A proposal for organising worlds

by **OneMoreNameless** » 26 Apr 2019, 09:35

Quest mode is pretty great for both exploring older Magic blocks and capturing the feeling of deckbuilding with a growing collection. It's also unclearly inconsistent between worlds and messily balanced. Here's a few simple changes I think will improve that.

Merge smaller sets into a single world. Although some older MtG expansions were not designed around complete blocks, they were also not designed as standalone products - the number of interestingly unique decks to be built or fought from a focused set like Antiquities is low and grinding against the same opponents to reach the next level of AIs will get dull quickly. The small cardpool combined with the default spell shop settings will dry out any new discoveries early (or be easily cherrypicked by travelling players), leaving little incentive to stay and certainly not feeling like a whole world.

I've combined Antiquities, The Dark and Fallen Empires on the basis of their narrative thread (the brothers' war and its fallout) while Legends, Arabian Nights and Homelands are grouped under a loose 'legends' theme. This makes the overall size of each world more fair for balancing preferences etc. plus now you don't need to dig into the game's files first to see which are actually worth playing alone. Note that I haven't edited any decks themselves; each opponent is still fully themed to its expansion as intended by whoever built them.

Add Coldsnap and the Battle for Zendikar block as prizes to the existing Ice Age and Zendikar worlds. These expansions largely follow the same themes and mechanics as their predecessors and so would add to coherent deckbuilding for the player, make the drafting tournaments more varied, and give them some representation outside of the main world even without having any AI decks (yet). Zendikar is large after this but no more so than Mirrodin or Ravnica's worlds already are and it still falls within the two block size that Magic's standard format used to rotate with.

Rename worlds to identify the expansions they use when their block name differs from their setting. Eg. "Terisiare (Ice Age)". Non-lore-nerds will thank you. As for the few worlds whose AIs pull cards from all over the place, I've dubbed them as "Era: "s to distinguish them from worlds sharing some of sets but with stricter builds.

None of this breaks savefiles by the way. At worst you have to click 'travel' to get back into your preferred world and might lose a challenge if you've been ignoring one. Less excitingly, I sorted the worlds.txt entries by expansion release dates and left in dummy lines for currently missing blocks for the convenience of future deckbuilders.

Equal booster prices for all sets. Don't get me wrong, IRL pricing for cards is a great idea for balancing and immersion if you're playing in the main world, and variable booster prices should be kept as an option that shares the card prices' download. It absolutely breaks the economy and makes no sense scarcity-wise when playing in historic worlds though. There's no reason to buy any packs except the gamey colored boosters, tournaments are effectively unplayable, trading cards to the shop feels worthless unless you have IRL pricing turned on and get lucky with a vintage rare ... Yeah with flat pricing you could jump worlds and get relatively powerful cards cheaply, but you can exploit that already with free boosters (or just 'cheating' your preferences) so you might as well default the prices fairly for the sake of those who mostly stick to one world.

Anyway, I did also scale the prices of the boxes et al. to the number of non-land cards included with a small (~5-15%) discount for bulk purchasing. A few newer sets not listed in booster-prices.txt are slightly off, I'm not sure where they're reading their prices from. Semi-related but I can't code: It would be nice if there was a small bonus reward for playing with a 60+ deck and duelling random opponents, to encourage full deckbuilding and sideboarding.

quest.zip: (869.18 KiB) Downloaded 175 times

by **friarsol** » 27 Apr 2019, 01:26

If you don't download the prices, they already default to a standard formula.

by **OneMoreNameless** » 27 Apr 2019, 02:55

friarsol wrote:If you don't download the prices, they already default to a standard formula.

This is not true of booster packs, and consequently, tournaments.

by **friarsol** » 28 Apr 2019, 19:00

OneMoreNameless wrote:
friarsol wrote:If you don't download the prices, they already default to a standard formula.
This is not true of booster packs, and consequently, tournaments.

Well, it IS true. They do default to the standard formula. The formula for boosters is just different than individual cards. You should create a feature request on our gitlab:

https://git.cardforge.org/core-develope ... /new?issue