Pet Abilities

[friarsol]

With the new Quest UI it's possible to buy whatever pet you want first. The Hound pet is way too strong once you purchase it's last ability. Versus slow control decks, I can push my opponent under 10 life before they even have anything interesting on the board. I'm fine with having all of the pets available at the beginning (it seemed farfetched that you had to have a fully upgraded Wolf before you were allowed to get a Crocodile). But the Hound's final Upgrade needs to be toned down.

I'm going to change my local copy to have it gain only +1/+0 and see if that seems more balanced. Maybe we can change this to have it cost something?
R: CARDNAME gets +2/+0. Use this ability only once per turn and only if CARDNAME is attacking alone. Other thoughts?

[lazylockie]

It would be a triggered ability sol, but I think paying R for it is more reasonable than not paying at all. Put the Hound on a semi decent RDW and you can have turn 3-4 kills easily.

I think the croc needs a revamp. Landwalk abilities gave space to other kind of evasions in modern magic. 1/5 chance to work isn't much reliable even with all those duals AI uses. Croc could be a 1/3 Wither or Drudge Skeletons variant.

And I don't know if you're going to make the blue one, but it could be a Merfolk Looter, since flying is already on white with Bird.

[Corwin72]

I think that the pets should be more of Familiars and have cool one shot effects. Dropping the computer to 10 on the first third turn seems too good.

Green should be 2/2 Sac to regenerate a creature.
Blue should be 0/1 flying, sac to return target creature to it's owners hand.
Black should be 1/1 wither and regenerate itself.
White should be 0/2 tap to give +1/+1 to attacker or blocker.
Red 2/1 can't block, Sac: target creature can not block this turn.

Black may be too good.

Other options could be
White 1/1 Sac to give shroud to a permanent.
Green 1/1 Sac to put a forest in your hand.
Blue 1/1 Sac to draw a card.
Black 1/1 Sac to give target creature -1/-1 until end of turn.
Red 1/1 Sac to destroy target artifact.

Or there is the endgame option.

White 1/1 10: Creatures you control get flight and first strike until end of turn.
Blue 1/1 10: Mill 20 cards from target players library.
Black 1/1 10:Black creatures get +2/0 and swampwalk until end of turn.
Red 1/1 10:Deal 10 damage to all creatures and players.
Green 1/1 10:Creatures you control get +3/+3 and trample until end of turn.

[lazylockie]

Other options could be
Red 1/1 Sac to destroy target artifact.

I like this idea. Seems like a double-edged sword though: on one hand it's cool for a color having access to other colors pies, but that's also a downside, since card drawing on red can be extremely dangerous and etc.

Another problem also is that the pets are hardcoded, so it takes a bit of the freedom of templating your own pets.

[friarsol]

Another problem also is that the pets are hardcoded, so it takes a bit of the freedom of templating your own pets.

Actually, this was another thing I wanted to resolve while we were in there. We can create .txt files for Pets just like we have for real cards. This way they are easier to tweak, and they would have access to things like AFs/Triggers/All-that-fun-stuff. Then we could just have a file that lists for each level a Pet.txt and a Cost.

[Corwin72]

R Sac: destroy target artifact?

[Fnoed]

I have committed a change that should make experimentation with pets easier, see package forge.quest.data.pets for details.

[friarsol]

I have committed a change that should make experimentation with pets easier, see package forge.quest.data.pets for details.

Definitely easier. Thanks for splitting those out. I wonder if it would be even better to have them like this:
http://code.google.com/p/cardforge/issu ... 1297003549

[Fnoed]

Probably. The new structure allows this to be done rather easily, adding a new parsing code to QuestPetManager should do it.
I will probably do this once I have refactored more of the Quest Code.

[friarsol]

Probably. The new structure allows this to be done rather easily, adding a new parsing code to QuestPetManager should do it.
I will probably do this once I have refactored more of the Quest Code.

Cool. Feel free to set it up with zip files as you mention in the Issue. Easier to pass around is probably the better consideration than easier to tweak.

[Jaedayr]

Is the current lvl 1 hound pet supposed to be 1/1 or 0/1? When you purchase it, it says it is 1/1 but on the battlefield it is 0/1 and does not display any pic.

[Fnoed]

Boosted to 1/1 in r6287.