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TOPIC: Is Another's Treasure: $95 PYP + $90/ea on 10+.

Is Another's Treasure: 2015 - $pecial PYP prices 10 years 6 months ago #37

My friends and I never do constructed Magic anymore, and haven't for probably 10 years. All we do is drafting, with our own set of house rules, and it's a blast! I don't think we'll ever tire of it :)

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Is Another's Treasure: 2015 - $pecial PYP prices 10 years 6 months ago #38

Only being able to use the past few sets in True Dungeon would be a nightmare. There would be many sad formulites, too! Balance is a goal, but can not be absolute. I agree that too much could make the game mundane and boring. But you can't run a "Monty Hall" giveaway either. This year was a dance on the "Monty Hall" giveaway line. If Jeff is play testing puzzles, good. However, most design mistakes should be corrected before GenCon. The only stuff at GenCon that should be mechanical, prop and supply issues (which did occur.) The new hardcore level added some unforseen problems as did Amulets of Wonder acting as Horn of Plenty's!
True Dungeon IS teamwork. Tokens offer a better chance of survival for the team. :-)

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Is Another's Treasure: 2015 - $pecial PYP prices 10 years 6 months ago #39

My friends and I never do constructed Magic anymore, and haven't for probably 10 years. All we do is drafting, with our own set of house rules, and it's a blast! I don't think we'll ever tire of it


Mike can you elaborate briefly on what you mean here?

Ed
Useful Links:
TD Character Creator
Amorgen's Excel Char Gen Tool
Token DataBase
Talking TD Podcast

TD Accomplishments:
Member of the first team to survive Epic True Grind
1st Solo NM as Poly Druid
Proud member of Gas Station Sushi
Don't Nerf Our Tokens!

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Is Another's Treasure: 2015 - $pecial PYP prices 10 years 6 months ago #40

MasterED wrote:

My friends and I never do constructed Magic anymore, and haven't for probably 10 years. All we do is drafting, with our own set of house rules, and it's a blast! I don't think we'll ever tire of it


Mike can you elaborate briefly on what you mean here?

Ed


Sure, Ed! We tend to play focused on having fun rather than super-competitive decks. Plus some of us are much better at deck construction than others. Given that, we've come up with two special rules we use.

First, when we draft the three booster packs, to make things simple, instead of doing something like constructing a 40 card deck out of the cards you draft, we play that you can pull no more than 3 cards out of the cards you draft, and you have to play the rest. That can let you discard a color or two sometimes, or get rid of one or two cards that are particularly useless. So deck construction takes just a couple of minutes, you discard your 0-3 cards, add your lands, and go!

One of the best things about that approach is you tend to play all the different cards, even the ones that would usually be discarded when constructing a 40 card deck, which adds to the variety and fun, and sometimes you find some cards are much more useful than you'd have thought!

Second, we used to do something we called "the Land Thing", where if on any of your first four turns you had no lands in your hand, you could discard cards from the top of your library until you got a land, and put that land in your hand (and then play it). But, even though nobody in our group abused that, it was clear that it could be abused pretty easily by someone drafting all low casting cost cards and putting relatively few land cards in their hand.

So, we replaced that rule by simply allowing everyone up to two free mulligans, which has worked out really well.

If we have an even number of people, we usually play teams with shared life pools, and then sometimes free for alls. If we have an odd number of people, we usually do the "attack person on right", then the next game "attack person on left", then a free for all, then switch up where everyone is sitting and start the cycle over.

When playing free-for-alls, we used to play with negative life points, where if your life goes below zero, you keep playing but keep track of how negative your life goes (because sometimes you can play cards to gain enough life to get back above zero), and we play until only one person has positive life left. But now we usually just play until one person goes below zero, and the person that brought them to below zero wins.

We also often play with a lot of people where you can only attack with creatures the players immediately next to you, but can cast spells on everyone, and the first person to have the people on either side of them below zero life wins. That brings out a lot of fun politics as you end up trying to keep some people above zero to keep someone else from winning :)

At GENCON, we usually do a mix of a LOT of Magic drafting, several True Dungeon runs, a role-playing adventure or two, some time in the dealer's room (always including a demo game at Kenzer), and some other fun stuff mixed in :)

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Last edit: by Mike Steele.

Is Another's Treasure: 2015 - $pecial PYP prices 10 years 6 months ago #41

Thanks! I have tons of Magic cards - most of it is around 1995 (Revised and 4th). We hardly ever play it any more and it would be fun to play with friends again. Obviously that means playing booster packs which I know some of my friends just can't justify.

Maybe I will just buy some booster boxes and keep the cards when done.

Thanks for the ideas!

Ed
Useful Links:
TD Character Creator
Amorgen's Excel Char Gen Tool
Token DataBase
Talking TD Podcast

TD Accomplishments:
Member of the first team to survive Epic True Grind
1st Solo NM as Poly Druid
Proud member of Gas Station Sushi
Don't Nerf Our Tokens!

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Is Another's Treasure: 2015 - $pecial PYP prices 10 years 6 months ago #42

MasterED wrote: Thanks! I have tons of Magic cards - most of it is around 1995 (Revised and 4th). We hardly ever play it any more and it would be fun to play with friends again. Obviously that means playing booster packs which I know some of my friends just can't justify.

Maybe I will just buy some booster boxes and keep the cards when done.

Thanks for the ideas!

Ed


Ed, that's probably a good idea. You could buy a booster box cheap enough that the packs would be somewhere between $2.50 and $3 per pack for the draft, which even at $9 for several hours of entertainment is a lot of value. I always buy the booster boxes at discount online for our drafts, and that lets us draft a lot cheaper than if we went to a store and bought the packs at full price.

