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I've had an idea that I've been considering for a little bit for a Third Quest Mode.

I haven't thought of a good name yet, but I was thinking something like "Through the Ages" or "Historic" or... I don't know I'm not really a marketing type.

But basically the idea is you start at the early days of Magic (93-95) with your overall card pool severely limited to anything pre-4th edition. You play for a little bit, and soon your card pool expands to Ice Age and Mirage block with your older cards appearing less often (maybe altogether except for some more utility/power cards). Rinse and repeat, slowly inching towards the present. I don't know how well this would work, but it could be an interesting way to play with cards people hadn't played with before. Maybe the mode would require a player to stay in a certain Timeline for a handful of games and they would have to beat a Challenge deck to move on (such as a Standard deck from that time period).

Obviously for this mode to be possible the card lists would need to have some way of identifying which set(s) they appear in. This might be a positive step to take anyway, to make Booster Drafting more "realistic" along with knowing how complete each set is. This may be a good way to focus effort into completing sets that don't need too much work to get finished up.

Well, that got a little long.
Any thoughts? I was trying to consider what the best place to start would be and I'm thinking it would have to be making set lists of the cards. But before I started doing that wanted to see what other people think.

The opponents in the quest mode might be classical creatures from that time, especially legendary ones. Of course, their decks would be limited to old cards as well, perhaps from standard or block format of their time?

One idea would be to "unlock" new expansions for certain sidequests.

The timeline might look like this:

1st stage: Alpha/Beta/Unlimited. Arabian Nights and Antiquities can be unlocked and added to cardpool.
2nd stage: Revised. Legends, the Dark, and Fallen Empires can be unlocked.
3rd stage: Fourth Edition. Chronicles and Homelands can be unlocked.

From this point onwards, block system starts, and the player gets more freedom of movement. From Fourth Edition hub, you are able to unlock Ice Age and Mirage worlds (and unlock Alliances, Visions and Weatherlight within them). Opening next block (Tempest) will, according to rules of standard, close off Ice Age, and so on.

4th stage: Fifth Edition. During this stage, Tempest and Urza's Saga can be unlocked, and within them Stronghold, Exodus, Urza's Legacy and Urza's Destiny. Additionally, Portal and Portal: Second Age can be unlocked from here.

5th stage: Sixth Edition. New blocks accessible from here are Mercadian Masques (with Nemesis and Prophecy), and Invasion (with Planeshift and Apocalypse). Portal: Three Kingdoms, Starter: 1999 and Starter: 2000 are also accessible from here.

6th stage: Seventh Edition. Allows access to Odyssey (with Torment and Judgment) and Onslaught (with Legions and Scourge).

7th stage: Eighth Edition. Allows access to Mirrodin (with Darksteel and Fifth Dawn) and Champions of Kamigawa (with Betrayers of Kamigawa and Saviors of Kamigawa).

8th stage: Ninth Edition. Allows access to Ravnica (with Guildpact and Dissension). After unlocking Ravnica, you can find a time portal which will allow you to access the Ice Age block in the past, once again. This time around, though, Coldsnap can be unlocked. After doing so, the big block comes around: Time Spiral.
In Time Spiral block you can unlock portals that allow you an unlimited access to ANY of the previous stages, giving you once again a chance to gather up old cards. In Time Spiral block, Planar Chaos and Future Sight can be unlocked. From now on, in any future stage there's option to unlock a portal that will throw you to the Time Spiral hub (and therefore allow you to visit any Magic era).

9th stage: Tenth Edition. Allows access to Lorywn (+ Morningtide, Shadowmoor and Eventide) and Shards of Alara (+ Conflux and Alara Reborn) blocks.

10th stage: M10. Allows access to Zendikar block (+ Worldwake and Rise of the Eldrazi).

Thanks Marek, that's pretty much in line with what I was thinking, but it's still good to have all of that fleshed out.

I probably would bump Fallen Empires to the 4th Edition Age, since Chronicles didn't have any new cards and it would be pretty terrible to play in an Age that all it had going for it is the removal of Dual Lands and the addition of Serrated Arrows.

And yes the creatures would play appropriate decks for the time period. With the early stages probably having a bit more leeway.

A few points to note that may not be apparent:

• The player would not be stuck playing Standard of the current Age. They can use any card they've collected just like in Quest mode.


