Am I playing Quests mode wrong?!?

[Deadpool]

Am i doing this wrong?

I just started trying quests and wanted to have a "fair" deck to start with and build up through questing. But i'm getting my bass handed to me...

I chose to start with a Modern pool, only blue, white and artifacts. What i get is worse than the worst sealed pool i've ever seen. Then the "easy" duels crush me because even with 12 flyers in my deck, i can't beat any deck with ANY synergy whatsoever.

So... help?

[friarsol]

Well, without seeing your cardpool and your deck we can't really give tips.

[Deadpool]

Sure you can. I guess i'm looking for advice on the startup settings.

Using the settings i did, even a lucky pool would still look like a the worst sealed pool. So do most people build from the entire format pool, like a constructed deck?

The best i could get out of this pool was a janky flyers deck w/ some bounce spells. Also, i'm assuming i have to build a 60 card deck. Is that correct?

[friarsol]

I'm not really sure why you think it's worse than a Sealed pool, you get way more Rares and Uncommons than a Sealed pool would. I typically just used balanced color distribution and pick the colors that have the best cards in them, similarly to how I would build a sealed deck. The more sets your starting pool has (All sets vs Modern vs Standard) the less general synergy they'll have, but there's plenty of good cards to make decks out of. Lately I've just been playing Modern pools, but have done both Standard and All with plenty of success. Occasionally you'll get a complete dud of a pool, but I haven't found that to be very common.

Make sure you are checking out the spell shop to help fill your deck out with playables. It helps to sell cards that are off-color to make sure you have the money to do so.

Technically, you don't have to build a 60 card deck in quest mode, I've said in the past that Quest is more akin to a Limited style than a Constructed one. Some point in the future I'm going to add a Quest item that relates to the 40/60 differential, but I haven't quite figured out how I want to do it yet.

[Seravy]

I'll share my experience.
I started with a card pool I would rate "decent". It was mostly red cards, I had Wake of Destruction, a 4/3 flying haste dragon for 5, some direct damage spells. I was also able to by various more direct damage spells relatively quickly (blaze, fireball, incinerate, lightning blast etc).
I won the first 17 or so matches without losing any (I did lose a few single games but not often).
Then the AI started ramping up. (I selected Normal difficulty by the way so it's not like I play ultra hard or anything)
I lost like one out of 4 on normal, which is fine. I did feel I'm only winning because I play red during this time : When the enemy creatures were too strong to handle using my own, I could use direct damage to kill the opponent directly. The bird pet helped a lot with that, providing 1 damage per turn for most games. In most cases I was able to nuke the creatures, too.
About 10 more wins later, AI is not playing hard decks. I win 1 out of 4. And would win zero if I weren't playing a deck full of nukes that double as "deal damage to enemy player" if needed.

I still haven't been able to unlock getting more than 1000 per card, and I still receive like 23% when selling cards, so I have no way to get any decent money. Buying packs is not an option.
I entered a draft M15 tournament once for 1200 using up most my savings. I got good cards and was able to walk away 1st place, happyness. (didn't get much red cards to use, but lots of other cool stuff...don't think I have enough to make other color decks yet, especially not at hard level.)
I also got a "token". I thought "yay now I can get cards from a specific block I want, let's use it to play a Tempest draft."
No warning or anything, token used up, boo it costs 7000 to enter. Okay, I sold all my cards I'm not using in my decks and had at least 100 value. Sold my 4k beta serra angel and meekstone for 1k as well because...there is such a restriction. And used up all my winnings from the previous draft to enter. No choice, if I don't play the draft will disappear over time like all others before did. Then I almost won the first round, but game crashed, and next time I lost. My card pool was absolutely horrible. So I was left without money, and cards to sell...but I still had a good red deck to play.
And this is exactly where I still am, I haven't won much good red cards since then nor found much in the shop. I was able to upgrade a blaze to a fireball, a 2/1 first strike to a 2/2 double strike and such minor changes, but nothing big.

I see several major balance problems here (which is reasonable for a beta release but it should be improved in the future)
1. Card prices. Yes you are guaranteed a rare per win from the pack but they also sell for as much as a common, it's not helping. It's not making much money. So you earn like, 30-100 credits per win at best. I suppose the 1/5 sale price is also hurting this a lot.
2. Card prices again. Good cards, if they are rare, cost a fortune. I had to pass on an Oblivion Stone because 2.9k was too much to pay. You can buy like 50 other good cards for that, even if you have the credits, but more realistically you won't. You earn that much in like, 40 games. And by that time AI is already at the highest level.
3. AI ramps up waaaaay too quickly. On "normal" difficulty, it plays hard decks before you can even unlock selling cards for their actual price if they are worth over 1k. I might change settings for this and start a new game, not sure. Don't like the idea of losing the cards I already earned and risking an even worse starting deck. I would expect to reach the hardest tier when I already unlocked a decent sale price and can afford buying stuff (including packs, or tournament entry) regularly. This is not the case, Hard AI triggered on game 30 something. ...I just looked at the game and there seems to be an "expert" tier above "hard". Now I' officially worried. In another 30 wins I need to produce mox lotus tier decks?
4. Pack prices. These are unreasonable. You get a pack free every win..but to buy one you have to spend like the winnings from 10 matches and that's the cheapest pack. Let's not talk about buying anything from an older edition, that's going to take forever.