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Is Another's Treasure: 2015 - $pecial PYP prices 10 years 6 months ago #43

So my Magic friends and I are not the only ones that do that? The practice does save money and there is no need for a liquor license! ;-)
True Dungeon IS teamwork. Tokens offer a better chance of survival for the team. :-)

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Is Another's Treasure: 2015 - $pecial PYP prices 10 years 6 months ago #44

Booster Draft has always been my favorite Magic format, although I admit it's because my strength lies in deck-building, and I was always broke, so didn't have access to the top-tier constructed decks, much less to rotate out the cards in Type 2.

I think I'd play more, but my gaming group is more into board games, and has very little interest in CCGs.

Back on topic. Magic does an incredible job of playtesting cards, both for Type 2 and Type 1. Even so, sometimes something still manages to slip through the cracks that should have been caught (Read: Skullclamp). We also have to keep in mind that Magic has a much, much, much larger budget for this sort of playtesting than TD. It also helps that TD is a cooperative game, whereas Magic is a competitive game, so people are less likely to be upset by class balance issues.

Having said that, I'm going to take issue with one set of tokens that I think is divisive and will be overall, bad for the game going forward. I think it was a mistake to print the Horn of Plenty. I think it was an even greater mistake to then print the Ring of Riches and Charm of Good Fortune. I'll explain why in a separate paragraph. Disclaimer: I have a CoGF, and am working on a RoR.

If you are a more casual (or even not so casual) player playing with someone who is equipped with nothing worse than Ultra-Rare, you realize two things: (1) this person spent a lot of time and money collecting these tokens that you didn't, and (2) this person's gear is going to help you succeed in the event that you paid US Currency to play.

The experience is much different when someone sees someone else break out the full suite of treasure-generating tokens. While the extremely new player probably won't put much thought into it, eventually that new player gets a little wiser, and realizes a few things: (1) The player may have only have bought those three items for a total of ~$350, but those tokens are now worth over $1,000, and the only reason that that player has it and I don't is because they came to the game early. This creates a feeling of competitiveness in an otherwise completely cooperative game. (2) This feeling is only exacerbated when it comes time to get treasure chips, and the newer player's $44 gets them three draws, while the older player gets 15 treasure draws for his $44. The newer player will know that the older player likely spent much less to acquire those items, and has had them longer, so will always have some intrinsic advantage over the newer player. (3) The player who uses token-generating items is forgoing the use of other items that might help them better survive the dungeon. This isn't such a big deal currently, as even on Nightmare, if you've got the full suite of token generators, you're probably pulling your own weight in terms of dealing damage, but there could come a time in the future where someone refuses to equip a neck slot item that will save them in a dungeon due to the HoP, and that person's party will be irate that they chose treasure draws over the rest of the group's success.

There's also the issue that as more people have access to lots of treasure draws, Jeff will feel more pressure to water down the content in the treasure boxes to avoid inflation in the economy. This doesn't hurt the guy with the HoP much, as he's just making relics and legendaries to get a +0.5% bonus and some prestige, and an UR pull is gravy, but it really hurts the guy who is still collecting rare tokens for his character, and only pulls what he or she perceives to be useless "junk", since they don't transmute and have no use for an uncommon weapon.

Again, these are fairly extreme examples, but one reason I enjoy TD so much is that it's cooperative, and as such, a rising tide raises all ships. The treasure generators seem, however, like a pandora's box that only seems to be slowly opening wider and wider, creating a wider gap between the haves and have-nots. In this regard, I'd almost rather see a new 1 in 1000 rarity random token used to drive token sales as opposed to any more treasure generator tokens.

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Is Another's Treasure: 2015 - $pecial PYP prices 10 years 6 months ago #45

Dennis Burdick wrote: Only being able to use the past few sets in True Dungeon would be a nightmare. There would be many sad formulites, too! Balance is a goal, but can not be absolute. I agree that too much could make the game mundane and boring...


Personally, I liked our team doung 212 points of damage in one round in one of the combat rooms this year, afterall I was on vacation.

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Is Another's Treasure: 2015 - $pecial PYP prices 10 years 6 months ago #46

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Interesting post, Seth. Thank for providing your perspective.

It's easy as a long-time player to be caught up in the "token game" (collecting,trading, etc) without realizing the way it looks to people who are playing the Dungeon game (teamwork for solving puzzles, defeating monsters etc.)

I'll admit: the forums do tend to lean toward the token end of things, since we can always buy/trade/sell our tokens, even during the off season, whereas the dungeon itself is only 4 days/year. Our community here occasionally has a hard time seeing outside its own bias.
"THERE WILL NEVER BE A TOKEN EQUAL TO A GOOD BRAIN!"- Smakdown

Check out these awesome resources:
Cranston's Character Generator for iDevices or Android
Amorgen's Excel Character Generator
And the ever-useful Token DataBase , expertly maintained by Druegar.

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Is Another's Treasure: 2015 - $pecial PYP prices 10 years 6 months ago #47

seth,
I am one of those guys that has a bunch of extra treasure draw tokens..except I share them with anyone I run with. I dont not ask for anything for them, other than the first chance to trade with them if they draw anything good/I would want

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Is Another's Treasure: 2015 - $pecial PYP prices 10 years 6 months ago #48

I am one of those that are guilty of the token bug as Raven said. We(I) build for a team and don't have as much as many that play. We all have what we like about the game. I love the dungeon rooms and am fine with challenges. I just make my challenge the challenge of getting the right tokens to beat the system. this brings the game from being just those four days to a year-round experience.

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