Dungeons! Er, what ever do we do about them?

[lujo]

Right, er, well, there's been talks about them in various treads and suggestions and dreams and wishes and plans and all that, but - what do we do with them and what do they actually do?

I'd like to say a few things, just so my stance on it is somewhat clear, maybe everyone thought about it already, maybe it adds a dimension, maybe not, but let's have it:

1) In Forge the quest mode inspired by Shandalar works like this: you have regular duels and "quest challenges" which emulate dungeons.

You can go "fantasy mode" and have regular duels have varying lives and pets (permanently spawned stuff that you can upgrade by purchases) - tried it a bunch, was to aware of everything that wrong with it, was pleasantly pleased that you can disallow it and have the regular duels be 20 lives and all standard MtG rules and had heaps of fun with that. That whole experience really once-and-for-all showed me that a lot of things tacked onto regular duels in Shandalar was a big miss on the part of the developers.

"Quest challenges" are like dungeons except it's a single encounter thing with no interface. The opponent has a permanent (or several) in play and a deck attuned to it, or varying lives, and your goal is to get through the challenge of beating it.

This separation of regular dueling which you use to build up your deck and wacky dueling with strange rules and permanents in play worked very well, and as a long time Shandalar and MtG player I felt like it fixed so many things which were wrong with Shandalar. I'm noting it just illustrate a different approach to a MtG RPG. Except that it was done by people trying to recreate Shandalar trying to improve on the Shandalar-specific nonsense which just made everything that was wrong with it more obvious. Folks here might see nothing wrong with defending someone starting with a Wall of Wood here and there, but folks over there were defending always starting with varying pets of your choice that included a 1/4 wall with Wither and 1/1 fliers with looting and such because "it's just like Shandalar, what can possibly be wrong?"

It might come in handy later, it might not.

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2) More along what I'm sure we're all interested in - what's the best way to solve some concrete issues with dungeons as they work in Shandalar.

2.1) The biggest problem, from my perspective, is the interaction between lives carrying over and in-match lifegain.

On the one hand, lives carrying over in dungeons is something you can base a MtG based dungeon around. Gives you a sense of attrition for a non-standard game mode, hightens the danger and all that. A mox is a gamechanger, expecting someone to beat several opponents in a row with a ludicrous assumption like dwindiling life is about right for something like that (heck, it might even be too little to ask).

On the other hand, lifegain (and lifelink) makes most dungeons quite trivial. Lifegain, despite it's general reputation, isn't a trivial mechanic even in a regular straight 20 life format - WotC isn't really eager to make lifegain cards too good on a regular basis and tacking lifelink on stuff has often pushed things way over the edge (Armadillo Cloak, Baneslayer Angel, Batterskull, efficient weenies with cheap equipment...) and heck, I've played Aven Riftwatchers in competitive constructed to great effect - gain 4 life, deal some damage, be a roadblock until you build you mana. Bad lifegain cards are bad, strong multi-purpose lifegain cards are quite something. And they're simply too brutal if the life carries over to the next match.

This is probably just stating the obvious, but you never know.

What if life carried over but only up to the amount you started the match with? Would that even be possible? Is it possibly already possible by tweaking something in the ini?

Lifegain would still be a really strong way to keep your life steady and stack up the gains from dungeon dice if you can. It would still likely make lifegaining colors the best at clearing dungeons, but how things are right now is a bit obscene.

Anyone see flaws with this?

2.2) Dungeon dice

Well, I don't actually run into this one very often at it's most extreme because I tend to walk around with decks with a semi regular curve of creatures. Other folks tend to go around with decks with just one creature or artifact in their decks and start every match with an Eldrazi or something. One of the reasons I don't go for this sort of shennanigans is that it's unnecessary - just the way the things operate is quite broken on it's own.

Well, that's obviously something that's getting looked into at some point (or is it?).

Any permanent you start the match with is quite an advantage (for either the player or the opponent), much more so than folks who's used to taking shandalar idiosincracies for granted generally think. A chance to start a duel with something that's good enough for you to put in a deck even more so, because it's probable that it plays nicely with whatever else you have in the deck and allows you to kill something faster, thus lowering the potential life loss.