...I had no idea you can play 40 cards in quest mode. That changes things a lot I guess? Feels weird to play 40 on a constructed format though. (Yes your card pool is limited, but not more than in real life. I mean, you have to buy cards in real life constructed too and you have to earn that money somewhere...so same deal as the game really except you don't earn the money by playing the game in the real world.)

Maybe these numbers work better in a smaller world, but in "all cards" it's pretty bad. Building any deck that has a deckent strategy usually requires 3-4 copies of several specific cards which most likely take hundreds or even thousands of wins.

Edit : reducing my decks size to 45 cards made games go much better. If I can keep an acceptable win rate after it ramps up to "extreme" I'll be happy. I'm still worried other players might not get this lucky. Red has inherent advantage over the AI because the AI can't consider direct damage you might use in the future when deciding on how to block or attack or play in general. It won't hesitate to tap out with blue when only one fireball away from losing and can't conserve hp either.

[Seravy]

Another day of playing and I have to say :

"Yes, we were playing it wrong"

As I just found out, moving to another world does not require you to play cards of that world. You only receive those cards and the AI only plays those cards but you don't need to.
Very old sets have high card value, and cards are generally weak aside from a few exceptions.
I've only tried one world so far, Dominaria - Legends. I can consistently win 500-1000 credits worth of cards per game and "hard" AI decks are weaker than "Normal" in the main world. Creatures in that set cannot compete with more recent releases, my new white weenie deck with 75% 2/2 creatures for 2 mana feels unstoppable.
I have not yet won a very expensive cards but as the set size is way less than if it was all 29k cards in the game, I expect to get them reasonably often. Cards like Tabernacle or Mana Drain cost like 30-100k in the shop, even at a 20-30% sale price that's a fortune.

...not sure if I like this system to be honest, the easier the games are the more rewards I get... o_O
(Plus the option to play for 1 win has this same problem in a smaller proportion. You get the same rewards for half as many games, so it's a 100% boost to your income/effort ratio. You'll never want to play for 3 wins ever again when farming for credits and you can forget about sideboarding due to that as well. Not to mention you get twice as many card shop refreshes, challenges, etc as well and unlock everything based on wins twice as fast.)

(using a 40-45 card deck really makes things easy too.)

[friarsol]

Quest mode is more about customization than anything else. I personally don't travel, if you like using the world system that's great, if you don't like using it, don't. If you want to change your reward system you can change most of them through the quest preferences.

[Seravy]

Quest mode is more about customization than anything else. I personally don't travel, if you like using the world system that's great, if you don't like using it, don't. If you want to change your reward system you can change most of them through the quest preferences.

It's not the reward system, it's the card prices. Let's face it, while I can change that, manually editing the value of over 29 thousand cards is...unrealistic.
I suppose I should make a tool to do it for me. Maybe I'll share it when I'm done.

I'm starting to think I should do it right now and start a new game. As is, you can play a single challenge game in the legends or beta world, pick the most expensive card, and buy like 30-100 packs from most other sets for that price. Which really defeats the purpose of cards costing credits.

Edit : checked the game files, unfortunately the card price file does not have rarity information, and packs are in yet another file. This is harder than expected...
if anyone has balanced pricing files, please share. (ones where the relative value of cards within the sets is preserved, but the average value of each set is roughly the same, 1-2 times differences are fine, 100 times more is not)

[friarsol]

Default card pricing is 6 gold for a common, 40 for uncommon, 120 for rare and 600 for Mythic. Whats wrong with that?

[timmermac]

Also, you can change your quest preferences so that you start with 999999999 credits and you get a large amount of credits for every victory.

[Fizanko]

A possible alternative when you start and do not have much good card to build a nice deck is to buy an old themed/intro deck in the spellshop and play with it to gain enough wins so you can have enough gold for building your desired deck on the side.

A couple of years ago i started a deck and noticed in my card pool i had a few goblins cards, i decided to try to make a goblin themed one.
In the spellshop there was the themed deck Speed Scorch available, as it's a goblin-centric themed deck i bought it with the intent to use it as a basis

But i playtested it a bit and quickly noticed that by itself it was a very strong deck getting me a lot of gold against the easy opponents to be able to fetch more packs than usual.

