Minion Master's Monday - King Puff, Money and Demons

Minion Masters!

Did you have a nice weekend? We sure hope so! Our weekend was about rumors and guesses. But also about tournament prizes & votings. Today is Minion Master's Monday and we have a few topics to talk about. Again, it's about rumors, guesses, prizes and votings.

Get a partner, Masters!

Because King Puff Cup 13 gives you a total of 225 reasons to do so! Yes, you got that right: King Puff Cup is officially sponsored by BetaDwarf Entertainment with prize money for every single tournament! So far, the King Puff Cup staff decided to distribute $225 amongst the Top4 players:

• 1st place: $100
• 2nd place: $60
• 3rd place: $40
• 4th place: $25

King Puff Cup 13 will take place on December 2nd at 14 UTC. This time it's a 2vs2 tournament without any restrictions. You and your partner are free to play whatever you desire most. Please make sure to read the official announcement for all the information and rules you need, as well as for the link in order to sign up and compete for a prize pool of $225.

Changes on the horizon

While prize money for the King Puff Cup is a huge announcement, our comunity was actively guessing about changes to a specific Minion, the Demon Warrior. She was called overpowered, some of you thought she might get removed. To clear that up: we will not change her gameplay-wise. The announced changes are a visual overhaul that also involves her animations. To quote UncleOwnage at this point, the visuals and animations were "crappy".

What's your interests?

Last Friday, we asked you to vote for content you're interested in. So far, the leading part of the community (29 percent) wants to see kind of an ongoing AMA called "Ask The Dwarves". Another 22 percent wants to see more and larger interviews, followed by 20 percent voted for "Deck of the Week".

Just to make sure: this poll runs until December 1st at 10am CET. So make sure to vote for content you're interested in!

You can find a brief explanation of the topics in our last Community Happenings.

Minion Masters Card Design Contest

210 submissions are too much? Not for ThatSprite and Sinilil! Both were discussing every single card idea live on Twitch last Friday. It took a while, but they did it! If you have 5 hours to spend and want to hear their recommendations and thoughts, here's the VOD.

And don't forget to vote! The first voting of the Minion Masters Card Design Contest in cooperation with Zgriptor will run until November 30th, 10am CET.

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Now, we wish you a successful week. We also want to encourage you to grab your friend and participate in the first King Puff Cup with prize money! Still looking for a partner? Have a look at our official Discord. The #tournament channel is waiting for you.

Cheers from BetaDwarf

Community Happenings - Did you already vote?

Minion Master at the Xbox Booth in France

Welcome to our Community Happenings! Did you have an exciting week? We for sure hope so! In the office, the team was busy like usual and while Monday and Tuesday were quiet, Wednesday came with a lot of work after we updated the game. Like you most probably noticed, we experienced some server issues. Seems like the Masters needed some extra time to get ready ;)

Minion Masters Card Design Contest

Yesterday, we started phase 2 of the Minion Masters Card Design Contest in cooperation with Zgriptor. Phase 2 is the 1st voting with a mega poll containing all 210 unique and valid submissions. The voting will run for 7 days until November 30th at 11am CET! During that time, every community member is able to vote for as many cards as desired. Please note, that every respondent will be required to sign in to Google and submitting the votes is limited to 1 respond per user. So please make sure you voted for every card you wanted to prior to submitting your votes.

How it works

Since the thread on the Steam forums and Reddit felt a bit complicated to read, we copied every valid submission into a spreadsheet, which will serve as a tool for you to see all the essentials of every card idea. The poll itself does only contain the card names. Here's a brief instruction how the voting works:

1. Take your time and look out for interesting cards ideas in the spreadhseet
2. On the poll page, press CTRL + F and copy the card name into the search field
3. Hit Enter
4. Vote for the card idea
5. Repeat the steps for multiple votes

I want to see the 210 submissions! → to the spreadsheet
Let me vote! → to the poll

The results can be seen anytime!

