Forge Android App: 11-13-2016 Alpha 1.5.58.002

[jureidinim]

Lastly, please let me know if you have questions or concerns about the details I have revealed so far. It's not too late to make some tweaks if people have objections or other ideas. Just keep in mind that one of my primary goals is to provide a different experience than Quest mode currently offers.

Thanks.
-Dan

Two questions:
1) So with the singleton rule in effect, even the matches that are Planeschase, Sealed, etc... those would also be singleton and single color (your commander color)?
Not an issue really - just asking for clarification

2) When you say we have to collect all cards for that plane to win - how many are you talking about? Will it be randomized every game - the cards to collect?

Loving how its shaping up and looking forward to it.

[drdev]

Two questions:
1) So with the singleton rule in effect, even the matches that are Planeschase, Sealed, etc... those would also be singleton and single color (your commander color)?
Not an issue really - just asking for clarification

2) When you say we have to collect all cards for that plane to win - how many are you talking about? Will it be randomized every game - the cards to collect?

Loving how its shaping up and looking forward to it.

1) Singleton, yes. Single color, no. That's what multicolor commanders are for.

2) I didn't say that's how you win. It's just one of the goals, along with beating every square of every plane (possibly more than once, hint). And the cards to collect will be the same every game since they will be all cards all the planes, which is somewhere around 13000. So it's really a stretch goal.

I will note that I'm developing a slick reward system to make it easier to find cards you're looking for, which I'll reveal more about soon. The one thing I will reveal is that, inline with the goal to collect all the cards, you will not be able to sell cards in Planar Conquest. Instead, duplicates opened in boosters will be automatically converted to credit you can spend to unlock more cards.

[friarsol]

1) Singleton, yes. Single color, no. That's what multicolor commanders are for.

But you said that's not true for Limited formats in your original post? (OP asked about Sealed, so I was curious about the discrepancy)

[drdev]

1) Singleton, yes. Single color, no. That's what multicolor commanders are for.

But you said that's not true for Limited formats in your original post? (OP asked about Sealed, so I was curious about the discrepancy)

Oh, I was talking for the main game board squares where you need to use one of your commanders' decks. Draft and Sealed events will be bonus events much like they are for Quest mode and will not enforce any special rules since you'll build a new deck from the pool you draft or open rather than using a commander's deck. You can play any colors you choose and play more than one copy of a card if it's in your pool.

That said, the same reward system will apply to these limited events, meaning you'll unlock all cards you draft that you hadn't previously unlocked and receive credit for any you already had unlocked. Same goes for any bonus packs you earn based on your performance in the event.

Lastly, I will mention an idea I have for a twist on traditional drafting. Basically, you'll draft per normal, but then when building your deck, you'll need to pick one of your unlocked commanders to play the deck with, so the deck would need to be of colors that fall within at least one of your commanders' color identities. You'd then play Commander games with your draft deck, and all your opponents would have a commander randomly assigned based on the color of their deck. Despite this flexible color restriction, I would still remove the singleton restriction, so you can play as many copies of a single card as you're able to draft.

Does that sound like something that would be fun to people? Keep in mind you will probably have a decent selection of commanders to choose from before you'd unlock such drafts, so it shouldn't restrict your drafting much. Although if you have a favorite commander it may encourage you to force draft specific colors or cards that play well with it. Also keep in mind that it doesn't have to be either or. I can offer both traditional and Commander drafts as bonus events for Planar Conquest.

[Sirspud]

1) Singleton, yes. Single color, no. That's what multicolor commanders are for.

Lastly, I will mention an idea I have for a twist on traditional drafting. Basically, you'll draft per normal, but then when building your deck, you'll need to pick one of your unlocked commanders to play the deck with, so the deck would need to be of colors that fall within at least one of your commanders' color identities. You'd then play Commander games with your draft deck, and all your opponents would have a commander randomly assigned based on the color of their deck. Despite this flexible color restriction, I would still remove the singleton restriction, so you can play as many copies of a single card as you're able to draft.

Does that sound like something that would be fun to people? Keep in mind you will probably have a decent selection of commanders to choose from before you'd unlock such drafts, so it shouldn't restrict your drafting much. Although if you have a favorite commander it may encourage you to force draft specific colors or cards that play well with it. Also keep in mind that it doesn't have to be either or. I can offer both traditional and Commander drafts as bonus events for Planar Conquest.

