A quick Planar Conquest update. I've overhauled the AEther screen a bit to make it look nicer and to prevent it being just a glorified card lookup for cards to unlock. I wanted there to be a bit of RNG involved, but still give some filtering tools so you can improve your odds of getting a card you want.
Here's a gif showing what I came up with:
Basically, I've narrowed the filters down to just 4 card properties: color, card type, rarity, and CMC. Within these properties, I've grouped similar options (like artifacts, enchantments, and planeswalker, as well as instants and sorceries), and used ranges for CMC in order to prevent being able to filter down to just a card or two most of the time. Also note that for color filters, you can only select one color, and the card will always contain that color (along with possibly others). You'll also only receive lands whose color identity includes that color.
Narrowing down the filters also had the added benefit of making it much simpler to come up with a fair pricing model. There's now a flat 25% additional markup added on to the base 50% markup for each filter applied, with the exception of rarity since that already directly affects the shard cost. Like the base 50% markup, the 25% markup for color, type, and CMC filters is configurable in preferences. With the defaults, selecting all three types of filters will apply a 125% markup to the average value of all cards within the filtered pool (i.e. cost = average value * 2.25).
The other nice thing about this new screen arrangement is the ability to have the pulled card animate into view from the deep horizon of the AEther, which I think better captures the flavor of pulling something from the AEther.
Let me know what you think and stay tuned for more updates. I may not hit my goal of the end of the month for the initial release at this point, but I am getting closer.
Thanks.
-Dan