After 7 days, we will close the voting and start a new one. Phase 3 will start with 9 cards (the 3 most wanted card ideas of each category) and pitch them against each other to determine the winning card idea. The categories were: Melee, Ranged and Flying.

Phase 3 will run for 5 additional days. Watch out for announcements on the Steam forums, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and Discord.

Another voting starts

Like mentioned in our last Minion Master's Monday, we will start another voting today. In fact, the voting started with the release of this blog post. What we want to know from you? Simple:

In order to deliver you content you are interested in, we developed some topic ideas. The topic ideas are as follows:

1. Deck of the Week: The Deck of the Week would be a randomized choice from our side. We would choose a Top20 player or a submitted deck (including at least 3 replays against different opponents) and feature it in our Friday blog posts. That format includes the deck, a brief explanation of the player about the deck and its cards as well as replays or videos.
2. Twitch Clips: This is more an addition to the Community Happenings. We would love to see you contribute to the content we present. Therefore, you would be able to send us Twitch Clips and a brief explanation. We would publish them on our blog and mention you, of course! In the end, these clips could be presented as something like "Best Plays of the Week" or "Funniest Minion Master Moments".
3. Interviews: Our interviews were rather short. The reason for that is, that we do not want to publish a longread every week. If you want to see longer and more detailed interviews, vote for it! We would then publish them as an extra blog post.
4. Ask the Dwarves: We know that you want to know as much as possible about Minion Masters and what's going on behind the scenes. Since we cannot answer every single thread on the Steam forums or on Reddit and the team is too busy for regular Developer Streams or AMA's, we thought "Ask the Dwarves" could be a cool idea! You would send your questions to Erythais and every Friday, he would select 3-5 questions to be answered in the blog post.
5. Player of the Month: The Player of the Month would be voted by you! In the last week of the season, we would start a survey to determine the player, who gets featured on our blog! That format would include an interview, used decks for the season, explanations, replays/videos and so on.

The poll will run for 7 days and you can vote for multiple topics. More than one respond per person is not allowed! The results of the poll will be presented next Friday.

The results can be seen anytime!

Here you go for the poll!

Since we got you covered for the weekend and next week, we feel that coming to an end for that weeks Community Happenings is reasonable. Have a nice weekend everybody and don't forget to bring the flying arenas to life!

Cheers from BetaDwarf

Minion Master's Monday - Announcements and Votings

It's Monday, the day after King Puff Cup 12 and also only a few more days to go until the next patch and the start of the votings for our Minion Masters Card Design Contest in cooperation with Zgripper - sorry - Zgriptor. We always appreciate Tengs (a Minion Masters addict and caster for the King Puff Cup) and his very own pronounciations ;)

Only 3 more days...

...until our Card Design Contest moves on to the next phase. You still have some time left to submit your card ideas on the Steam forums or Reddit. On Wednesday, November 22nd we will lock the threads as soon as the patch notes are live. From that point on, we cannot accept any further submission for the contest. The votings will start on Thursday, November 23rd at 10am CET. So watch out for the link and further instructions after patch day.

King Puff Cup and prize money

Yesterday, King Puff Cup 12 was streamed live on Twitch by everyone's favorite Dipshit and Tengs. We saw intense games and while some of the big names of the scene couldn't make it, the participants showed us superb gameplay. In the end, Dirion managed to beat Videogamer77 in the grand finals. Zgriptor managed to grab the third place.

That brings us to the current standings:

Congratulations to the winners and a big thanks to all participants, viewers and the KPC staff!

Dipshit also announced the King Puff Cup as officially sponsored by BetaDwarf! Yes, you got that right! Every King Puff Cup will come with prize money in the future. The exact amount will be announced by the King Puff Cup staff together with the next official announcement of KPC 13.

By the way: if you were unable to watch the King Puff Cup live, yesterday - here's your VOD!