• The Bazaar will only be selling cards based out of the current Age. This will also make it easier to track down specific cards you want for a deck, since you can just play a bit longer to get that Tradewind Rider, or Sensei's Divining Top.


• Defeating a monster will only provide bonus cards from his Age.

I think this all sounds awesome. The first step would be to somehow tie the cards to their respective sets.... I'm not sure what's the best way to do this though.

Fallen Empires could be shared world between Revised and Fourth -- though I understand your logic. Maybe the Fourth Edition could also get the old Promo cards (Arena and its ilk) as a bonus?

I was wondering about the concept of "keycard decks" -- it would be a mechanical link between a creature and its deck. The deck would not only play 4 copies of the creature it belongs to, but it would also always start with 1 copy in its opening hand, before the rest is drawn.

After thinking up various ways to distinguish between stronger and weaker creatures, the simplest way I found was to simply use the CMC of the creature x 10 as the starting life total (10 life minimum, even for 0-cost creatures). X-creatures would be encountered at random power level.

(This system was actually invented for something I call "Tribal Towers", which would be a set of battles against creatures sharing a common type, with a random creature selected from each CMC group; for example the "B-movie cinema" challenge would pit you against Horrors starting from 1-CMC (Kederekt Parasite, Ridged Kusite or Vebulid), through 2 (13 possibilities, ranging from Abyssal Gatekeeper to Squirming Mass), 3 (16 possibilities, ranging from Abyssal Nocturnus to Urborg Mindsucker), 4 (22 possibilities, ranging from Canker Abomination to Urborg Stalker), 5 (21 possibilities, ranging from Abomination to Vermiculos), 6 (18 possibilities, ranging from Abyssal Horror to Woodwraith Corrupter), 7 (Cateran Overlord, Delraich, Phantasmagorian or Tsabo Tavoc), 8 (Devouring Strossus or Mindleech Mass), and with the 11-CMC boss Hypnox.)

Of course, the main problem is deck assembly - and also the fact that some of the decks would probably be quite similar. But it could be probably done. The deck should be, in every case, tailored to get the maximum power from the creature...

Other ideas:

Commons get strict block decks, uncommons can use cards from the contemporary Core Set, rares can use cards from the preceding block as well. (For Core Set uncommons, they can use previous core set, the rares can use the preceding block as well.)

From Shards of Alara onwards, where mythic rares start, mythics come with their own sidequests. You have to complete the sidequest to unlock the mythic and gain 1 copy of it. Until then that card cannot be randomly won or bought anywhere.

Various gimmicks:

In The Dark, you might get attacked by the Inquisition if you're found to be using cards unknown in that period.

A creature with morph might appear face-down, so you won't know what opponent you've chosen until you fight it.

Once you meet a planeswalker, he/she can subsequently randomly appear anywhere you go, even if he/she doesn't belong there.

Each battle happens in a particular terrain; this affects possible opponents. In general, only creatures who match the color produced by the land appear, so green creatures appear in Forest, white and blue in Tundra and absolutely anything in City of Brass. Creature only needs to match one of its colors, and colorless creatures can appear anywhere. If a land mentions some specific subgroup of creatures, then any creature of that subgroup can appear there, regardless of color (for example, any Insect, Spider, Rat or Squirrel can appear in Swarmyard, any Merfolk can appear in Wanderwine Hub, any creature with printed P/T 1/1 can appear in Pendelhaven, and any legendary creature can appear in Karakas or Okina). Basic lands and common nonbasics require only 1 battle to pass, but on uncommons you have to fight twice in a row, and on rares thrice.

It'd be fairly nice if you could set the amount of time that you are in a stage to something like 10-20 wins as well. The only issue I'm having with quests at this point is that it only takes 4 wins to gain a level, and that seems a bit too easy for a very hard level for my liking.

DennisBergkamp wrote:I think this all sounds awesome. The first step would be to somehow tie the cards to their respective sets.... I'm not sure what's the best way to do this though.

To sort cards by their set, you would use code similar to the "Recently Added Card" menu option. The code just reads the file, "cards.txt" and sorts cards according to the line number of where the card name exists in "cards.txt".

Somehow you need to generate all of the card names for every Magic set and then generate another file (that is a subset) that only lists the cards that are in Forge (you want to do this because it will be a much smaller file and will take less time to read).

On a side note, I don't know how to make the Deck Editor to show the card's set, right now I don't know how to create new columns. Ideally it would be good to allow the user the option to show or hide it, but if that is too hard, just show it.