#treasurechests

Let me tell you a story about a Legacy tournament: Palace Jailer showed up and apparently it’s a real card in that format.

Okay, sure, that’s not much of a story.

But it did cause some challenges for us on Magic Online. See, we made the determination when reviewing Conspiracy: Take the Crown that there weren’t any Monarch cards that would be important to Constructed, and since we weren’t implementing the draft environment, we could safely avoid implementing the mechanic in its entirety without any loss to our Constructed community. When it hit, we were as surprised as anyone else.

One of our mandates is to match paper as closely as possible, and the absence of a relevant Constructed card skews the digital metagame in ways that we’re not happy with. And we follow the Internet, and we know many of you aren’t happy about this either. So we took the next opportunity we had – remember that we work quite far in advance – and allocated some resources to put the mechanic and some of the relevant cards into the game.

What you folks can expect, then, is that treasure chests starting with the release of Modern Masters 2017 Edition, you’ll be able to open many of the cards from Conspiracy: Take the Crown that can make you the monarch. They’re going to show up with the other Treasure Chest-exclusive cards (the PZ2 set), with adjusted rarities such that cards with this mechanic will be much more common than the existing cards from that set. Palace Jailer is of course on that list, and we even made sure to include Queen Marchesa herself.

Specifics on Treasure Chest collation changes and drop rates will come closer to the release date, but I thought you guys would appreciate a little more of a heads-up.

In the latest Magic Online release, we added a whole lot of cards to Treasure Chests that you might not have seen before. There are the Commander 2016 cards, of course, and several cards from Conspiracy: Take the Crown too, but there are also a whole bunch of promos we added to Treasure Chests. Some you’ve seen in paper products like a Duel Deck, some have previously been in the system and just not available to players, but some of them are brand-new, never-before-seen pieces of art.

Remember, these are all found as Curated cards in your Magic Online Treasure Chests!

When we announced Magic Online Treasure Chests, we initially did not reveal the contents, in part because we wanted some people to enjoy the surprise of an opening they didn’t even know was possible, and in part because we didn’t want players who got unlucky to feel bad about this.

We changed direction somewhat after some player feedback that was given in response to the announcement (before Treasure Chests launched).  Some players were opposed to not knowing exact prize contents on principle, and many had very pessimistic views about what they would receive in the treasure chests. Further the fact that they couldn’t be traded caused many players to complain they were required to accept the random chance of Treasure Chests when they did not want to do so.

For the upcoming November 16 Treasure Chest update, our goals were:

Add select cards from both Commander (2016 Edition) and Conspiracy: Take the Crown

Make Treasure Chests tradable, and refine the design with this in mind

Cycle in and out some cards from the curated list

After Treasure Chests launched, we’ve received additional feedback from players.  It’s clear that too often players feel they received nothing of use to them and when this happens their accomplishments in the league are not being rewarded in a way that makes them feel good.  Naturally, this isn’t our goal, and so we’re looking to find ways to improve the design to minimize this. Due to our timelines, we weren’t able to do so for the November 16 update, but we hope to do so in a future update. All of this feedback has been helpful, and is benefiting not only Magic Online Treasure Chests, but other promotions as well.

We believe making it tradable will help mitigate some of these feelings, as players who find opening them too unappealing can trade them away instead. I’ll have an article on November 9 that will go into full details about the changes to Treasure Chests being made for the November 16 update, along with other Magic Online updates.

But we’ll be continuing to look at data about Magic Online players are behaving, both before and after this update, as well as the feedback we’ve already examined and additional feedback that the community will provide, as we not only look at the design and use of Magic Online Treasure Chests, but our other offerings as well.