Quest Mode: Guide to Formats, Worlds, and everything

[Chris H.]

Rather than having a cost for traveling to another world I would rather see a bonus of some sort given if you accept a limitation as part of the traveling.

Some people want to travel at any moment and play with their entire library and I do not want to discourage this.

So I think that a bonus for accepting a limitation might be worth consideration. A new card pool from a limited set of cards to select from (+ existing cards from my pool that matched the limited set of cards?).

I would create a new deck from this limited card pool and I would even accept going back to facing the easy opponents to start with.

It might be worth some thought and consideration.

[friarsol]

It's actually an unlimited number of cards at your disposal. The card shop gets restocked when you change worlds. If you continue cycling through the worlds, you can get a lot more variety. @devs: what do you think about imposing a cost for traveling? Something small but not insignificant to discourage "shop scumming"? There already is a cost associated with this behavior, though: time.

I'm fine with charging a nominal fee, but how about disabling the traveling button for say 3 matches each time you travel. This would be thematically equivilent of needing to re-energize each time you Planeswalk, so you need to restore your familiarity with the area before being able to move onto the next.

[serrasmurf]

I'm fine with charging a nominal fee, but how about disabling the traveling button for say 3 matches each time you travel. This would be thematically equivilent of needing to re-energize each time you Planeswalk, so you need to restore your familiarity with the area before being able to move onto the next.

This I like.

But what do you guys think about how to balance it with "unlock sets" when you play a custom quest?
Why should I pay big bucks for unlocking a set when I can travel to the set?
- travelling could be disabled in custom quest. it fits the idea of custom quest, but is less fun to not be able to travel
- unlocking a set gets different requirements which are easier when you don't travel. First idea that comes to mind is you have to comlete challenges (or get a big discount when you complete some), and conveniently challenges are currently reset when you travel..
- ?

[myk]

I added the "disable travel button for a few rounds" item to my shortlist. I actually think the "unlock sets" functionality will eventually become obsolete as we add more worlds to cover all the sets...but that might not be for a while : P

[RumbleBBU]

I'm fine with charging a nominal fee, but how about disabling the traveling button for say 3 matches each time you travel. This would be thematically equivilent of needing to re-energize each time you Planeswalk, so you need to restore your familiarity with the area before being able to move onto the next.

Agreed. That sounds like a perfect solution - both thematically and balancewise. And as long as it's 3 matches and not 3 wins, you wouldn't get stuck in world that's too tough for you, either. Just lose 3 matches, then get the h*** out of there.
(The actual number of required matches in a world could depend on the Quest difficulty and be adjusted in the Quest preferences - e.g., 3 for Easy, 4 for Medium, and so on.)

Why didn't I think of that!

I actually think the "unlock sets" functionality will eventually become obsolete as we add more worlds to cover all the sets...but that might not be for a while : P

That's pretty much how I vision it, too. The whole unlocking stuff was simply a shortcut to building your custom quest environments until I started the whole worlds stuff.

[lazylockie]

do you guys think it's possible to make a Mirrodin themed world?

[moomarc]

do you guys think it's possible to make a Mirrodin themed world?

Definitely, it's just a case of people building and testing the decks. In fact its quite a popular quest world idea and a few people have started working on decks (its the predominant world concept after this post in the World Deck Development thread in the Decks subforum. If you're any good with deck creation maybe you can contribute a few (or even just ideas for decks) over there. The more people working on it, the faster a world can be developed. Generally the devs have left expanding the quest worlds to the users now, although Sloth in particular will generally look over the decks to check AI issues.

[Enchanteur]

I love make decks, and particulary challenges decks because they are the most flavorfull. These decks don't need to be really strong in itself, because AI get some extras. So it can be tribes decks or very originals strategys.
And I know how to "cheat" in order to test new decks/challenges. (not very difficult, just remove all others decks, and just put your decks, edit accessibility win=X, repeat=true).

I will make new ravnica world decks soon.

How to compile new decks on the forum ?
It should be better to do a deck topic for each world.
Who take new decks and incorpore it to the new releases of forge ?

[serrasmurf]

I love make decks, and particulary challenges decks because they are the most flavorfull. These decks don't need to be really strong in itself, because AI get some extras. So it can be tribes decks or very originals strategys.
And I know how to "cheat" in order to test new decks/challenges. (not very difficult, just remove all others decks, and just put your decks, edit accessibility win=X, repeat=true).

I will make new ravnica world decks soon.

How to compile new decks on the forum ?
It should be better to do a deck topic for each world.
Who take new decks and incorpore it to the new releases of forge ?

Hi,
I've been a bit busy lately, but will try to finish the ravnica world in the next few weeks, now that we have dragons maze in the mix.

Any input is welcome, we can share them on the world decks development thread.
When we have sufficiently playtested it we can post the decks there and one of the devs will put it in the new release.
My plan is:
- update current ravnica guild decks with dragons maze cards
- see if there are new cool guild decks to be made
- finally make 3/4/5 colour decks. some with combo/ card interactions that play better over 3 particula colours, some for proper (very) hard opponents
- not sure if I want the new intro decks
KR,

[RanDomino]

I actually think the "unlock sets" functionality will eventually become obsolete as we add more worlds to cover all the sets...but that might not be for a while : P

That's pretty much how I vision it, too. The whole unlocking stuff was simply a shortcut to building your custom quest environments until I started the whole worlds stuff.

Let me suggest going the other way, or adding the option: A world becomes unlocked when you unlock all the sets in that world (and maybe chop the unlock price in half). I really like the unlock sets 'mode' because it adds RPG-like progress, but currently there's no reason not to do all my shopping in Ravnica and all my fighting in Main World or Jamuraa.

