Hi. I'm an Arcane Wonders Ambassador, and I have a couple questions:
1. If I want to volunteer with the Arcane Wonders booth at Origins, would I still have to pay for my badge, or would it be free? Or is there a discount?
2. How do I apply to volunteer with Arcane Wonders at a specific convention or other event? How does all that work?

Also, is Arcane Wonders still hosting official tournaments? I can't find the tournament schedule on the website anymore.


The reason I'm asking about this is because:

1. Besides sharkbait, I'm probably the only competitive mage wars player in the entire Columbus Ohio area.

2. Since sharkbait isn't available to help build the local mage wars community here, it's on me to do it, and volunteering at origins might be a good way to promote mage wars locally since it's in Columbus where I live.

3. If I'm remembering correctly, last year the origins mage wars tournament was fan-run rather than being hosted by Arcane Wonders. This meant that we could participate in it without needing to buy event tickets to enter the event.

4. In conventions, I usually want to spend most of my time on mage wars, and only a smaller amount of time on other games.

5. If volunteering with Arcane Wonders means that my badge is free or at least cheaper, then it will make it much MUCH easier for me to go to both origins and gen con in the same year.

6. Paying $60-70 to be able to enter the gaming hall where I will likely do nothing but play a game that I already own with people who I could easily play with outside of that hall...it seems like it's hard to justify doing that every year, especially if I also want to go to gen con too sometimes. The reason I still do it is because I rarely if ever get to play mage wars arena with anyone in person outside of conventions, and I very rarely get to play mage wars academy in person outside of conventions either.

If there were any way that I could go to origins and participate in a non-official mage wars tournament without having to pay $60-70 just to enter the room it takes place in, then that would be really great.

Thanks!

Want to scratch a mage wars itch but don't have time to play a full game of Academy or Arena? Are your friends too busy to play now? Is OCTGN down?

Don't worry, you can still play Mage Wars!

Play by Post Arena

1. Go to https://pixlr.com/editor/ on your web browser (best to use google chrome, it doesnt work right on firefox)
2. Open image from url: https://repository.rebel.pl/products/107/1036/_101002/ArenaBoard_24x32_withBleed.png
3. Press t and then click on your starting zone. This creates a text layer. Then type in an abbreviation of your mage class (like "Wiz", "Fm, "AnWd" "BwW" "ArWk" or "AdWk" etc. In the line below that type in their stats: Channeling/Mana/Damage/Life/Armor. For instance if you're a wizard of sortilege you would put:

SrWiz
10/20/0/32/0

4. Select 14 pt font and make your font color either 00ffff or ffff00. Press ok.
5. Whenever you want to move a card to another zone, select its layer then click and drag its name there in the pixlr online image editor. When you want to put a new card into play, simply press t and click on the zone you want to put it in, then type in its name abbreviation and stats and put it in 14 pt font and the same color as your mage, then press ok. Then alter stats of other cards like your mage as needed.
6. Attached cards are listed as abbreviations in a creature's text layer like thus:

SrWiz
10/15/0/32/3
SisRb
Rgbt
RhH

Attached facedown enchantments are ?

DFhyd
0/0/0/15/1
?
?

7. When you are ready, save a picture of your starting board state. Then upload it to a private instant message to whoever you want to play against, along with the url for this thread. An example starting board state is attached to this post.

NOTE: You are unlikely to actually finish a full game of arena in this format. This is for if you want to casually practice or test your spellbook a bit without a heavy time commitment since this way you can take your turn whenever you want, whether thats a few seconds after your opponent's turn, or a week after your opponent's turn. There is no time pressure here.

Not the north American kind. This is a variant of mage wars domination.

There is a vtar orb on each end of the map, in each mage's starting position. You can only gain vtar from the orb/s behind your opponent/s starting position/s. You do not gain vtar during upkeep, Instead, each time a friendly creature hits an enemy  orb, that creature' s controller gains 1 vtar, then that creature teleports back to their starting zone even if they are anchored.  After a set number of rounds the player with the most vtar points wins.

Enjoy!

