Campaign mode

[tc85123]

I don't know if this would be possible but I think it would be great to have some sort of campaign mode where you can move up the ladder to the final boss or something along those lines and earn cards maybe even have antes. And have new decks to go against and new challenges on different releases.

I don't know if anyone else would be interested in that but I've been doing it on my own using a random number generator to produce antes and I started with one deck and add cards as I win them. And I try to make strong decks to go against but it would be so much better if there was an actual campaign mode. Earning cards is a lot more fun to me than just being able to have access at any time.

[Lodici]

I think a campaign mode would be great but for it to work I think you would need to be able to identify/build decks that can be played strongly by the AIs or even be able to setup pre-configured duels where you know that if you are given deck A and the AI is given deck B you will have to play really well to win (eg. a boss duel). You might also be interested in this discussion related to an elo rating.

[PalladiaMors]

Maybe another idea - for the far future, since it looks like it could require lots of coding - would be to add Sealed and Draft as possible play modes. Melvin once commented somewhere that the AI was designed to play Limited and not Constructed. Constructed decks can have very complex strategies and don't suit the AI too well right now. Limited decks are more simple and straight forward to play, and playing on these modes should reduce the skill level difference between humans and the AI which right now is a bit of a bother when playing constructed.

The random deck generator is a way to play limited, but then the fact that you have no input whatsoever over the deck that you will get might make it not so interesting for some players. It could be interesting to allow the player to choose which boosters he wants to use (I think Magarena should be able to randomly generate boosters fine) and allow the player to build his deck from the cards he receives, as you do when playing Sealed. The AI could build using the random generator from an equivalent card pool. This feels like it could be not such a huge workload to do (I really have no idea) and it corresponds to a traditional way of playing Magic, unlike the randomly generated decks, which I think might be more appealing to some players.

Draft is a lot more fun in my opinion, and shares the same advantages in that the resulting decks should fit the AI better and put it and the human on more equal terms. But I suspect writing the code to "teach" the AI how to draft could be quite complicated. It probably could use Gatherer ratings to rank the cards to pick, that part is fine, but there are other factors - in most formats you need to choose colors and commit more or less early, just picking the card with the highest rating every time wouldn't result in a playable deck, you need to plan on a mana curve etc. This entire aspect isn't available right now and maybe doing that from scratch could be difficult. So I'm just mentioning things that crossed my mind to see what you guys think. I do think that a stronger emphasis on Limited formats might be a good idea after all, and then supporting the traditional ways of playing Limited could perhaps bring more players to Magarena?

Edit: By the way, tc85123's idea is really nice as well! My comment really had nothing to do with it, so I'm sorry for hijacking the topic to discuss something else (I do that all the time huh). It just made me think about what could be done concerning play modes, so I posted here.