[Seravy]

Default card pricing is 6 gold for a common, 40 for uncommon, 120 for rare and 600 for Mythic. Whats wrong with that?

Nothing, except I don't see these prices much when I play the game?
How do I make the game use these "defaults" then?

An example :
Elvish Archers are 7800 if they are beta, but 42 when they are 5th ed.

I want them both to be 42. (or maybe the beta could be, like, twice as much but not two hundred times more please)

As is, earning a single pack of beta gives you more money than earning 100 packs of, say, 15th edition.
Likewise, if you want to buy a card from beta (or legends, etc) and are earning your money elsewhere, you can forget about it. It takes like 500 wins to buy a single card. This might be realistic in real life where older cards are much more rare, but in the game you have equal access to all sets, so scaling the price up 200 times is not working.

I also think the pack prices in the shop are way off the mark. If average rare value is 120, uncommon is 40, then a pack should be priced around 250-300. But every time I see a pack I want it costs over 1000. (Urza's Destiny, Saga, etc, I started playing at the time of Urza block and it's still my favorite)
This makes it hard to enter tournaments as well unless they are from a "cheap" edition...a legends draft costs 75k to play while M15 is only 1200.

[friarsol]

Default card pricing is 6 gold for a common, 40 for uncommon, 120 for rare and 600 for Mythic. Whats wrong with that?

Nothing, except I don't see these prices much when I play the game?
How do I make the game use these "defaults" then?

I mean it sounds like you imported the card prices, from the downloader, so... you need to delete that file you were looking at earlier. All the prices are grabbed from real price data, we aren't just making them up or anything. If you want to edit your booster prices they are in /res/quest/booster-prices.txt

[Seravy]

Default card pricing is 6 gold for a common, 40 for uncommon, 120 for rare and 600 for Mythic. Whats wrong with that?

Nothing, except I don't see these prices much when I play the game?
How do I make the game use these "defaults" then?

I mean it sounds like you imported the card prices, from the downloader, so... you need to delete that file you were looking at earlier. All the prices are grabbed from real price data, we aren't just making them up or anything. If you want to edit your booster prices they are in /res/quest/booster-prices.txt

Oh... Good to know, thanks! Yes, I downloaded the card price data, assumed it is needed to play like card images.
I'm already about 75% done with the card repricing tool though so I'll go for it anyway. That way I can maintain better cards costing more within the set.
I think I'll do the boosters manually as you suggest. I'm not too familiar with new releases, so I'll need to look up contents (how many packs in a box etc), I assume "blockdata\starters.txt" and so on are what the game actually uses.

Any way to edit the shop selling percentage? Haven't found an option for that yet and 20% is pretty low. I suppose it's not too important if it doesn't exist, I expect to reach 100% after a week of playing but I feel 20% is a bit too drastic. I would also like to increase the price of pets and health as such, it's way too much of a benefit for what it costs.

[RumbleBBU]

I think this is the blessing and the curse of full cardpool quests. For you, the player, it can be challenging to build a coherent deck when you get lots of random cards from different eras with different, often incompatible mechanics and no synergies to speak of. Sometimes you just know which exact cards would give your deck focus and take it to the next level...but chances are you will see thousands of other cards first and never the ones you want.

For your opponents, it is pretty much the opposite case. From their deck building PoV, they have access to every card in the game (well, every AI-compatible card at least), and the can actually have the cards they need, so, as a result, their decks tend to be more balanced...and let's say, quite powerful.

But like pointed out by others above, there's more than one way to play the Quest mode. Personally, I like limiting the sets available in the game, both for you and your opponents. Quest worlds are one tool for achieving that. Forge comes with a selection of worlds, some set in ancient eras of Magic, some set in more modern eras...and you can make your own wolrds if you want (it's not rocket science, you just need to invest some time in building the opponent decks).

Or you can just define a custom format and just get the expansions you want to play.

And yes, 40-card decks makes it somewhat easier to have focus in your Quest decks. They tend to be faster and perform more consistently than bigger decks.

For the record, I prefer limited Quests generally set in specific (pre-modern) eras of Magic, and I build opponent decks that capture the feel and trends of a particular era. I also find that such 'limited' Quests tend to be more 'fair' or balanced, to my taste. (Although, for Very Hard opponent decks I tend go wild with Vintage/Extended deck concepts - you can still beat them with your more limited decks, at least in theory, because the AI never plays them optimally.)

The beauty of the Forge Quest mode is that your Quest experience can be very much tailored to your personal liking.