This all sounds incredibly fun! I cannot wait for the release!
In terms of the limited, will the sets used be specific to the plane you are on or unreleated?
Followup question, will chaos drafting/sealed be possible? (Drafting/sealed with boosters from random sets)
Thanks again for your incredible work!

[drdev]

Lastly, I will mention an idea I have for a twist on traditional drafting. Basically, you'll draft per normal, but then when building your deck, you'll need to pick one of your unlocked commanders to play the deck with, so the deck would need to be of colors that fall within at least one of your commanders' color identities. You'd then play Commander games with your draft deck, and all your opponents would have a commander randomly assigned based on the color of their deck. Despite this flexible color restriction, I would still remove the singleton restriction, so you can play as many copies of a single card as you're able to draft.

Does that sound like something that would be fun to people? Keep in mind you will probably have a decent selection of commanders to choose from before you'd unlock such drafts, so it shouldn't restrict your drafting much. Although if you have a favorite commander it may encourage you to force draft specific colors or cards that play well with it. Also keep in mind that it doesn't have to be either or. I can offer both traditional and Commander drafts as bonus events for Planar Conquest.

This all sounds incredibly fun! I cannot wait for the release!
In terms of the limited, will the sets used be specific to the plane you are on or unreleated?
Followup question, will chaos drafting/sealed be possible? (Drafting/sealed with boosters from random sets)
Thanks again for your incredible work!

All rewards will be tied to the plane you're currently on, so yes, the packs will come from sets associated with the current plane. You will be able to choose which sets however, though the idea of having it be random sounds fun too, so maybe I'll make that an option. Also, I should clarify that your commanders come with you as you travel between planes, so even if your entire draft deck is from Ravnica, you could use a commander that came from Theros for example.

That said, I am planning to have a special "Chaos Realm" plane that cannot be chosen as a starting plane and can only be reached via means I'll reveal soon. That plane will include cards from all the other planes, so limited events launched from within that realm could include packs from any combination of sets in the game basically.

[1mrlee]

When the opp has chalice for 1 on, and I lightning bolt him. For some reason it's still letting my bolt resolve, even tho the trigger pops up.

[Traldar]

Does that sound like something that would be fun to people? Keep in mind you will probably have a decent selection of commanders to choose from before you'd unlock such drafts, so it shouldn't restrict your drafting much. Although if you have a favorite commander it may encourage you to force draft specific colors or cards that play well with it. Also keep in mind that it doesn't have to be either or. I can offer both traditional and Commander drafts as bonus events for Planar Conquest.

Sounds incredibly fun! We once did a Conspiracy draft with my play group and decided to allow everyone to bring a commander to rule the deck (we used 5 packs and allowed a 49 cards + Commander), however the singleton rule was not in place, of course. It was wildly fun!

Cheers, very excited to know more about the format!
- traldar

[Agetian]

Sounds really amazing and fun, Dan! Can't wait to take a shot at your new mode!

- Agetian

[drdev]

Time for another Planar Conquest update. Today I'm going to reveal "The AEther", which is Planar Conquest's version of Quest mode's spell shop. Instead of having a randomly generated pool of singles, packs, and boxes to purchase (along with the ability to sell your cards), The AEther is essentially a slot machine where you press a button to "pull from the AEther" a single card.

The trick is that you have full control over what pool this random card is pulled from, as you can apply any combination of filters to the card list (which defaults to all non-unlocked cards in the current plane) to zero in on specific cards you're looking for. The cost to "pull" the card will be automatically adjusted as you filter the card list, calculated from the following formula:

AVERAGE_VALUE * BASE_MARKUP * ADJUSTED_FILTER_RATIO

AVERAGE_VALUE refers to the average value of all cards in the filtered list. The value of a card is based on the odds of it appearing in a booster relative to the odds of a common appearing in a booster, multiplied by a base value for commons (100 by default, configurable in preferences). From the screenshot above, you can see that, in Alara, the odds of a given common appearing in a booster is about 14 times that of a given mythic rare, hence why the cost to pull a random mythic is 14 times the cost to pull a random common. This base value of a card is also what you will receive when you open duplicates in booster packs.

BASE_MARKUP is a markup percentage from the value you receive when opening duplicates in booster packs. It will be 50% by default (hence 150 for a random common in the screenshot above), but configurable in preferences.

