Might and Magic Duel of Champions; A confused look at Time of Renewal

I've been playing MMDOC on and off for a year now. It actually holds the record for highest played game on my Steam account, although I'm not certain how much of that is owing to idling while chatting or waiting in queues as opposed to actually playing.

the weirdest lolicon

I'd been off MMDOC for a while when news that Ubisoft Montreal, the studio in charge of the game, was in some part dismantled and kicked off the project. While I don't necessarily respect the quality of their work, I did think they seemed like decent guys, so it is a pity if they lost their jobs for having the ill luck of competing in a market that rapidly changed with Hearthstone's arrival. Following that, I basically didn't pay any attention until news a "new" set was being released and would be ushered in by the "new" development team, BlueByte, known for their work on various not very good games, and Anno 2070, which I own but haven't played through yet.

There wasn't a lot promised with the new set. Most of the information came by way of the bizarre Chinese server. I always find it weird looking at news from Chinese versions of games, as the Chinese market seems to prefer women look extremely make up'd and rather chesty. What got really weird was looking through and finding art for twelve year old girls that look like this... Meanwhile they're not allowed to depict bones.

I guess on that end I'd fit right into China, the bones I mean, since I've never understood the love for the undead in modern fiction. Vampires, sure, but what is the deal with Zombies? And skeletons? Snore.

Crude photoshopping aside, the Chinese server continued to receive updates and new game modes while MMDOC was busy being transferred to BlueByte's domain, which is admittedly not a job I would want. Taking over major software productions is generally speaking brutal, thankless work, so I'm not trying to poop on the BB guys and/or gals. The "new" set, which was long since out in China, was finally set to show up on April the 15th. There was limited fanfare, and it finally rolled out of its cave...




The new set was supposed to accompany Draft mode, but long story short, draft mode wasn't added to the game. What was added was ... Basically not a whole lot. There are 24 new cards in Time of Renewal, but they're all rare and epic. The paywall is currently up and was redoubled, with WC cards increased on the new cards, and the altar itself isn't even open.

jackpot: still bad

The paywall isn't new, but completely restricting people from getting cards from the altar is new. You also can't win a new pack from swisses, but this doesn't shock me, as entering swisses now costs gold and I guess people could just grind infinitely away with gold? I never really liked the WC and ticket removal from the daily quests, but dailies have been so consistently poorly handled in MMDOC this is nothing to be surprised at. It was sort of nice thinking you could just grind out tickets, but instead I think people just don't really bother with swisses. Not certain though, I haven't bothered doing swisses since draft mode was announced.

So I've been playing for the last week and ToR is seriously just an incredibly confusing experience. You get accustomed to how Magic works over the years, a constant in-flux of new expansions and changing metagames. Magic is deep, it takes a long time to discover metagames and even if you've got it nailed down on week 8 new tech and new ideas could totally change up the game plan by week 12. There is this constant feeling of motion, which admittedly directs you toward buy buy buy, but it also improves the game play experience. ToR is more like the old school MTG "core" sets, which are finally being phased out this year in favor of - more likely than not - simply adding more reprints to the main new constructed sets. It feels less like 'Things have changed' and more 'The more things change, the...'

So while ToR feels weird for taking so long to arrive, it's more strange than anything for how they paywalled off the new high end stuff, but there are a lot of changes, in fact, while some cards are a little different, a lot of stuff has been seriously changed either by interaction with cards you'll actually see in standard or just straight up changed to be completely different. Harpies, for example, were previously kind of a joke race, but they completely remade at least two important examples and a lot of harpy stuff is going to play very differently. So in many ways these are just new cards, which you can get in new packs that are paywalled off, but they're sold as old cards that you may already have and can pay for through other means.

As such, while I have barely at all seen the "new" cards, I have actually seen "new" cards that people already owned. That's a very strange paradigm. I haven't played that many games, maybe something hovering around fifty or sixty, but I have yet to see a single new rare or uncommon, let alone epic.

I guess one of the questions here is - Does the current paywall matter? And the answer is "no, I don't think so". MMDOC doesn't have a tournament scene, so you're not losing money goofing around in the queues and doing dailies. You might lose a little more, but you can just take a little bit of time off, or just play to your dailies, and not really lose out. If you feel the urge to support the game, you can, but if the paywall offends you just don't give them money.

There aren't too many other changes. Dailies continue to be a design mess, with some of them a frustrating amount of work to finish and others just sort of baseline grinding. However, faction dailies now temporarily give you the different card backs, which is a cool little twist. I played against an opponent and his card backs infected all of my non-deck cards, which looked neat I guess, but otherwise its a minor cosmetic change that people were asking for. I still can't get over the disingenuous language used to describe the addition of the daily forfeit button. You know, maybe if you need to pull out marketing speech to weasel word the change you're implementing you should stop and look at what you're doing. "Players aren't going to like this, but..." need to have a conclusion like "...it improves the play experience" not "and it benefits no one."

They also added new animations, which are overbearing and cover up card faces. There were a lot of complaints when they were first discussed and at this point people have been asking to have an option to simply remove them. There isn't one in game, but the following mmdoc news post does contain directions on how to do so. As a word of warning, modding games can be somewhat iffy, so be certain you really hate the animations before you do it.

