What is the optimal lifelink value for team games?

[Sailor Vulcan]

I know we have talked about this many times, the pool of players is not deep enough to support what you so desire. You personally have stated multiple times that you can not find enough players to the released version of any of the Mage Wars product. How can you expect to have a vibrant variant play. Since I am a national  traveler I can tell you from personal experience, you can walk into practically any game store in the evening and find dozens of people playing MTG. You even complain that you couldn't find enough players in the MTG side of things to play EDH. What makes you think that players that have just picked up the game or have played only 3 or 4 of the mages (that is the variability piece I think you are missing) and have another 3 or 4 to yet player, and btw feel that they haven't mastered but maybe one or two, will want to go off into variant land.

As for the Wall Cheese with the Straywood map, it is known, and the powers that be, and I and sure they are working on resolving it, the one thing you can't say about AW is that they make knee jerk reactions. Domination is where I think you might have a chance to add to the pool of variant maps. I plan on including a couple of custom maps with each OCTGN release. It would be really cool if AW could set up a page where players could upload there custom maps and then other players could down load them and rate them. AW could even post new official maps or updated ones to the" Mage Wars Battlegrounds Map Repository".

Okay. That makes more sense. I really should have thought of that. Sorry, I did not mean to offend anyone nor to diminish the great amount of time and hard work that Arcane Wonders puts into this game, and I'm hoping I didn't come across that way because that's really not how I meant it. It's just that I've never understood before why people never want to spice things up in a game and why people often seem to play the same way every time, and it feels like I almost never get to play variants. Now I think it makes a little more sense. It seems kinda obvious in hindsight. Introducing the variant rules is kinda like introducing a new game altogether. It's not quite the same since they wouldn't have to learn everything from scratch, but it's similar enough that skill in one format doesn't necessarily completely translate to skill in another. And people want to more thoroughly explore and develop their skills in the regular format before getting more into variants.

Thanks for clearing this up for me and sorry for being stupid.

[Halewijn]

Sometimes I don't get why you get so frustrated. Especially this year, it seems Arcane wonders tried its very best to satisfy your needs for variant rules.

- We have domination, which can be played on MANY various maps. 1 vs. 1, 2 vs 2, 3 for all. You can create the map you want. (It's not because they don't get posted that nobody uses their own ones. )
- We (will) have a brilliant faster variant which you have already received in your mailbox.

And we didn't get another arena expansion in 2015. I for one really enjoy the 2 vs 2 on domination. And why would you even care if we play different variants or not, because, you have stated many times you have trouble to find players in your area to begin with?

[Sailor Vulcan]

Sometimes I don't get why you get so frustrated. Especially this year, it seems Arcane wonders tried its very best to satisfy your needs for variant rules.

- We have domination, which can be played on MANY various maps. 1 vs. 1, 2 vs 2, 3 for all. You can create the map you want. (It's not because they don't get posted that nobody uses their own ones. )
- We (will) have a brilliant faster variant which you have already received in your mailbox.

And we didn't get another arena expansion in 2015. I for one really enjoy the 2 vs 2 on domination. And why would you even care if we play different variants or not, because, you have stated many times you have trouble to find players in your area to begin with?

When I put a lot of thought and effort into something and then it seems like most people ignore it most of the time, I get rather frustrated. Now I know there is a good and fair reason for it, but I didn't know that before. My frustration could be in part because for most of my life, most of the things I really like or care about are things that most people around me seem to not care less about and don't want to give a chance to. Sorry, I'll try to be more aware of the issue and try harder to avoid knee-jerk reactions in the future.

[netzhuffle]

Was there any kind of report from team tournament in Germany?

We played with Lifelink +1 there and think it was the right decision. (The goal was to kill one enemy mage.) We feared that Lifelink +2 would take to long for a 90 minutes per round tournament but wanted to have Lifelink for the better team feeling. We had 50 percent of the games finished in those 90 minutes and think that’s the perfect number for 2 vs. 2 tournaments.

Of course, playing in official tournaments is different from playing at home. When thinking about the rules for the tournament we quickly noticed that time will be the biggest enemy, having enough games finishing before the 90 minutes are up was more important than other things.