ADJUSTED_FILTER_RATIO is an additional markup determined by how much you try to zero in on a specific card. In other words, the fewer cards of a given rarity are in the list, the more it's going to cost you to pull one. So you can use The AEther to pull any single card you want if you filter down to just that card, but it's going to cost you more than if you take your chances at pulling it randomly. How much more is something I still need to work out, and I'm certainly open to input here.

Now that I've explained the function, a little bit on the flavor. First off, I'm going to be replacing the gold/credits of Quest mode with "AEther shards" for Planar Conquest to tie in with this screen. Obviously these screenshots are using the existing icons from quest mode for the time being, but I plan to create new ones before I release anything.

Ultimately, I'm really trying to inject as much MTG flavor into Planar Conquest as I can. That's why I went with the name "AEther" for this. Quoting a MTGSalvation wiki:

The æther is an energy residing in the Blind Eternities. It takes part in summoning creatures. When they materialize, they are pulled from the æther.

As always, any feedback is welcome. Thanks.
-Dan

[Agetian]

This is a really cool idea, Dan! I love how things are shaping up thus far! Very interesting and very MTG-flavored indeed!
By the way, as a little note - currently mobile Forge doesn't compile (complains about a number of missing Conquest-related constants), not sure if you're aware of it, so I decided to mention it.

- Agetian

[johnny5ive]

I have a feature request for Forge on Android. I play a lot of constructed deck games, and I would like to (possibly automatically) save the state of the game when I am in the middle of a match. I can't always complete my match because I get interrupted, and when Android shuts down the App (which happens frequently because of memory use) then my game is lost. Would this be difficult to code? I see save games are possible for other modes, but I haven't been playing them so I don't know if they are saves from the middle of a match, or for progress between matches.

Either way, thanks for an awesome program.

Hopefully once we get online play figured out, the ability to save and reload a game state reliably will be doable. As it stands, that is a tall order however.

Really? That's really disappointing then. I thought Android had tools to allow developers to suspend their apps successfully and not just shut down. This is my main annoyance and why I came to the thread today. I would use Forge a lot more often if I could depend on it. As is, if I get a message or something and need to switch to a different app there's a 50/50 chance that whatever I'm doing in Forge is just lost.

Aside from that just a couple minor user experience quibbles. I use Forge to test commander decks. As such I'm constantly editing my decks and pasting a new list from the clipboard. Why is the "only use core sets and expansions" box always checked by default? If I'm copying a list from the clipboard isn't it logical to assume that I want all the cards from that list copied? Then once I do copy the list why should it erase my commander if one isn't indicated in the list? Same with sideboard. I'd think if the copied list doesn't have a sideboard or commander it'd just keep the one I have already, rather than just clearing it completely. Again, minor quibbles, but ones I notice constantly. Oh, and being able to default to a certain format would be great. For example, I only use commander decks. It'd be nice not to have to change to commander every time. Defaulting to the previous choice would be good.

[drdev]

This is a really cool idea, Dan! I love how things are shaping up thus far! Very interesting and very MTG-flavored indeed!
By the way, as a little note - currently mobile Forge doesn't compile (complains about a number of missing Conquest-related constants), not sure if you're aware of it, so I decided to mention it.

- Agetian

Are you sure you're on the most up-to-date source? I'm not seeing any such compile issue.

[Agetian]

Ok, I updated to r30485 and now it compiles fine. Not sure what was wrong before, I always updated to the latest revision :/

- Agetian

[drdev]

So today's reveal is not something a static screenshot will suffice for. So here's a gif instead:

I wanted to do something a little fancier for reward dialogs, and this also gave me the ability to display cards faded out with a shard value on top for cards you already had (although this gif doesn't include an example of that). Note that you can press Skip at any time during the animation to immediately reveal all cards and scroll to the bottom. Also note that the cards are sorted by rarity, so commons are revealed first and mythics/rares last.

Similarly, here's what the dialog looks like when you click Pull from the AEther on the screen I revealed a couple days ago:

The gifs don't seem to play very well inside of the post itself, so I'd suggest clicking them to view them on their own page.

Let me know what you think. I'm planning on adding the same flip animation to the card zoom overlay when you click on double-sided and flip cards, so I want to make sure I've got the animation speed right.

Thanks.
-Dan