Quest Mode Commander

[KrazyTheFox]

Since drafting tournaments have been a huge success, I've been thinking about other modes I could add to make quest mode more fun. I think the next one I'd like to add is commander, but I don't really have any ideas for it. I was thinking something along the lines of a full on quest with opponent progressions and some kind of story to go along with it.

Unlike draft mode, this will require much more work, as the automatic commander deck generator is not near good enough to provide a challenge. The decks will likely have to be hand crafted.

So right now I'm fishing for ideas; what would you guys like to see in a commander mode for quests?

[mastroego]

As an user I'd appreciate Commander or even Planechase being somehow integrated in Quest mode.

I don't know these formats and don't fully understand how to try them out meaningfully in Forge (do I have to create decks for the AI to?), so having them in Quest would be great.

[Xitax]

Commander might be difficult due to the 70 or so singletons you'd have to get on color.

IMHO, there should be a way to get specific cards through challenges or something.

[Agetian]

Yes, something along the lines of "duplicating a card" or "getting a specific [color] card from a given set" (like in Microprose's Shandalar if you remember) functionality as a bonus for beating hard challenges might be nice for Quest - not necessarily implemented as in Shandalar but just so it'd be possible to get certain specific cards easier in higher level play.

As for the modes - Commander might be interesting but I agree with Xitax that it might be difficult to get a deck going given the way the Quest currently plays.

- Agetian

[Fizanko]

Maybe a workaround would be to have pre-build commander decks for each world, independant from your quest stockpile if you don't have enough singletons.

[KrazyTheFox]

Now that I've had some time to think about it, I've come up with a few more ideas.

What if, to start, you could pick a commander deck out of a pool of pre-built decks as Fizanko has suggested (it'd pick, say, 3 out of the entire pool and let you pick from those)? Then you would earn more cards to improve that deck or build new ones by defeating opponents in commander games. The cards would usually be visible before you took on an opponent (some could be hidden still). The opponents themselves would be the commander of that opponent's deck and would be visible. You wouldn't earn booster packs from wins, but you could earn cards outside your unlocked sets. I'd still like to find some way of adding some kind of meaningful progression to it.

[friarsol]

When I first talked about adding Commander into quest mode, I was considering doing it to start in the same way I did the Sorin vs Tibalt Challenges. The biggest problem at the time was that we didn't have the Commander decks at 100% coverage, and on top of that there were a bunch of cards that the AI didn't really know how to handle in them. Even if we start a Commander specific quest mode there's a lot of overhead to creating all the decks.

I think the most similar comparison is that it's a world of it's own, that you aren't really allowed to travel away from.

[serrasmurf]

1st question: do you want to play against normal opponents or commander opponents?
I'd prefer the latter. I'm with Sol, a world specially customized for commanderplay would be the best fit imo.
It will also keep quests interesting, you start in a normal world, and when your normal deck becomes streamlined & boring you can start preparing for a commander deck.

Alternatively you could make the constructed gauntlet accessible from Quest, which could let you play various predefined tournaments, like a commander tournament (just like your draft)

There is a lot of room for some cool flavour: where do commanders meet? westpoint -> arena plane -> battlefield plane