The Ultimate Quest Mode Thread

by **drdev** » 05 Oct 2014, 00:41

Marek14 wrote:Does the Mana Screwed achievement literally count lands played or just number of lands on the battlefield when the game ends? If the second, you could easily cheat the achievement with help of Zuran Orb...

Just lands played. I did it that way on purpose.

by **Marek14** » 05 Oct 2014, 05:24

drdev wrote:
Marek14 wrote:Does the Mana Screwed achievement literally count lands played or just number of lands on the battlefield when the game ends? If the second, you could easily cheat the achievement with help of Zuran Orb...
Just lands played. I did it that way on purpose.

I asked since someone mentioned "Ravnica gates" here. If he meant the karoo lands that produce 2 mana, they don't atually reduce the number of land drops, just number of lands on the battlefield...

by **Fizanko** » 05 Oct 2014, 06:04

I got the achievement with 2 ravnica gates + 1 regular land.
The 2 gates allowed me to play my dual color creatures and other spells without problems (once i could get my cluestones deployed, as they need 3 mana ) and thanks to the ability to choose the color coming from their tapping.

It was great due to how really mana screwed i was in that game.

by **borsuk** » 05 Oct 2014, 23:24

It would be really nice to have "reset to default values" option/button at quest preferences screen, it's nice to be messing with values, but you need to write previos/starting values somewhere else before that in case of too big/miscalculated changes.

by **Fizanko** » 05 Oct 2014, 23:55

Would be useful yes, but what you can do for now is to delete the file named quest.preferences in your forge user data folders, it will be recreated the next time you launch Forge and will have the default settings

by **lujo** » 07 Oct 2014, 10:49

Hmmm, how does power increase for decks work exactly?

Because there's a bunch of affinity decks in the medium tier in the main world which simply aren't "medium" in difficulty. Pretty much no affinity deck IS, by default, and the reason it's not always on top of the older formats is because you can in theory sideboard or metagame against it - if you have access to the full card pool (of formats which are huge!).

I'd really love to hear some rationalizing of why there are several decks which could be classified as affinity in there? And I say rationalizing, because there's no legit justification, I'm just curious what led someone to believe that this makes sense?

by **Vecc** » 08 Oct 2014, 01:28

Just had an opponent counter Lightning Bolt on Blighted Agent with Invigorate. So I went for another Bolt with everything still on stack and it went for another Invigorate. My final Bolt met... a third Invigorate. That was a fun game.

by **Fizanko** » 08 Oct 2014, 23:20

My first win in a year with an opponent running out of cards in his library, and it was a hard AI (Isperia 3 from Ravnica) , so happy it happened

The deck i built from my 60+ duels in Ravnica (pure dual color with Dimir cards) wasn't completely designed to mill everything, but to help breaking the AI decks by putting lots of his cards into graveyard.

Secrets of House Dimir | Open: 1 Call of the Nightwing|GTC
1 Consult the Necrosages|RAV
1 Consuming Aberration|GTC
4 Deathcult Rogue|GTC
1 Dimir Aqueduct|RAV
1 Dimir Charm|GTC
2 Dimir Cluestone|DGM
2 Dimir Guildgate|GTC
1 Dimir Keyrune|GTC
1 Dinrova Horror|GTC
2 Duskmantle Guildmage|GTC
1 Duskmantle Seer|GTC
1 Far // Away|DGM
3 Haunter of Nightveil|DGM
4 Island|RTR|3
4 Island|RTR|4
2 Island|RTR|5
1 Lazav, Dimir Mastermind|GTC
1 Lurking Informant|RAV
1 Mind Grind|GTC
1 Mirko Vosk, Mind Drinker|DGM
1 Moroii|RAV
1 Nightveil Specter|GTC
2 Notion Thief|DGM
4 Paranoid Delusions|GTC
1 Pilfered Plans|DGM
1 Psychic Drain|RAV
1 Psychic Strike|GTC
4 Swamp|RAV|3
3 Swamp|RTR|4
4 Swamp|RTR|5
1 Twisted Justice|RAV
1 Whispering Madness|GTC

But the AI helped me, it played several Compulsive Research , a few Remand and used Sphinx's Revelation and his -2 for Jace, Architect of Thought.