We need your decision, Masters!

Before we come to an end for this blog post, we have one more announcement to make. On Friday, November 24th at 10am CET, we will start another poll. As we mentioned several times before, we want our amazing community closer to us in certain areas. One of these areas is our blog here. In order to deliver you more enjoyable content, we decided to just ask you what you want! As simple as that.

We will start a poll with several topics to choose from. You can decide what interests you most and just tell us. Most of the topics will be presented in our Community Happenings, because they wouldn't fit in our Monday posts. Among other options, some topics will include weekly deck presentations, Twitch clips and randomized interviews ;)

That's all for today, Minion Masters! This blog post is a bit shorter than usual, but several happenings during the week will make up for that. Wednesday patch, Party Girl Milloween along with other skins, Card Design Contest phase 2 and your opportunity to choose content you like to see on our blog.

Cheers from BetaDwarf

Community Happenings – King Puff, Parties and Maniacs

Wow... what do we have here? Community Happenings on Friday... let's see: King Puff Cup, news from the Halloween party (oh boy, Milloween is real serious about King Puff), an interview... we don't know about you, but with that much stuff in one blog post, we should really get things going!

King Puff Cup retuuurnsss!

Yes, you heard us right! King Puff Cup 12 is around the corner and this time, the KPC staff decided to use the Metabreaker format again. Last time, that format caused a lot of discussions amongst Masters, because they are not allowed to utilize just any unit they desire. On Saturday, November 18th at 4pm CET, Masters all over the universe will battle against each other for over 5,000 Rubies and 50,000 Gold!

The complete information, rules and the link for signing up can be found here: Official King Puff Cup 12 Announcement

Show us your skills - we see you on the flying arenas!

Let's get ready for some serious fun, Masters!

We don't know about you, but we felt like Milloween had to wait for too long to be seen. She can try whatever she wants, King Puff just doesn't seem interested in her. Lately, it came to her ears that King Puff likes parties. His Halloween party for instance, was a huge success. Pictures showed him, as well as Stormbringer, in a brand new fashion. It paid out, because Stormbringer is the winner of the most popular outfit! Puffs all over the kingdom are desperately looking to get a selfie with the Storm Ranger:

Not only the highest range, but also the most popular outfit!

Milloween studied the news and reports from that event and decided to leave her mage robe at home and hop in her party dress instead:

Milloween in her brand new outfit - let's see if King Puff will be impressed this time.

Let's see how that turns out! There are already rumours, that King Puff dislikes her favorite music...

Some Masters want it random...

NuclearGoo is known for playing Draft more than any other game mode. Another dedicated Draft player is PakoMANIAC. Since Draft is not nearly featured as often as the Ranked modes, we decided to ask a few questions.

Thanks for having you, PakoMANIAC. Most players might know you from moderating the King Puff Cups. For those who don’t, would you introduce yourself please?

Hello everyone. Yes I'm helping out the KPC team with moderating, but otherwise players know me as the “Prowler lover” or as a certain individual called me the “ProwlerMANIAC”. That's mostly because since the introduction of the Prowler, I always had an avatar of him – the latest a King Prowler sitting on the master tower haha. Otherwise everyone calls me just “Pako” which is also my real life nickname. I might be also known to prioritize playing draft over ranked or 2v2 modes.

You don’t hide your love for Apep and RNG cards. What makes Apep special for you and why do you prefer random outcomes when playing a card?

I'd rather say I don't hide my liking of those – my love is only for the Prowler haha. But yes, I do like playing Apep combined with the RNG cards. Apep overall is probably the most all-around master who can work with any deck. He also gives you 2 random free cards, which can always come handy, no matter what you got. But if you obediently worship Apep the Serpent God – like he demands to – and believe in the heart of the cards, Apep will grant you the best card to counter you enemy (not always the case!!).

