Haha - thanks for your patience Nihil. My guys are working right now to restore the old posts and post counts. We'll find a way!

Another thing to consider is that there might not be a one-to-one ratio of strength vs. weakness, but instead there might be more of a rock-paper-scissors kind of balance.

For instance, the Necromancer MAY be weak against the Priestess outright, but that isn't to say he couldn't be strong against the Beastmaster persay. The Beastmaster is largely weak against fire, but strong against other things. I think in the end it definitely evens out.

Hey guys,

These are great questions - and we're learning as we go what the best solution to some of these problems are.

Largely, we leave the development of the casual play up to the retailers - as they know the speed and play of their players better than we do. We've had a lot of long game times reported, but we've had plenty of short game times reported as well - sometimes a one-size-fits-all approach isn't applicable.

We recommend a swiss format for the games so that everyone gets to play (as opposed to something like single elimination).

As for the promo cards - we are giving out 24 cards in the first OP Kit - which can be won through the tournament structure, through store giveaway, or through a few story challenges.

The kits will come out monthly, after our Holiday Kit ships (hopefully, if all goes according to plan, the holiday kit will ship out later this week).

Hey Hedge, sorry we ended up having a last minute trip to run some demos and I just got back into town - I'll be putting together the PDF file for your sometime this weekend and sending it off on Monday. Sorry for the wait!

Sorry guys, I'll disable the captcha.

Just a quick update: Our team worked through the night, but they did not finalize the implementation, so they will be going through this again tonight.

Thanks!

We don't currently have a list as retailers are just now putting in their orders to distributors - but we are working hard to put something like this together.

Mandatory Enchantments and Official Tournaments have been a big question for us over at MWHQ. There's a few different options that we see:

1. Let it go - in our years of playtesting, it never became an issue, maybe it still won't be. However, when we playtested the game, there was no incentive to cheat as we would simply be breaking a game we were helping to create. Clearly there are some people out there who cheat. So what do we do with them?
2. Let the Judges decide - players with a reputation for cheating will slowly not be welcome in gaming groups and retail stores, so in that regard, the problem works itself out at the lower levels. But what about in official tournaments or at tradeshows where a persons reputation won't stand out amongst all the other players?
3. We could enforce a kind of stack - where you have to keep your enchantments in the correct order, so that a player can always see what order they were played in.
4. We could have players use colored sleeves to indicate when an enchantment is mandatory or optional
5. We could make all mandatory enchantments now voluntary (which will throw off some of the balance and require some errata. I also personally don't like the flavor of this and remember fighting pretty hard against it).
6. Players could keep personal records of when enchantments were cast. It's not terribly difficult to do, but it is another annoying step to add in. However, some players may already be doing this with their Mana. It's not terribly hard to bump your status board and move a cube, it's usually accidental. But an opponent might not miss 1 extra mana every now and then, and that extra mana could be the difference between revealing a block at the right time, or having enough mana to pay upkeep to keep your creature in existence. How do we defend again that? Well, for the most part it's simply just cheating - but records could help here as well.

A large part of this will be determined by the kind of culture we create as Mage Wars players. Will we be super cutthroat and competitive? Will we be gracious and understanding? Will we largely turn out to be a casual play kind of game or will there be a hardcore tournament league? Time will tell on a lot of these issues, and I'm sure it won't just be black and white. We'll have players of all types playing in all sorts of ways. That's an amazing thing!

However, at the end of the day Mage Wars was created as a game by players for players and we want to make decisions that positively impact not only the gameplay and mechanics, but the experience players have playing it.

What do you guys think?