Just think about it - starting with a 5cc creature is the equivalent of having 2 black lotuses in your deck, drawing them in your first hand, using them, playing a creature and drawing 3 cards. Despite the fact that you're playing in "dwindling life mode" (unless you're packing lifegain), and against opponents which start with a permanent of their own, this is a tremendous advantage. One dungeons dice Serra Angel = 2 Black Lotus + Serra Angel + Ancestral Recall. Ok, that's a bit of an extreme example, but that's the general idea.

So most dungeons are, in fact, largely stacked in the players advantage as long as dice can be found. If the surface decks are built to make the regular game bearable and fun (and there the player is at a significant disadvantage compared to the usual mtg situation even if the opponent has lower lives too, because of playing with a pile of cards vs. constructed decks), those same decks suck in dungeons.

Which is a problem, tbh, because dungeons contain treasures, and grabing a bunch of moxes messes up any topside balancing as it's quite difficult to make decks which play nicely against decks with moxes and decks without moxes (and Sol Ring). Even a Shandalar with no manalinks and no shennanigans topside would still work (in fact it would, believe it or not, work better), as long as it had fully functional dungeons for the off the wall no-holds-barred crazyness. The dungeons have to be mechanically a bit better thought out than they are now, even for this current Shandalar.

I'm curious - even without having the enemies be able to use different decks, which would possibly allow for each enemy having a specific deck tuned to being played in dungeons (geared towards the dungeon specific bonus card, able to tackle free permanents by the player, life gain proofing etc.) - would it be possible that once sideboarding is understood to add a handle "if dungeon" which would let a deck be adjusted and powered up "on the fly"?

Because in order for dungeon decks to be properly challenging, they'd have to be an order of magnitude (or several) tougher to really be able to handle dungeon dice properly. Well, in theory anyway.

[jiansonz]

How about having life carrying over between duels only when it's lower than the player characters' life going into the dungeon? So if you enter the dungeon with, say, 24 life and leave the first duel with more than that, you'll still have 24 life in the next. OTOH, if you are torn down to 8 life, you start the next duel with 8 life, but will have the chance to raise it during that duel, back to a maximum of 24 to the next.

[lujo]

Yep that's pretty much the best I can come up with too as far as lives go. I think it would have to be "as much as you start a dungeon duel with", otherwise dungeon dice that boost lives would get wasted if you're already at the max.

[jiansonz]

I think it would have to be "as much as you start a dungeon duel with", otherwise dungeon dice that boost lives would get wasted if you're already at the max.

Yes, if that's to be interpreted as "as much as the highest life you've started a duel with in this dungeon", then it's better than my suggestion.

[BlueTemplar]

Alternatively, for harder dungeons you could have only life loss carry over.

I wonder what can you do with poison counters too. You could have dungeons based on poison counters carried over.
It's also possible that poison counters could be used to store life points state...

[lujo]

Sure, wouldn't mind testing either, for the first thing.

Poison counters only count up to 10. You could have poison themed dungeons, sure, but that mechanic is, well, poison. I suppose it catches people's eye for some reason, but design wise it's about as alien as horsemanship. It's kinda like porting cards from a different MtG where a basic "Shock" does, idk, 20 damage (because things have 100/100 or something) into MtG.

[BlueTemplar]

Don't you think you might be exaggerating?

Something that doesn't fit well with the rest of the game might work better in a dungeon. Horsemanship seems not being fledged enough, but maybe we could have eldrazi-themed, shadow-themed, phasing-themed etc... dungeons?. Having dungeon-themed enemy decks would help a lot, not sure how feasible that is in the code.

Also, we don't know what can specifically be done with poison counters until we look at the code, don't we?
(Poison seems to be just a parallel life count, with less interactions (are there any cards that remove poison counters? If not, it solves the lifegain problem in an indirect way).)

