Quest Mode: The Beginning

The quest mode is one of best parts of Forge. The idea of starting with a bunch of random cards and carefully building your deck until you become uber-powerful is every guys dream. (Or every girl’s dream. The best way for a beauty to meet a geek is through a card game like Magic.)

The “classic” quest mode was written by me (mtgrares) with comments from the forum. Everybody on the forum loves Forge and has many, many suggestions. The central idea in my mind was trying to code a menu based Shandalar. I can’t really program graphics very well so that restricted me to only using (boring) menus. The idea of choosing from 3 opponents came from one of the Yu-Gi-Oh games for Gameboy Advance. I liked the idea of being able to choose my opponent, even though I don’t usually care. (And yes I did play Yu-Gi-Oh videogames before Magic.)

One of the great things about the quest mode is that is it harder than your average match. Forge’s AI is very basic so the only way to “ramp up the difficulty” is to restrict the player’s cardpool while giving the AI more powerful cards.

While programming the quest mode I wanted to show a player’s progression by something other than the number of wins, so I came up with a “level” name like “Mana Mage”. The last level you can attain is “Serra Angel is your girlfriend” which is a little humorous. (The level names could be changed to something better/funnier, so feel free to make suggestions.)

The classic quest mode was fine but DennisBergkamp expanded on the idea by allowing players to purchase more life (you start with 15) or buy a pet (like a 1/1 wolf or a 0/3 plant). He added a variety of other things to buy such as a card shop, so you can buy individual cards, a free mulligan (you mulligan and get 7 cards but it costs a lot of money) and even “legendary” matches where you can to play against special opponents. Some legendary matches are restricted and you can only play them once. (I feel like a weenie but I haven’t played any legendary matches, I only play short quests for 10 or 15 matches.)

Technically you can choose from easy, medium, hard, or very hard quests but the difficulty only affects the overall length. Easy quests require 10 wins and very hard quests require 40 wins although you can keep playing if you want to (which appeals to some insane people that have 200 wins and 0 losses).

One of the improvements was to divide up the AI decks by difficulty. Currently there are 3 levels of difficulty. At the beginning of your quest, you only play against easy AI decks

Thanks to wololo for suggesting this topic. Be sure to check out his Magic project Wagic.

--mtgrares