Mixed with my spells and creature power to put library cards into the graveyard, the AI fell with 0 cards in library.

by **serrasmurf** » 09 Oct 2014, 13:28

Fizanko wrote:My first win in a year with an opponent running out of cards in his library, and it was a hard AI (Isperia 3 from Ravnica) , so happy it happened

But the AI helped me, it played several Compulsive Research , a few Remand and used Sphinx's Revelation and his -2 for Jace, Architect of Thought.

Mixed with my spells and creature power to put library cards into the graveyard, the AI fell with 0 cards in library.

Isperia has indeed a lot of card draw and control cards, and few win conditions, the AI can't handle that very well.
You see the same with other decks with a lot of draw power (both the honden deck and the Sigil of the Empty Throne deck come to mind), where somtimes there is no way that I can win but the AI is so friendly to deck himself.

by **serrasmurf** » 09 Oct 2014, 13:30

Playing a lot of new quests currently, thanks to Krazy creating the new rewards for quest drafting. For the first time in the 5 years i play Forge I can properly work towards a constructed deck in quest mode (but it still takes a lot of effort, which is good).

by **lujo** » 09 Oct 2014, 14:17

A good thing for the quest mode would be some sort of "bounty" system where you can beat stuff up to influence merchants to acquire more stuff.

The old shandalar game had a medallion system which let you occasionally purchase "blue enchantments", "any land" and such stuff. Something simmilar to that system could be really precious.

by **Fizanko** » 09 Oct 2014, 18:55

It always seemed to me there was a rule in the randomness, if in my quest duels i accepted a hand with only 1 land in it, every single time i could be sure i was going to be mana screwed for 3 turns in which no more land would come.

That's why i always mulligan if i notice only 1 land in my hand

This time it went again, i decided to test that theory and i was wrong, i wasn't mana screwed for 3 turns.
I was mana screwed for 7 turns, couldn't believe not a single land came for 7 cards pick.

Confirming that i will continue to always mulligan if there's only 1 land in my initial hand

by **KrazyTheFox** » 10 Oct 2014, 00:44

Started a new quest with the same settings as Tim's Challenge (just one that I don't have to keep track of) and my starting pool has both a Mox Ruby and a Sarkhan Vol in it. I think I know what colors I'm playing.

by **lujo** » 10 Oct 2014, 01:50

While repeatedly playing the quest challenge, I've noticed that it generally devolves into "precon challenge" for me. If you can sell enough stuff from your core pool (and if you sell the snow lands you generally can, rather easily), then all you have to do is google the precon lists on starcity games and decide which one to pick. It's kind of the best investment besides drafting, tbh.

For example, there's 3 Seal of Fire in Rakdos Bloodsport (and a few other goodies) and if you buy that and add a Last Rites and/or Mind Swords, it sorta builds into a nice little deck (a nice little 20-0 decks, since I've bought 2 and scored a few other sinergistic things).

But that's childs play - there's a Nemesis G/B one with 4 Blastoderms. 4. Also a host of really useful Spellshapers and some other stuff. So the last 4-5 quest challenge experiments have all been "how can I develop / combine precons" rather than what I ussually do.

I was wondering - what do you guys think about this? It kinda makes certain cards staples in quest mode since you're kinda always guaranteed to have access to them, while most other cards are really difficult to pinpoint. It's especially noticable because even if a precon has chaff, there's MANY of them which deffinitelly have enough cards to fill up a pretty good 40 card deck, especially if you have a bomb or constructed staple or two in their colors.

by **Fizanko** » 10 Oct 2014, 02:31

If you want the most efficient decks, it's certainly a good idea to use as reference the best decks, apparently lots of people do that in real play anyways if they can afford the cards.
Some challenge seems to require specificly built deck anyways.

In other words , to me part of my fun with the quest mode is to build "theme" decks (not theme in the sense of mtg deck building stuff with specific combos etc... but them in the sense of the background story).
On my Theros quest i just did that, moving decks around the various gods and so build what was in flavor with them (Morgis and a minotaur themed deck by example)

As currently i'm in a Ravnica quest and i'm very far in it, i got a truckload of card that i kept instead of selling so i could build several dual color-only decks to represent each Ravnica guilds with them.

I had lots of fun playing with those decks (even beating some hard Ravnica AI with each of them) , and even if they're not the most efficient (i had a couple of Doubling Season i got from rewards by example that i have not included in any of the decks) they're very fun for me to play with in that quest.
There are still cards in that block i hope to get to complete those decks.