[stassy]

Yup, there is Leeches, though not implemented in ML nor Shandalar, or Melira, Sylvok Outcast

[lujo]

Oh, you mean like repurpose the the code for poison to keep track of lives?

Some stuff you can make a dungeon about, some you can't. The infect block had to have Metalcraft and Battlecry to even out the odds for the competition. You only need to take a look at what those do (generally make the creatures significantly larger than they have business being or straight up bump their damage). So if you theme enemy decks around that (and have poison count carry over, even), you expect the player to have a deck which could destroy everything topside so hard that what you'd get out of the dungeon becomes of insignificant relevance. That's if the AI plays it properly, if not why bother? That mechanic cuts the opponents life in half at the start of the match, it's not something to frame a dungeon around.

Some other things, absolutely, as soon as we have a way to add different decks to dungeon enemies and customize dice rewards for individual dungeons that's pretty much what I'll be looking to do.

As for horsemanship,

| Open

it's not that it isn't developed it's that it's paralel flying from a another dimension. What happens when you mix it with the other cards is that you get a card that supposed to be an Earthquake to be a Hurricane + Earthquake for the price of an Earthquake, unintentionally. Rolling Earthquake. There never was such a card made on purpose, wotc never would've made it. (Sory about the Wildfire mis-example, was thinking of something else). And they didn't, as horsemaship = flying for a set which was meant to just be a separate promo thing for a closed chinese market.

Mix them with regular cards and what you get is effectively unblockable creatures in all colors and spells that usually have limitations not have limitations. Not that a portal III kingdoms dungeon wouldn't be a fun idea, but if a player has a deck that can deal with that, it doesn't need to go into any dungeons. If you have a deck with an (earthquake + hurricane for the price of one) which only doesn't hit your unblockable dudes - you won the game already. Frankly, those things shouldn't really be in the shandalar pool at all if we're being serious. They're like taking cards out of a different ccg. And that's not exagerating or even making an analogy, that's almost exactly what they are Shadow at least has the "decency" to render creatures with it unable to block themselves.

The effects of horsemanship are completely unintentional. They're all mostly reprints of vanilla-ish fliers for something that was intended to be a standalone thing and not mixed with actual other cards. Thanks for reminding me, btw, I keep remembering that I have to take the horsemanship stuff out of the pool in my ini, but then forgetting to actually do it.

I'm not sure there's any other mechanics that are in the same league as those, though. Most other alien things like that are a bit underwhelming rather than effortlessly abuseable. (So are the early poison cards). Widely available shadow like it was done in tempest block is pretty close, and the pricing of things in various multicolored blocks quite definitely didn't account for routine alpha duals. But neither is really "take it out" worthy.

[stassy]

snowland/spell/creature? Like Icequake or Rimescale Dragon ?:P

[lujo]

Nope those aren't problematic. It's not necessarily the alieness, it's the effects of particular alien mechanics. Snow is hardly worth using at all in power terms, but it doesn't break any major rules and works as intended. Those two you listed? One just minorly punishes the other guy for using snow (noone has any objective reason to do it, really), and the other guy is just a regular creature that doesn't even work unless it's in a snow deck. You could make a snow card which seriously hoses people for NOT playing a snow deck, wotc mostly didn't (which is generally a good call). You can take most snow cards and make them not be snow cards, what they do wouldn't change at all. The ones you can't are mostly snow-hosers. If you made a dungeon with all snow decks, what would happen is... nothing much, except the player could walk in there with a lot of snow hosers and some regular cards and beat the crap out of everything (most likely). But that's not a problem at all.