I like playing RNG cards mainly because they're fun to play. As I like to say: “You don't know what you're going to play until you actually play it”. All RNG cards also give you a mana advantage over the opponent, so if you're extra lucky – or just have the RNG Gods favour you, then you start gaining more and more value from them and win because of the sheer mana advantage. Sometimes though, they do not give anything useful after all, so you just lose haha.

Let’s talk about Draft. As far as we know, it’s your favorite game mode. Why Draft over Ranked?

Yes indeed, draft is my favourite game mode. Draft is also dependent on how lucky you are while creating your deck from the choices you've been given and shows how well you can adapt your play-style around the deck you just drafted. Players who mainly play Draft might be better at adapting than those who mainly play ranked, solely because of the variety of decks they are playing. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that Draft players are better, but they (we) are certainly more used to play all kinds of decks – even bad ones haha.

I believe it's just a more fun game mode where you play the drafted deck from the minimal 3 games (losing all 3 first games) to the maximal 14 games (12 wins and 2 loses) and then have to change the deck again. Draft is also more rewarding than ranked if you're good at it, even though it has an entry fee of 750 gold.

New players often struggle in Draft mode. As a new player, should I even play Draft? And what’s your  suggestion for more success?

Yes, it is the case that new players struggle in Draft. Mainly because they don't know the cards well yet and are still figuring them out. In my opinion Draft might be the best opportunity for newer players to just that -  try out and learn all the cards in the game, as they can play them without actually having them in their collection, so I do strongly recommend new players to try out draft. They might not come far and will probably have some issues getting more than 3 wins at the beginning, but the more you play, the more your understanding of all cards and the more you're capable of adapting to the deck you've drafted. Also, if you make it far enough in draft (about 7 wins and more), you can always expect to profit from the rewards as well.

Suggestion for more success, hmm that's a tough one. Always try to include some spells and anti-air as you might struggle a lot without them. For example, if you get a first pick between Plasma Marines, Cleaver and Warrior, I'd usually go with the Marines, because if you're really unlucky, they might be the only anti-air unit you'll be able to draft, meaning you will really struggle against air units. The same goes for spells. Also try to keep your average mana value under 4. Heavy decks usually struggle in draft as well, as you cant always answer your opponents cards in time, the only exception to that might be if you have Mordar as your master, since resurrecting big minions always gives you an edge over the opponent.

Which cards would you never choose in Draft? And what cards are auto-includes?

The card I would certainly never choose is Call to Arms. It might be a completely dead card if you don't have any buildings in your deck. I also avoid choosing the Scrat Tank and Demon Warrior. While the Scrat Tank may have 600 health and be immune to damage as long nothing is near him, I still don't see the value in including the card and the Demon Warrior only shines if you have a really good, fast cycle deck, otherwise you're more or less only wasting mana on it.

My personal auto-includes are Plasma Marines, Succubus and Legionnaires. A good spell like a Fireball or Daggerfall are also very much needed if you get the choice.

A lot of insights from a Draft player. Thanks for having you again, PakoMANIAC! If you want to leave some shout-outs, feel free to do so.

Thank you for having me Erythais! I would like to shout-out to the whole King Puff Cup staff for hosting all those tournaments and letting me be a small part of the team, to my favourite Minion Masters streamers VideoGamer77, Salbei and ShadyHobos, to my biggest Draft rivals I play the most against – NuclearGoo, Rikka and Tony, and to all the other people of the amazing Minion Masters community. I'd like to thank the developers of BetaDwarf for creating this game I fell in love so much, for listening and working with the community to make the game even better.

I'd also like to recommend everyone to buy and play their other games: Forced and Forced Showdown.

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That's all, Masters! Good luck to everyone participating this weekend and we see each other on Sunday, when the King Puff Cup will be casted live on Twitch!

