But I like the idea of rewarded tourney where only default decks would be allowed..
I think it would really show skills of players..

Maybe make a default deck-only tournament that awards gold. Or possibly a free sealed/draft tournament that awards gold.

I know a lot of people are going to say the producers won't make money that way because it will be too easy to get gold. But this is not necessarily true. First off, this game already gives out a handful of free gold to a select players; the free gold system GREATLY favors those who spend money on the game. So implementing a few ways for people who play this game for free to be able to win a little bit of gold is not going to put this studio in the red. If anything it will rake in more players and keep players for longer periods of time. The longer a player stays on this game, the more likely they are to buy something.

If you have two more tourneys in addition to the current tourney with a prize of 150g each, that's only 300 g every five hours that the site would be giving away for free. Hell you could only have one tourney going every five hours and alternate them, that way it's only 150g every 5 hours (which is only a theoretical loss of 3 dollars, however, there is no guarantee that the person who won would have even spent 3 dollars, in fact if he wouldn't have won that money it is much more likely that he would have quit rather than spent the money).

When there is an actual way for someone to play this game for free competitively, in the long run, you will see a much bigger increase in your player pool.. Don’t feed me the “the way to earn gold for free is to play the ladder” crap. The ladder is broken; it is pretty impossible for players who haven’t spent money to actually advance in the ladder. You would have to get pretty lucky and play super chumps to win your way to the top via the ladder using only default/phantom cards.

Here are some other suggestions:

- This game NEEDS more information available.

This would include:

A database with very explicit rules of play and an explanation of every mechanic is really needed.

A group of enthusiasts who know the game and who share information via blogs about meta-game deck builds/strategies.

- Better marketing.

Why are there so few people playing this game? This game is sweet and it really shouldn't be too hard to get people to start playing this game.

A problem is that you advertise this game as a free game and REALLY fail to deliver on that promise. Most FTP games use micro-transactions in order to keep their game up and running, these transactions are generally aesthetic only items. There is nothing wrong with selling cards as a means of making money, after all this is a CTG. However, if you are going to advertise yourself as a FTP then fail to deliver on that promise you've lost a large chunk of FTP gamers. And just because someone is playing and not paying for it doesn't mean this company is losing money, that person could simply not be playing; and then the company really wouldn't be benefiting at all. When a person plays a game they add content for other players JUST BY BEING ON.

You know how long it takes for a similar player game to start?
The time it takes is indefinite. The reason being is: LACK OF PLAYERS.
I am not the only one who has experienced this, in fact all the people I have invited play have experienced this and are pretty turned off by this outcome.

You could even make a mode that gives you access to all the cards in the game however have the matches count as nothing. The players don't gain rank/prestige/anything. It's simply a way to test deck builds before you go out and spend a bunch of money.

There are honestly billions of things you could be doing in order to bring in more players. More modes, more cards, more options.

-What the hell are you guys doing?

Where are the dev blogs? What are you guys up to? What are you planning on implementing? Let us know something. Am I playing and supporting a game that is going to shut down soon? Should I go back to playing MTGO?

- Community, community, community.

Build your community. Get them excited about talking about this game. Start up discussions about anything. These forums are so dead. I posted a rather lengthy post the other day and NO ONE replied. I am pretty sure no one will reply to this but since it got the most recent post I thought I would give it a try.

-This game needs a SUPER overhaul in terms of the way it’s managed. It looks like another case of a great product but HORRIBLE management. I don't say this to be rude, I love the game, but I say in hopes that it pushes the dev team to start to think of ways to get people to play this game.

So in summery here are the things that need improvement (descending in order of importance):

More players
Information about this game
A larger card pool
A community
Dev blogs
More ways to win gold (even if it’s just a small amount; winning 9 gold a week would be great for some people).

Proxima; I'd be really happy to answer you, but all I can say is that you're completely correct about those things.
The ones who you should expect serious answer from are Jed or Altren and both now have hands full of the new set coming out next month, so they don't have that much time to answer all posts (even only read them) on forum..
But I am sure that after the new set is out they'll have a look on all this and they will start working on those problems, as you're not first (and probably not even last) who pointed them out.
So, just, bit of patience, please

I hope this helped ya at least a bit.
Zurken

Proxima: Yeah I agree we need to do all those things specially get more people on. We don't have a big team working on this so we can really only focus on one thing at a time. Right now we are concentrating on the next set and a bit on the persistent mode. After the next set we will focus again on marketing.

Jed, I think this statement of yours is evidence of a way of thinking that I think you need to reconsider. I know that there are a limited number of people beta-testing the new set coming out, so in that respect you get some help from the player base. But there are so many things that people in the community could help out with for free (or, perhaps, for a very limited amount of gold).