[SecretCaveman]

The initial post states that "The selection of unlockable sets tends to tilted towards the sets that are historically close to the ones currently in your Quest".
However, the first sets I get to unlock are always the latest ones (that is, Modern Masters and Dragons Maze), no matter what starting sets I chose. Is this working properly (and i've just been unlucky, maybe), or is there something wrong with it?

I'd really prefer beeing able to unlock sets close to the ones I already unlocked.

[RedRob]

I was looking at putting together a few Worlds, but after some thought I realised that until we know how the Planeswalking Quest is going to function it's impossible to accurately gauge deck difficulty and challenge rewards. Is a hard deck supposed to be hard by the standards of a Block Constructed card pool? Modern? Vintage? Should a Challenge be giving random rares as rewards or power 9? Until there is some structure to the Planewalking Quest then different worlds will have wildly differing assumptions and therefore power levels. Also, I noticed that as long as old power cards are available in the general card pool decks will very quickly tend towards Vintage, which makes a lot of cards useless when you get them. Basically the power level of decks in Magic goes Draft < Block Constructed < Standard < Modern < Legacy < Vintage and it would be cool if your deck went through that progression than jumped straight to Moxen and Necropotence.

The basic question is whether you should go through the worlds accumulating cards into a single deck that gets better all the time, or whether you should have to play each world by it's own rules and make a new block constructed deck each time. Whilst I can see the appeal of honing your favourite deck over time, I think that this way skips most of the content of the different Worlds. Once you level up to Hard you will only ever see Hard decks from any world you visit, missing out on all the flavourful tribal decks and such. Also, once you have a honed Hard deck then 95% of the new cards you get from a world will be worthless to you as they won't fit your deck's power level, which takes away a lot of the fun of getting new cards. This has lead me to a few ideas for the Planewalker Quest mode.

The Planewalking Quest
You should start in a world with a fairly restricted card pool, to entice the player to want to Planeswalk to the other Worlds. I'm thinking all the base sets from M11 onwards, as they've been introducing some interesting cards into the basic sets lately and it gives you a nice selection of basic cards. To start with the Worlds would be locked off, and would have to be Unlocked before you could travel to them. This could be done by paying a fee, like how Unlocking sets is done at the moment, however I was thinking it would be cool if Challenge rewards could include "Unlock a specific world". That way you could have (for example) a Mirrodin themed challenge in the main world that, if beaten, gave access to the Mirrodin world. At the point a World is unlocked you get given a starter pool of cards (just like your initial Quest starter pool) drawn from that world to start your World deck. Once in a world you can only use cards legal in that world in your Quest Deck, and you start facing Easy opponents again as you build up your deck for that world. This way each world provides a new experience. The challenges for a world would give tournament staples as rewards, and would be calibrated against block constructed decks. As you can unlock Worlds as challenge rewards, or using credits, you should be able to have two or three Worlds unlocked at a time, so getting stuck on a World or getting a crappy card pool should just mean you can play another World to build up some credits to buy some better cards.

The player will want something to do with the card pool they are ammassing from the different Worlds, therefore I suggest that there should be "Boss" Worlds that you can only unlock by beating multiple challenges in the basic Worlds. First there would be a "Modern" world populated by Modern Tournament winning decks that allowed decks from the whole Modern card pool and is unlocked by beating any 5 challenges. This would allow players to build a deck from cards they accumulated in the various Worlds. Then there would be a "Legacy" World that was unlocked by beating the Modern world. Finally there would be a "Vintage" world that would be the endgame. I was thinking that the Modern and Legacy worlds should have a chance of giving Power 9 as Challenge rewards to prepare you for the Vintage world. Then once you beat the Vintage world Challenges maybe you have an "end Boss" deck with like 100 life and starts with all the moxes in play or something ridiculous to give players some bragging rights and a feeling of closure when they can finally beat it.

So, just some ideas I was batting around. I know some of these aren't possible without some coding changes, which might be a barrier, but hopefully I haven't proposed anything too radical. If people want to just create a honed deck and refine it the standard Quest mode would still be available, this would cater to people that want a more structured and goal oriented experience. What do people think?

[moomarc]

Hi RedRob. The ideas are good but we've had similar ideas before and it was generally decided that we wanted Forge to be as open as possible rather than restrictive. So rather than adding a bunch of new code to shape planeswalking similarly to what you've envisioned and risk alienating more casual users that just want access to all the cards all the time, you can already restrict yourself. You can start a new deck in each world without having to enforce it.

That said, it has been a fairly frequent idea so it's quite possible that at some stage one of the devs will have the time and interest to implement another mode or extra quest setup options that will make some of your ideas possible.

[SecretCaveman]

The initial post states that "The selection of unlockable sets tends to tilted towards the sets that are historically close to the ones currently in your Quest".
However, the first sets I get to unlock are always the latest ones (that is, Modern Masters and Dragons Maze), no matter what starting sets I chose. Is this working properly (and i've just been unlucky, maybe), or is there something wrong with it?

I'd really prefer beeing able to unlock sets close to the ones I already unlocked.

So I tried this again, and they really always unlock from latest to oldest. This really takes out alot of the fun for me.
I like to start with a restricted card pool (one block of expansions for example) and then unlock new sets one by one. This is the way the restricted card pool is supposed to work. However, at the moment, this is just not possible, because you end up with the same editions each and every time after a short while (except for the ones you started with).

Is there a chance that this is going to be fixed any time soon?

[friarsol]

Is there a chance that this is going to be fixed any time soon?

The person who was working on it has been busy with real life recently, and generally since the devs are all volunteers, we work on things we are the most interesting, so I'd imagine this most likely won't get fixed soon unless the original dev comes back in that time frame.