Dominaria drops into Arena today. Plus a bunch of other changes…looking forward to checking out the new draft events.
Yay! Spellslingers is back!
For those that aren’t aware, it’s a super fun-to-watch show with Day9 hosting and playing against his nerdy and often well known and/or entertaining friends. Sometimes they know how to play and sometimes they are new to the game, but it’s always fun to watch. This is the start of season 4, and I actually thought the show was done as it’s been a minute since season 3 ended. I just started this first episode and I’m already right back in. Give it a watch, if you enjoy Magic especially.
Question for the hivemind: What’s your favorite way to play with odd-numbered groups of people? My game group will occasionally play draft or break out Commander decks, and it’s easy to figure out a multi-player format if we have an even number. Two headed giant for 4, Emperor or three-headed giant for six, etc. But it’s just as likely that we have five or seven people, and then it’s more difficult.
Free-for-all doesn’t work well because no one is willing to attack, thus leaving themselves open to multiple counters. We’ve tried “friendly neighbor” where your goal is to defeat all players that did not start sitting next to you, and that’s better, but once you get one or two people eliminated it usually turns into a two-on-one. Our latest experiment is based on the Sheriff/Deputy/Renegade/Outlaw format that Bang! uses, which everyone likes but needs some tweaking to avoid giving a big advantage to any of the factions.
Anyone else have ideas for this kind of odd-numbered multiplayer format? We’re always looking for options.
The best we we have found to handle free for all is to only allow attacking to the left. That opens up a lot of fun metagaming and shortens the game a bit as well, because someone that can’t get traction isn’t saved by no one being willing to tap out and attack in the early game.
I thought, “Hey, maybe I’ll play some Magic online. Haven’t done that in a while. Ok, how are we supposed to play it these days? Arena? Oh, not out yet. I guess Duels?”
Placeholder text. Can’t dismiss this pop-up window. Alt-F4. Oh, WoTC. Never stop being useless. Even the Pokemon online cardgame works better than this.
Arena is really great from what I’ve played of the beta. Wish they’d hurry up and roll it out.
Duels was discontinued last year (Amonkhet was the spring 2017 set and was the last set added to the game). Your best bet is still Magic Online or waiting for Arena to have an open release.
In addition to the above, you can also sign up for the Arena beta if you want, they send out invites daily. It’s pretty fun, I’ve been in it for a while, and I am going to drop $5 every now and then to draft (because after the beta ends and they wipe everything, I’ll get my “gems” back and be able to draft again - two drafts for the price of one!)
I did sign up for the Arena beta, so I’ll check that out if/when they let me in. MTGO wants $10 before you can play, and I assume it’s still a dumpster fire. I had an account WAY back when they first launched it. I can’t imagine that account still works though. It’s a totally different system now.
Yeah. WotC is in an awkward position now with new players wanting to play online. I just started playing paper Magic a few months ago, and would love to play more often. Having watched Arena videos, it seems to be exactly what I want, but I haven’t heard anything about getting into the closed beta since putting my name in. I’ve also watched people play Magic Online and tried out the demo decks myself. Interface is clunky and inscrutable, and it will cost me $10 to play on a system I know I’ll abandon as soon as I get to play Arena. So I sit in limbo, waiting.
Thanks for the idea…I believe one of our guys suggested it at one point, but I don’t think we ever played it. Or someone got steamrolled when we did and it was discarded as a bad play experience, something like that. Might be worth another try!
I don’t imagine they’re too far away from Arena going open beta now. The game’s in a pretty good state, and they’ve added all the sets to make it standard-ready.
It’s gonna be a serious money sink, though. Entry into a single best-of-3 draft carries a $15 price tag, cash-only (gems can be earned, but it looks like a pretty severe grind).
You could always check out Hex: Shards of Fate in the meantime. The rules are closely based on Magic, but the card sets take advantage of the purely digital nature of the game, and there’s a lot of single player content available.
Ooh! Great suggestion. I will.
And if Hex doesn’t float your boat, there’s also Eternal. Hex is too much like Magic for my taste, while Eternal does more stuff you’ll only see in an online CCG. Though I haven’t tried Hex in over a year, so things may be better there now.
I like this idea, can you expand on it a bit? Or is it variation that was written up on the web somewhere?
It’s 750 Gems or $5. Unless something changed since earlier in the week?
Here are some shots of the gem costs and how much it costs/rewards for playing the four game mode options available currently. Note the rewards and how many losses you can incur.
For example, it’s $10 to draft Dominaria, but even with one victory you get 2 packs, and if you win 5 games you get six boosters, plus the boosters you opened for the draft of course, and you get a gem refund after 2 victories.
I’m on the fence on this method. I think mostly I’m okay with it, I’ve always wanted to get into MtO but hated the way that game presented itself. This I’m much more into, it’s much prettier and faster to play, and drafting looks really fun in it. $5 or $10? Might be something fun to do once or twice a month. And it might keep the people out that are just there to troll. Paying even eighty cents or whatever to play a constructed series of games might keep people out that just want to run the clock down and waste your time, for example.
There’s a MTG variant called Kingdom which is basically the same as Bang, but we felt it needed more spicing up. Still working on tuning our own version, but here’s what we have so far. (Yeah, very Tolkien-esque naming, we’re LotR nerds.) Each player gets a themed ability, usable only if they reveal their role. If you want to use the ability, everyone’s going to know who you are, and target you accordingly.
I got an access code for Arena earlier this week, so I’ve been spending a little bit of time with it each day. Some thoughts.
It’s so much nicer to play than MTGO. Just everything about the presentation is really slick. The animations are nice, and they don’t bog the game down as much as they did in Duels. I have some issues with how it handles complicated board states, but I think they’ll get ironed out eventually.
It changes how you think of “budget.” In paper, a budget deck is any deck where most of the cards are cheap on the secondary market, regardless of rarity. In Arena, rarer cards are always equally hard to get, regardless of power level, so a budget deck is one that mostly uses commons and uncommons. The problem, then, is that everyone focuses on using their wildcards to get the cards that are most powerful in the current metagame over different cards. I think that will lead to much less diversity in the Arena metagame, because who is going to bother to try and craft cards to play an off-the-wall Muldrotha deck before crafting four Karns?
I see Arena settling out as a great place for people playing paper Standard to get a lot of practice in and for people who like drafting. I’m worried that casual players are almost immediately going to feel like they’re getting priced out of the game.
Big Arena update today. They added the Core 2019 cards, changed the way the vault works, added a new player’s tutorial, and added some new free ladder options. Also, of course, some free packs and a fair amount of free gold, always welcome.
The vault now just counts number of packs opened to your next wildcard, similar to the way Heroes of the Storm just counts number of levels to your next Rare or Epic chest. Probably better than the overlong vault opening before.