I been trying to get players in my local area to play it, but it's not easy heh.

they all want to play magic cards, and think that's the only game in the world

It is a tremendous challenge. At my LGS, one of the card designers for The Spoils TCG has been demoing that game on Saturdays for about a year, but he says it's a constant struggle to win over people from MTG.
His advice is to just say,"Hey, you're right. MTG's a great game. If you've got 15 minutes, I'll show you why Spoils is a great game and let you know why I think it's (different/better/more strategic, etc.) than MTG."

Another way I'll be trying to drum up new players in my area is by attending board game meetups - there are these group meetups all around the Tampa area, where I live, on different nights of the week. I'm going to try to start going to them once a month with the four apprentice spellbooks in hand to show people how to play.

Some of the key selling points, to me, are the strategic back-and-forth to each turn, and the momentum shifts of changing who has the initiative, as well as the fact you don't have to buy endless packs or trade for the cards you want - everything's available. The length of the game can be an obstacle, but in apprentice mode game shouldn't last much longer than an hour. Then, you can preach that even in games that have taken 3 hours, it feels like time flies by because you're so immersed.

Best of luck!

I do wish I had a Gravikor though... grrr...

Understand your frustration. Gravikor is sweet! Hopefully it will be in Druid vs. Necromancer....
You could always make a proxy - since it's not legal in competitive events now anyway, perhaps your opponents wouldn't mind.

I'll be one of the Mage Wars ambassadors at Gen Con this week, and I was curious about what people were interested in seeing in terms of event coverage. We're not at the stage where video coverage is a possibility, so you can leave that suggestion out for now.

Given a limited number of "coverage reporters," what are the most important things you'd like to see covered? Mage vs. Mage breakdowns with winning percentages by matchup? A detailed blow-by-blow of one match per round or a general overview of all matches in a given round? Are things like final life totals or number of spells cast important to you, or do you just want to know who won and what Mage they were playing and battling against? Would you like to see decklists for the final tournament?

These are a few of the questions I had, so I would love your input! Fire away with your suggestions!!!

Thank you for your explanation of the errata, something at least a few vocal MW forum dwellers abhor. In the future, I suggest that you release your explanation at the same time as the changes, so as to avoid bad vibes. It's bad enough that a brilliant game like Mage Wars needs to errata three cards with really only one core set out and one expansion (ASIDE: small math issue - if there are "almost" 300 unique cards and you errata 3 of them, that is slightly more than 1%), but I think you could have shut a lot of the negativity down with a preemptive explanation.

As for the moves themselves, Battle Fury seems natural, even Hand seems fine making it unique because, well, I just think it was a pretty broken spell in combo with Temple of Light for its low cost (in mana and spellbook level). With the change in Hand to "unique" status, however, your argument for instituting an additional mana cost to ToL's activation seems unwarranted at best. With 2 temples in play, you're still only successfully getting a condition on the effects roll 50% of the time, which does not seem overpowered given ToL's high casting mana cost.

I was not at Origins this year so I can't speak to the tournament results or if the "competitive" metagame was being warped by this combo, but I can say that the combo was certainly not widespread at the small tournaments at Dice Tower Convention in Orlando recently (I saw one Hand/ToL build over four tournament days). Perhaps some further playtesting showed the potential for mass abuse and the errata was implemented to avoid the combo dominating at Gen Con, which promises to be a much larger, visible tournament?

Thank you again for releasing an explanation. I look forward to future sets and a deepening card pool with which to ferret out new strategies, as these errata have certainly introduced the need to get more creative for many mages. I just wish you had the strength of some actual tournament data to back up your decision about a year into this awesome game's hopefully long-lived existence.

The biggest concern is total time of the event. When you are at a show or renting a hall you are limited to the time allotted by the venue. For example the Gencon finals will be a 24 person 5 round Swiss we have 6 hours to work with including deck reg.


How long should the rounds be?

If you're truly limited to 6 hours, that does not give you even 75 minutes per round to complete a 5-round event. If you're forced to run 68-minute rounds with a 5-minute break in between rounds (for restocking spellbooks, bio breaks, etc.), that completely fills your 360 minutes.

You need an extra 35 minutes for 75-minute rounds, and exactly 1 hour more for 80-minute rounds. Other than starting event earlier (extending time to run event to more than 6 hours), forcing players to end rounds in less than 70 minutes seems like a recipe for multiple ties per round, which of course heavily favors the aggro builds.

Perhaps some sort of article or series of articles or posts on ways to speed up game play would be warranted on Mage Wars site or in these forums? (apologies if that thread already exists)

I recently played in an 8-man tournament with 75-minute rounds. Of the four matches each round, about half of them resulted in draws, and each player received 1 point. I would prefer 90-minute rounds for organized play, as I think more than half of those draws would have resulted in victories for the players instead, but sometimes venue limitations exist on timing of rounds.

One possibility kicking around my brain was some sort of zone exiling as the end of a round nears. For example, in a 75-minute round, let's say after 60 minutes each player, beginning with the player who currently has initiative, gets to choose one zone that no mages occupy and destroy/exile either everything within that zone or put some type of black marker over the zone to signify that players can no longer use that zone to move through (as well as exiling or destroying everything that resides in that zone). Then at the 65-minute mark, each player again gets to choose a zone to destroy/exile from the game, and finally, one final zone destruction phase at the 70-minute mark.

I believe this would act a lot of strategic decisions as those time markers approached. If it was in a game where one player obviously has the upper hand, I think they're just going to ignore the time left on the clock and go for the win the way they have been. For an even match, or worse yet, a priestess v. priestess battle between healers, it could introduce some elements that could significantly speed up play by removing a zone with a critical spawnpoint or with a large amount of creatures "holed up" and basically just trying to prolong the game.

Just a thought, and I'd be interested to get some feedback on feasibility, alternatives, and rules tweakage.