Cheers from BetaDwarf

Minion Master's Monday

Even without tournaments, weekends can be enjoyable. Hard to believe after all the last busy weekends. Anyway, we enjoyed the weekend and took a closer look at over 60 submission already made in the Minion Masters Card Design Contest in cooperation with Zgriptor! Ever heard of the mighty Alpha Dwarf with his "pretty big axe and lots of gigantic muscles"? Or the Umbrella Warrior, who's immune to flying Minions, but can't keep up with the strenght of a normal Warrior? No? Well, then maybe you should have a look and submit your card idea on the Steam forums or the official Subreddit.

"What the **** were you thinking, when changing..."

Last Friday, we decided to gather your feedback on our latest changes to Dragon Nest on a separate thread. Not that we didn't listen before! It just seems like some community members don't feel heard or valued enough, so that we take their feedback and suggestions into consideration. While this is not true, UncleOwnage spoke for the whole team, when he said:

The issue appears when we receive a large amount of feedback and very strong knee-jerk reactions, which can sometimes be difficult to navigate, thus making it hard to identify the actual problem and find a constructive way to move forward. [...] discussions went from being heated and confrontational to calm and constructive. This made it a lot easier for us to work with.

Your feedback is valuable to us and your suggestions are worth to be considered. Like UncleOwnage said, the issue is to identify the actual problem within highly emotional outbreaks. We do not judge you for that, because we're aware of the possible ramifications caused by changes to games. But we want to emphasize, that even the most valuable feedback can be easily overlooked, when all the actual valuable data is hidden beneath unstructured, unconstructive and emotionally driven statements.

At this point, I want to quote UncleOwnage once more, because he spoke for the whole team again, when he said:

You, the community, are an invaluable source of feedback for our game, and we’re making the game for you to enjoy.
You’re also the ones who play the game the most, so we are open to the fact that we can make mistakes which you can help us correct.

We don't want you to hide your frustration or tell us we did amazing, if we messed things up. But you can make our work a lot easier, when you give us structured, constructive and calm feedback as well as suggestions on how to improve a certain issue. That way, we can identify problems faster and work on solutions hand in hand with you!

What's going on in the office?

A lot of work. Currently, the team is busy with further balance changes, the third Expedition, Spectator mode, bug fixes, quality of life improvements, a new UI and scaling up the competitive scene around Minion Masters. At this point, we don't want to go into detail about some of the mentioned tasks, while others speak for themselves. But we can assure you, that we'll not hesitate to give you insights and previews, whenever we have something shareable.

Speaking of shareable information: our latest patch introduced Supplies being converted to Gold after reaching the cap of 20.000 Supplies. The ratio for that is 1:3.5 for those who were wondering.

And UncleOwnage already leaked the planned changes to Spirit Infusion...

We want to come to an end for this Minion Master's Monday. This week, we have the usual patch day on Wednesday, the ongoing Minion Masters Card Design Contest in cooperation with Zgriptor and on Saturday the next King Puff Cup! So stay tuned and watch out for announcements.

Cheers from BetaDwarf

Community Happenings – After fire and fury comes... creativity!

We had many exciting weeks, from the end of September all the way to November. This weekend however, is the first weekend without a tournament since October 21st! And we’re not even done with polishing and scaling up the competitive environment or implementing essentials like Spectator mode. So, all the competitiveness comes from our community – from you! That’s something, we’re really thankful for and you guys can be proud of.

Creativity, Minion Masters and you

Last Wednesday, we officially started the Minion Masters Card Design Contest in cooperation with Zgriptor! Yes, you’re able to create your very own Minion, submit it and see if the community likes it. We’re accepting submissions until November 22nd, 10am CET. After that, we will start a big poll for 7 days to determine the Top3 submissions for each of the following categories:

• Melee
• Ranged
• Flying

As soon as we know the Top3 of each category, we pitch them against each other in another poll. After 5 days, we will have our winner, the most wanted card and the Developers have some work to do. Please note, that BetaDwarf has the final say on all cards and their implementation. In order to make our task easier, you should try to provide as much information as possible. We’re especially interested in the concept (how it’s going to look, rarity, mana cost, maybe some backstory), mechanics (special effects, abilities) and stats (Health, Targets, Movement Speed, Attack Speed, Damage, Range etc.) - and obvious counters.

