Reserves time really needs to be longer. 3 minutes instead of 2 minutes.

    • Reserves time really needs to be longer. 3 minutes instead of 2 minutes.

      The current sideboard rules give us 2 minutes to sideboard between games. That generally ends up being about 1:55 due to the game end animation and loading time cutting into that number.

      With Immortal being hot at the moment I'm running right up to the reserve max time in more and more situations. Particulalry trying to re-gem during a 1 minute 55 second sideboard is a nightmare. If you make a mistake and have 5 of a gem desperately trying to figure out where you messed up becomes a panic. Also with this current set focusing on 3 color decks color-swapping in limited between games is also pretty harsh due to having to click 30-80 times and waste 20-30 seconds of your sideboard time just removing cards from your deck before getting to the actual sideboarding.

      With the changes to the timeout rules that happened in the past year it might be worth Hex revisiting the amount of sideboard time they give players. MTGO offers up 3 minutes and that game is less complex when it comes to sideboarding.

      Am I alone in this? Most matches don't run into this, obviously. I do think this change would offer up, particularly in constructed, some more interesting sideboarding options as well as some more interesting matches.

      The post was edited 1 time, last by JinsakuAjo ().

    • I think that if you're going to be playing a socket deck in immortal that is doing a lot resocketing post-board, I don't think it's unreasonable to require you to have memorized your reserves plan for each matchup and utilize the arrow keys to swap gems quickly. Doing so, you can easily swap out even dozens of gems and a couple cards in the two minutes given with at least 30 seconds to spare. Extending the reserves time means forcing the opponent to wait up to an extra minute in between games and I don't think that time should be given to you if you've willingly chosen to play a deck that you know takes a lot of clicks to reserve but haven't put in the effort to memorize your reserves plan.

      As for limited, maybe this is an unpopular opinion among those playing a lot of the current limited format, but I don't think people should be able to color-swap in the reserves in limited. In fact, I don't think you should even be allowed to have more than 1 or 2 extra of each basic in your reserves.

      Overall, I think two minutes is enough and adding an extra minute means your opponent has to wait longer for the actual gameplay to resume.


      What I would like to see, though this would take extra engineering, is the ability to save reserve-states so you can just load up a pre-built reserve state and then make minor adjustments from there if necessary.

    • the timer and interface is obviously insufficient for anyone who has played an immortal deck with lots of gems.

      brought this up long ago. it was ignored.

      you can troll a player and run down the entire chess clock, but you can't actually play the game as it was designed

    • Adding even 30 seconds to reserves would be pretty helpful as every second counts there.

      Because of the current trend to decrease long swiss tournaments, game time is not as big of an issue these days. With something as core as the game clock though, baby steps would be the way to go. Minus two minutes in order to encourage faster play without favoring aggro vs control. We also have to be mindful that there are players with disabilities that cause them to execute moves a bit slower so we don't want to disadvantage them either.