There is a lot (loads!) of outdated information (check, for instance, the player guide and the wiki) and there are many things not covered at all or only covered in a more or less random fashion in the forums (rules being the main thing). These things could be updated by people in the community if there only was a sort of 'We need help on this and this' section on the forums.

Here is just an example: Tha player guide on the website is outdated both in terms of the actual descriptions and, as far as I can tell, in terms of the screenshots. To update this would be a more or less mechanical job. If you asked for help, I am sure you would receive it.

So a general suggestions is this: Even if you are only a small team (Jed and Altren being that team?), you have a potentially very large army of helpers that you could and should take advantage of. Even such a thing as appointing someone from the community a forum moderator or assigning people the status of 'official helpers' in-game would be a large step in that direction.

I have much more to say about this but I want to keep this post reasonably short so I will therefore end with something related. I have been thinking for some time now about writing a 'Newbie Player Guide', not because I am uniquely positioned to do so (well, it takes one to know one, right?) but because there is a strong need to have one. But then the question is whether it is worth investing the time that it takes to write a proper guide if there are no new players to read it... And so the problem of the small pool of players crops up again. Then again, maybe asking the community for suggestions and help even on this issue might be a very good thing

Voices: We would love to have people help out with the documentation and with things like new player guides, other community building things etc. We have a wiki set up so anyone can write these things easily. So yes please anyone help us write this stuff.

I was playing with my friend the other day; we were grinding against each other (this means I would win ten matches, then he would win ten matches) in order to accumulate phantom cards. It was going rather poorly. We would often get doubles of really crappy cards we didn’t need: cards for elemental domain (which neither of us have enough of to actually make them count), bases that serve no purpose with our current card pool, etc.

I was thinking today about what we were doing. We were GRINDING on a game that really shouldn’t be about grinding AT ALL.

I was thinking about ways to solve the play for free problem and the uselessness of phantom cards problems when in donned on me… Why not a type of currency (silver… or phantom gold, or whatever) you win from matches that allows you to BUY phantom cards. You could have the phantom card’s life span reduced to 14 or 7 days. You could set the price for phantom cards at 2/3 the market price.

This allows people to test drive cards they are considering purchasing, allows people to more easily play competitively on the ladder for free. It doesn’t really deter grinding, but it does greatly reduce the amount of grinding one would have to do in order to build a deck or add cards to his current deck out of phantom cards.

I agree with a lot of what has been said by previous posters. I realize though that you guys are very busy with the upcoming patch, but I'd just like to second some of the things Proxima mentioned. I think his idea about the Phantom Currency in particular is flat out genius. I personally just joined the game not too long ago and fell in love with it immediately. However, I started getting discouraged as I started playing more and am borderline quitting now. The reason being is that I haven't put any money in to the game yet, and so my decks are completely unviable. At the same time, I don't WANT to put any money in to the game yet because I have no idea what I'd like to invest in. The amount of information on this game is just too small to really make any completely educated decisions. I can only find a handful of decklists posted on the forums, and there are a few ruling questions I have had that I also couldn't really find the answers to. I've started playing computers in the hopes of winning some Phantom Cards to possibly piece together decks and see if I can create any nifty synergies. As it is now, I spend hours playing the computer and end up with a handful of completely junky cards, and the extreme majority of the time they're duplicates of starter cards I already had access to. Not to mention I've got many cards where I 'own' more than 3 now, which with the deck construction limits makes them literally 100% useless. I also started trying to see if I could win some gold, since I would like to actually test cards in order to try to make fun decks out of, but as is now it seems near impossible for someone to do so (without having put money in). I rarely get similar games going, and am forced to go 'Anyone', at which point I get totally raped. Either that or I end up playing a similar game against someone who has hundreds of games played. As I understand it, high level players can tank their ratings to do better on the ladder or something. Anyway, back to the point, I think if I could play computers for some sort of phantom currency to be able to purchase phantom cards of my own choosing so that I could mess around with cards to find the stuff I like, I'd actually be more likely to purchase real gold. I'd know what exactly to buy, and I would feel like I actually had a chance at competing some places. Also, I wouldn't care at all if the phantom card duration was drastically reduced to something like a few days if this new system was implemented.

To summarize:
Phantom Currency = thumbs up
Fix Ladder
More info on game available

Well we will probably do something like that. but in the meantime you can play free sealed and draft games to get the feel for more cards. You can also join Brass league it is very cheap and will give you an even playing field and access to more cards.