Infect needed a whole block to be designed so that guys without poison could race guys with poison, to turn the 20 lives the opponent has into effectively 10. So you get a 4/4 for 2 with 0 drawbacks, or a 3/3 for one, or an 8/8 for 5 etc - the enemy has to do twice as little damage as usual, so the regular guys have to do twice as much. Not to mention that the attrition from Infect also meant other guys had to be bigger than usual. Take cards out of that environment and put them into shandalar (or even just the regular game without too much cheeze), bad things happen. Very much not something you want to tack dwindling lives between games onto. I mean, sure, knock yourself out, I'm not anyone's parent

Horsemanship just plain doesn't work as intended, literally, like it doesn't work as intended in real life. It's really meant to be just flying for a set with no flying for pure flavor/marketing reasons. The wanted a set flavored around the romance of the three kingdoms to appeal to the chinese, but low fantasy, so no way to make Lu Bu or the crew have flying. And they still had to be mtg cards (most of it is reprints templated for a simplified, discounted, "beginner tier". Core sets used to be "advanced tier" and expensions "expert tier"). Expensive stuff had to have flying, it's what expensive creatures get. So they put flying in as horsemanship because the set wasn't meant to be played with the rest of the cards, just be an entry level sorta-promo product.

In the original portal "blocking" was "intercepting", it caused confusion for people when they moved on to other cards. It's also why everything is a sorcery instead of instants. Horesemanship is just the last time they did something like that (or make a purely stand-alone promo set at all).

Most things from portal don't get much more powerful due to this (or are, in fact, worse), horsemanship does. It's funny, because you can re-label most other abilities in general and cause no problems, but if you do it with flying, you get what you get.

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Sorry if the 20 dmg Shock looked like an exaggeration. I was trying to say what sort of tihng happens, the numbers made it look like something else. It doesn't have to be a 20 dmg Shock exactly, it's just a simple example of taking something out of one system into another. It's exactly what happened to horsemanship, and, scaled a bit differently, the reason why infect is such a tricky mechanic. Take Steamflogger Boss , he's made to be exactly that sort of thing, except with an ability made useless on purpose. Snow cards are mostly Steamflogger Boss outside of their environment, and quite pedestrian within it. Stuff with horsemanship and infect, for example, is very invasive in a different environment. Horsemanship unintentionally, infect very much on purpose. That's why they gave infect to a species unstoppably invading a plane - very flavorful, but also very accurate in all repects. It's a bizzare alien ability on bizzare aliens who's in-game flavor purpose is to destroy regular mtg stuff by playing by completely different rules. The overall concept theme for them was, not kidding, "griefing". They fiddled with the idea of bringing poison back at one point in MtG, that was the only way to remotely justify it

It's, by design, something that demonstrates what happens when cards from a different game invade mtg, and how mtg inevitably loses that fight. That's, like, the actual story of Scars of Mirrodin. It's also why the shandalar life rules are actually a very silly notion, because when wotc needed something to represent "ultimate horror of the mtg universe which nothing can stand against" what they did was make phyrexians force you to play with 10 instead of 20 lives

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Just about anything else is probably fair game. Got it's twists and kinks, or is just falvorful, but it's not like that.

[lujo]

Do'h, there's a simple way to put it. People call these things "parasitic" mechanics, because Rosewater used that term for something at one point, but that's not really the best way to call them. They can be "insular" or "invasive".

Snow is "insular" - it mostly only interacts with other snow cards. From the other guys perspective it makes no difference. Arcane from Kamigawa is also like that, for example. It doesn't get any better or different out of it's environment. It can be difficult to pick up a deck that supports it for the player, so whether there's a reason to have it in the purchase pool is up to the player, but if you make enemy decks around the mechanic it's just flavor or quirky. Slivers also feature into this category, I think.

"Invasive" changes the rules for the other guy, it's the kind of thing that generally has to have blocks and cards designed around it to contain it because the system doesn't really handle it well. Infect is blatantly like that, horsemanship is unintentionally this, shadow is also like this for many tempest block cards, domain can be like this in enviroments featuring lands with two land types and fetchlands, and og moxes and sol ring are also like this (lands with no limit on how many you can play per turn). Alpha Duals do this to higher-powered multicolored cards en-masse. There's a bunch more, and the Shandalar lives format makes a lot of otherwise fine mechanics be invasive (similarly to how infect works, but moreso), but most of this isn't really a problem on it's own. Make what's happening on screen the closest you can get to actual magic, you can theme dungeons around even most invasive stuff fine enough.