I honestly can't think of much else that was changed. Like I said, there's card rebalancing, but a lot of it is more goofy than meaningful.

To get into some specific complaints, first off, this card:

Maybe it was secretly updated, but this card is indicative of the entire brain fart that is Mass Rage and how it interacts with the game. The idea that the devs willfully decided what we really needed was a card that turned off an entire important phase of the game almost two decades after the Magic devs figured out no one liked Stasis is pretty amazing. But this card, man this stupid card shows everything wrong with how things interact with Mass Rage. It should read "Until the END of your NEXT turn" but the devs are too stupid or willingly ignorant about how cards actually work in their own game.

Basically, Mass Rage and a number of other cards interact with the game's phases in such a way that most reactive strategies just don't work. Also maybe they buffed the card in general, but I don't remember it being changed and it still blows my mind that it passes for a Haven epic.

Second, Boneyard is still in the game and has actually been ridiculously buffed. I have a strong feeling the developers have the same moronic VIPs (or whatever the droolcups who help with testing are called) who argued that Boneyard is "fine" because there's an event that can gradually remove their 2 drops from their 'yard. No one with a functioning brain actually thinks this is a solution, and boneyard continues to function as a fortune card without requiring fortune while offering the more boring, repetitive game stats. The developers also chose to buff some mummy or whatever, which now costs 2 and vomits up poison counters when it dies for whatever reason. Kinda baffled on what the VIPs were thinking, but I'm going to assume "durr" and then maybe "hurr" if the necessary brain cells fired to communicate eight full characters. The game has suffered for its testing strategy for the last year, which isn't much of a shock.

People wanted to playtest for WoTC because they were tournament players who wanted to play Magic as their job. People who want to playtest for a game with no tournament scene are just not going to be real players, because the game doesn't have any real players. So you just end up with a lot of cards that persist for a long time.

what the hell

There are a couple cards that could have used addressing. The whole "if this doesn't attack" cycle from Sins of Betrayal was ill-conceived, and sometimes I think the devs should look at the way people react to sets and go "yeah ok maybe people hated SoB and maybe we should push SoB cards out of the metagame". Ghosts were buffed, which is bizarre, since physical damage decks haven't been overwhelming since HoN. Incorporeal in general didn't need buffing, as rounding down means the mechanic is flat out insane in lots of spots, but I mostly think the problem is boneyard.

Third, many of the cards they brought back are just baffling. For one, they didn't complete the invoker cycle in Standard, which is just strange - they're only missing one - and several cards/heroes didn't need to be put in Standard. Bring back Jezziel but not Kelthor or Ishuma. The goal of Standard and bringing cards back to standard should be to bring out heroes who weren't seeing play and buff them to see play in Standard. Bringing back heroes who still see play in Open defeats the point, you're not increasing the usage of the card pool.

I would question why they brought back Sahaar Mummy and then buffed it, but again, I feel like a lot of the changes are very poorly thought out. Taking a card that is seeing play in Open and buffing it before introducing it to Standard is not what I call well thought out design.

Magic has shown well that the more playable cards there are, the more variety there is and the more money people will spend. I don't really know why a lot of the cards that were brought back were brought back, but it's an evolving situation, and the metagame evolves so slowly in this game it is hard to really get a feel for balance.

Necro in general plays really well, except that it has dark magic, which then makes necro really unenjoyable to play against since your few answers to their strategies invariably get nuked out of the game. Spell schools, in general, have not really been properly rebalanced. Dark largely has too many mechanics, much the same way Inferno does. Granted all dark does is sling removal spells at bigger creatures and continues to pressure fatties out of the game.

There's this and that bothering me about the game, but it's really hard to get a read on how good or bad the metagame is. For one, like I said, no one has the new cards. They just don't. For two, some of the days I've played I've seen lots of variety, other days I play against three different necro decks that all lean on boneyard, and basically just win or lose based on boneyard. Some days I don't see any Boneyard nonsense or Mass Rage, though, so maybe the game is getting more fun.

I don't really know if it is a good or bad time to start up MMDOC. My referal link is still the same if anyone wants to give it a try, although I honestly can't look at the numbers and say the player base is regaining its stride. There is basically no support at a community level for the game, so you tend to see a lot of the same decks repeated over and over, and BlueByte has offered some tournaments but there really aren't enough to push the game upward. Thankfully Road to Paris, which was a hilarious joke, isn't around eating support time, so that's cool.

I also really don't know if the game is going to be around much longer, but, it sounds like it is at least somewhat successful in China - where the game is less supposedly p2w but more be-titted and who knows what else - so it might just coast for years by using development produced in China. I enjoyed playing a bit this week, but the game still has a lot of the same stupid problems that made it unenjoyable after SoB - bad daily design, Mass Rage, Boneyard, mediocre hero balance and aggro decks running wrath spells - still persist. I don't see myself logging as much next week as I did the last week, unless they drop draft tomorrow, which they're not.

I kinda just want to play more Magic. Or games where the developers don't cling to stuff like Boneyard or Mass Rage.