Another important information: everyone is allowed to participate. But no matter how many ideas you have, we cannot accept more than 3 submissions per category!

You want to have all the important information always at your fingertips? Here’s a quick cheatsheet Zgriptor made for you:

How you submit your ideas? Here you go:

• Official Steam thread
• Official Reddit thread

King Puff is looking for his next champion

Although not announced yet, the next King Puff Cup is not far ahead anymore. According to FFA & Dipshit, interested participants should prepare themselves until next weekend. We don't want to spoiler too much, but they also told us, that they want to use a well known format again! Last time, it caused a lot of discussion...

However, we cannot provide you with more information, yet. FFA, Dipshit and the King Puff Cup crew are still preparing the tournament and the rules, so watch out for further announcement in the next few days on Discord, Reddit and Steam.

This week, we keep it nice and short. However, it's not the length of a text, but the content within that matters! At the end of this blog post, once again we want to thank our whole community for supporting us, all the dedicated Streamers & YouTubers for their effort, card designers for the submissions & each and everyone for playing Minion Masters!

Cheers from BetaDwarf

Minion Master’s Monday - How to become a Minion?

We had another tournament weekend entertaining us with finest Minion Masters gameplay. King Puff Cup 11 took place last Saturday, the live stream by everyone’s favorite Dipshit joined by Tengs happened yesterday live on Twitch. Congratulations to our winners Memfisto (1st place), Some boxes (2nd place) and Dirion (3rd place)! Thanks to everyone participating and watching the stream, as well as to the King Puff Cup staff! You missed the show? Well, then here's your VOD!

A Contest about creativity

An extended Halloween event with two exclusive skins is enough, right? We didn’t think so and that’s why we present to you the Minion Masters Card Design Contest in cooperation with Zgriptor!

Yes, you’ve heard us right – YOU can now become a Minion in Minion Masters and have the privilege of serving King Puff with fresh mana daily! C-SAR will love the show!
Although, that’s not physically achievable, we’ll have settled the next best thing for you: you get to design and submit your card ideas for our brand new contest… and the best thing is, your card may actually get implemented into the game!

Sounds cool, right? Let’s jump into the instructions to see how you can take part in this:

    • From Wednesday 8th on, you’ll have 2 weeks for you to think and carefully design your card. After that it goes into a big poll which takes 1 week and everyone is able to vote on your submitted cards – don’t try to cheat the system though, BetaDwarf has the final say on all cards!
    • Try to give as much information on your card as possible, we’re especially interested in the concept (how it’s going to look, rarity, mana cost, maybe some backstory), mechanics (special effects, abilities) and stats (Health, Targets, Movement Speed, Attack Speed, Damage, Range etc.) Remember: The more information you provide, the better the community and the developers can decide whether it’s worth to vote for your card or not!
    • Make sure your idea isn’t too complex though, and remember to ensure the card text fits and makes sense. Also, consider using an already existing Minion archetype if possible. If your card idea just needs a Warrior type Minion, is it then possible to use that Warrior as a basic concept? The less archetypes in the game, the easier it is for players to understand. But sometimes new archetypes are needed for sure.
    • Ensure your card has obvious counters, such as a Warrior not being able to hit air.

We want to give you an overview on how the contest works again:

    1. From Wednesday 8th on, you’ll have 2 weeks for you to think and carefully design your card.
    2. After that, every card goes into one big poll that lasts for 1 week.
    3. After all that, we begin the final voting period in which we pit against each other the best 3 cards from each category and this final voting process (5 days duration) will determine our grand winner that gets to join us in the great pan galactic warfare. Please note: BetaDwarf has the final say and provided card information is subject to change.

