restrictions by editing the quest.preferences file directly (in Notepad or whatever).
• You can build 40-card decks and you don't have to care about Vintage restrictions. Get 4 Strip Mine, 4 Black Lotus, 4 Ancestral Recall, the works.

The worlds:

• The Main World contains everything in Magic. It can be difficult to find good cards in the Spell Store (Wizards has printed loads of crap, especially in the earlier years) but you can theoretically find anything. It's the only place to find planeswalkers (with the exception of the Return to Ravnica ones), and we all know how good those are.
• Ravnica is a 2-color deck world. If you decide to quest in Ravnica only (meaning no travel), the usual "go mono-red" advice does not apply. Try Rakdos instead. It's hard to find anything particularly awesome in the Spell Store.
• Shandalar is even more mono-red friendly than the Main World. It's also a good place for finding the ingredients to the "easy red/blue best deck" I mentioned above. Shandalar opponents generally feature little removal and lots of small but inefficient creatures. Their decks are usually built around a specific gimmick such as Meekstone (quite popular) or Stasis (which the AI can't handle).
• I haven't tried Jamuraa.

[serrasmurf]

Just posted the Zendikar World in the World decks development thread

[Fizanko]

Only lost a handful of match on a hundred ?

Wow, impressive, i started my quest with terribly bad weak cards on my stockpile, spent a lot of time losing matches , in fact it was 12 - 0 for the AI until i finally got good cards appearing and was then able to build various interesting decks and beat the AI to get back on that nasty 12-0 .

So far i'm now there with 93 wins and 75 defeats, my best winning streak being only 8


I'm really happy when i can defeat one of those hard AI and their several power nine cards they like to play everytime. At that point of the game, the pet is usually destroyed/banished/etc.. on the 1st AI turn, as with their P9 card they play too one of their several creature exiling spell on that same turn

Anyways, great guide with lots of good information Xyx !

[serrasmurf]

Hi XyX,
That's a good starting guide for beginners!

Personally I always end up with a control deck. It's my style of play. But it is also very effective against all the creature decks, of which there are plenty and the archetype the AI handles best.
So if you have a (40 card) deck with 6 spot removal spells, some defenisve animals, 3 mass removal spells, some draw spells and a win condition (big creatures or planeswalkers) then you should be able to win at least 35 of the first 40 matches (depending on your settings and travel habits). Dragging the game with a control deck will give you also more room to outplay the AI. I also make sure I have an "out" to every situation, so I try to have an alternate win condition, something against getting milled (Elixir of Immortality or Eldrazi bastards) and something that can handle any permanent (like Echoing Truth).
Further your sideboard is your best friend for coping with all the different type of decks. Charm of Vigor (to be found in the bazar) is your best insurance against bad luck.

I agree that pets feel like cheating so I also doesn't use them. In a default balanced quest configuration it would be more appropriate if pets had some kind of drawback, like your opponent occasionally also bringing his pet...a 5/5 flying firebreathing dragon!

[Fizanko]

Once you're at the point the AI is fielding a couple of P9, your pet does not feel like cheating anymore as the AI can then field multiple "pets" on his own without mana problem on only a couple of turns while banishing yours instantly

[Fizanko]

I've been starting a new quest to see if the experience i got from the previous one would be helpful (as my previous quest had a really horrible early game)

This time i decided to get the hound instead of the wolf, main reason is that the hound can get haste when leveled and at max level you can buff its power with X mana (though need to sacrifice after)

Anyways, i started to build a red deck as i had a planewalker from the start with them , Koth of the Hammer .
Sounded nice but 4 games ... 4 losses, and not close losses, the AI got insane decks that annihilated my poor starting one each time.
Good i edited the preference to set the gold loss to 0 as i couldn't afford anything in spell shop by then.

And during that 4th loss i noticed a green card in my reward Curse of Predation
Sounded good, so i decided to switch and get a green deck (as i started to have several green card, though no planewalkers)
And battle happened, at some point Curse of Predation came in my hand and i had enough mana.

Then wow, wow, wow , poor AI each attacker on the attack phase get +1,+1 , cumulative (so each turn they attack they get another +1,+1) and my group of green weakling low mana attackers in a few turns became real heavy hitter that the AI despite upgrading its 2 Caravan Escort couldn't stop, and soon the 2 powerful upgraded card were annihilated.

Yeah, sometime it takes really 1 card to make a big difference , something i described in another thread

Lots of fun so far.

[Fizanko]

How an accidental click can make you lose a game.

As i was restarting the quest, i ran into the early Challenges, this time it was the Sorin vs Tibalt challenge, based on the mtg duel deck of the same name
http://www.geekenstein.com/magic-the-ga ... lt-review/

Convenientely i was given the Tibalt deck, making it very hard as that deck is simply inferior to the Sorin one, unless of course you're very lucky in the order of your hand picking card and the opponent is very unlucky.
So basically you win if you're very lucky, you'll lose if not.

The 1st round to my surprise went my way, looks like the AI got the worst luck ever apparently, as he was being unable to field any creatures for so many round i had already nearly killed him by the time he finally got something out of his hand.

Now the 2nd round, i wasn't unlucky, and the AI wasn't too, it was simply a matter of the Sorin deck overpowering slowly but surely the Tibalt weaker one, couldn't do anything and lost logically.
It's during that round that i learned that the Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded planewalker is probably the worst planewalker card ever, playing it is actually giving you a big disadvantage, certainly contributed a lot in that unavoidable defeat

Then came the final round, i didn't expected much anymore as i couldn't get a damn land on every turns, so i was behind the AI in term of mana, i had several direct damage spells but at that point of the game, the AI has an overwhelming advantage in the number of creatures, so victory was just out of question as my damaging spells would never deal enough hit to the AI before his creatures would destroy me.

Until Breaking Point appeared

Any player may have Breaking Point deal 6 damage to him or her. If no one does, destroy all creatures. Creatures destroyed this way can't be regenerated.

And there i had a smile, because either the AI would accept the get 6 damage that turn, that would allow me to possibly have enough direct damage spell to kill him before his troops would do the same, or he would have to get rid of his too numerous and strong creatures, and my pitiful ones being lost wouldn't be a problem.

Anyways, i was back in the game, i had now a chance.
And i clicked ... accidentally on the wrong button because


... oh no ...
Let's say that it was then game over as the AI couldn't lose anymore

[Fizanko]

In a previous post i mentionned noticed a P9, Mox Emerald , in the spell shop for a .. certain .. price
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=9258&start=90#p148746

But that was nothing, because i just found a new P9 in the spell shop ... Black Lotus ! and the price is ...

[Fizanko]

question : as i was browsing the various packs available on the spellshop and i noticed a "limited alpha starter deck"


wow, not being much aware of the mtg commercial practice regarding specific editions that seems to be followed by the quest spellshop for its credits price, what is so special about that deck to warrant such a price in the spellshop ?

[timmermac]

That's the very first edition of Magic. It is incredibly hard to find unopened packs for that set, and most singles from that set are also very expensive, again due to rarity.

[Fizanko]

Thanks, i had no idea it was that expensive for a deck.