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-J327A using Tapatalk

So, obviously mage wars isnt actually disappearing any time soon. It seems that very recently in the past month or so a lot of old retired online mage warriors have come crawling out of the woodwork and returned to the game after a long period of inactivity. When I said that the forums had become a ghost town, a week later it was no longer a ghost town. That being said, we do seem to have difficulty growing our community, and Arcane Wonders isn't planning on selling the franchise anytime soon if ever.

The thing is, mage wars has SO MUCH potential for customization of strategies and variant formats and maps which is largely untapped right now. Domination is hardly played. Team play is hardly played. Academy perhaps is played a little more often than they are but probably not by much.

There are no publicly visible competitive metas for any variant maps or formats of mage wars, or at least not that I know of.

Let that sink in for a moment. The only format of mage wars with any serious competitive play after six years of the game's existence is just plain vanilla 1v1 3x4 zone no starting terrains Arena. And there is not enough interest to make any variant formats actually have competitive play any time soon.

This is a huge letdown for me. I love to play variant rulesets and design them for others to play, but it seems like my efforts on this front are largely wasted in the Mage Wars community. The long and short of the issue is, I suspect, that we simply dont have a large enough playerbase to support variant competitive play, and we never have.

My question is, is it possible to grow the playerbase to that point, if so how can it be accomplished, does Arcane Wonders have any plans to try to accomplish it, and if so what are those plans?

While mage wars is not dying, I do still feel like Arcane Wonders did kinda bungle their marketing for the game and impeded if not outright prevented much of the game's potential for future growth. Someone said recently in another thread that Pegasus Spiele, the german distributor for mage wars, is discontinuing their translation of the game. I think this is likely to indicate a big problem because a lot of our best players have come from germany. Over the years I've heard people online talk about mage wars like it was specifically a game for Americans and there is even less people playing it in europe or elsewhere.

Sometimes I feel really let down by this game which I love which I invested so much of my time and energy into. It is a great game, but it's greatness comes and goes, and it could have been amazing all the time instead of just sometimes great. It was so much better in 2013, when there were lots of people here, Arcane Wonders was still actually producing story material and in the process of making the first battlegrounds set, and a bunch of other mage wars things besides just pumping out new cards. The community wasnt just active, it was ALIVE.

And one of the worst things is that over time Arcane Wonders has mostly stopped communicating with its playerbase. We can talk about these problems all we want, but Arcane Wonders will not respond to tell us what they plan to do about it. They will just have their playtesters come on and say "trust me, next year will be amazing and there will be so much new awesome content etc etc etc."

We've heard this before. 2016 we were promised that 2017 would be an amazing year for mage wars. And yet for most of 2017 the online community was not very active, and the forums were a ghost town until sometime in december. Where was this amazing year for mage wars we were promised by the arcane wonders playtesters? Maybe it's in the same place as the other amazing years of mage wars we were promised before, which also didn't quite happen either?

Why isn't arcane wonders communicating with their playerbase more? I don't really see them on here at all anymore. In fact, I think responding to the "Mage wars is dead" thread was the only post they made on here for months and months if not the whole year. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong about that.

Even if I somehow do manage to create an actual local player community for this game at this point in the game's history, how big is it realistically likely to grow, and what am I supposed to tell them about all this?

If you would like to play Mage Wars variants on OCTGN but are having trouble finding people to play them with, this should help. Let me know if you would like to be added to any of these lists.

Have fun!


Domination
Arena with Custom Maps
1v1v1 Arena
2v2 Arena
Academy
Limited Card-pools
Arena with Alternate Starting Positions

This is a list of OCTGN mage warriors who play Mage Wars Arena 3 player free for all matches who I know about. If you would like to be added to or removed from this list please let me know!

Recommended map: 3x5 zones arena with spiked pit terrain at c3, b2 and b4, and starting positions at c1, c5, and a3.

henry_ketchup (me)
keejchen
KosmosAlive
Werekingdom

This is a list of all OCTGN mage warriors who play Mage Wars Arena Domination who I know about. If you would like to be added to or removed from this list please let me know!


henry_ketchup (me)
coshade
puddnhead
drmambo23
keejchen
Werekingdom
ein_Micha (nonsense)