Wait! Categories? Yes! The card categories allowed for this contest are Melee, Ranged and Flying! Except that, everything else is just limited by your own imagination!

On Wednesday, we will create a thread on the Steam Suggestions subforum and Reddit for you to let us know your card designs. What out for additional information with the patch notes!

Balance changes on the horizon

We don’t want to go into too much detail right here, but on Wednesday 8th, there’s more than our newest Community event happening. We looked into balance for some time now and will present to you surprising changes. One of them involves Morgrul, who will see a change in mana costs. Others Raging Reinforcements, so you see the outcome of your next usage. There's also changes to Volco's Perk 1 and everyone's beloved Dragon Nest... so stay tuned for our Wednesday’s patch!

ESL Go4 Series

At the end of September, we started a voting regarding the ESL Go4 Series. The question was simple:

Do you want the ESL Go4 Series before or after the official release?

The votings ended about 2 weeks ago and we discussed the results internally.

We expected 500 votes and almost reached that goal! Thanks for everyone participating! As you can see for yourself, there's no clear winner in the results. Players, who voted for the first option are only 8% (or 42 votes) ahead of players, who voted for the second option. 24% don't care, but would compete. Our decision is to wait with the ESL Go4 Series. We saw larger interest for the King Puff Cups and The Master's Challenge, but not enough to represent Minion Masters at the ESL with large numbers of participants, continuously. That and a fairly close voting brought us to this decision.

What does that mean now? Is the ESL over for Minion Masters? Not at all! We maintain contact to the ESL Project Management and they assured us multiple times, that we can enter the ESL whenever we feel ready for it. As we mentioned in our news back at the end of September: we will just do another poll later on.

That being said, we want to come to an end. You’re well informed for this week and we’re looking forward to your card ideas, your reactions to the balance changes and another week with an amazing community!

Cheers from BetaDwarf

Community Happenings – Devils, Duels and Games Weeks

Another week ends. To be honest with you, it just feels like Eventober turned into Eventember. A new month, but still a lot of happenings. Halloween event extended until November 15th, the hunt for Devil King Puff began last Wednesday, The Master’s Challenge brought us an amazing and thrilling tournament! And now? Well, we just keep on going!

King Puff wants entertainment again!

Memfisto won The Master’s Challenge just 6 days ago, while the next tournament is already in the sign up phase. It’s time for the next King Puff Cup! The tournament will take place on November 4th at 2pm CET. This time, the KPC staff decided to force players to use specific cards. Players will be allowed to use all cards and Masters excluding one copy of the FORCED cards. Each Master has an assigned FORCED card and Masters can't use another Master's FORCED card. Players may change their deck and Master freely in between games, as long as they use exactly one copy of the required Master’s Forced Card and do not include another Master’s Forced card. For example, a Volco deck must use exactly one copy of Dragon’s Nest.

For the complete rules, an overview of the FORCED cards and for signing up, here you go!

King Puff Cup 11 comes with a prize pool of over 5,000 Rubies and 50,000 Gold.

Paris Games Week? Yes, but not without Minion Masters!

Since November 1st, the Paris Games Week powered by Coca Cola has been attracting a lot of visitors. There are a lot of games represented, like Player Unknown’s Battleground, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, Destiny 2 and… Minion Masters!

We’re officially represented at the Xbox Booth! Interested visitors can play Minion Masters on the Xbox and are supported by the staff on the spot. The Paris Games Week is still running until November 5th.

Questions to another Master

We try to talk a lot to our community. Sometimes during talks it happens, that we have specific questions to some Masters. This week, Zgriptor was such a case. And that’s why we had an interview with him.

Thanks for having you, Zgriptor! For everyone who doesn’t know you, would you please introduce yourself?

Hi, thank you for having me! I’m just a regular dude who happens to sometimes make a couple of Minion Masters videos on YouTube and I sometimes stream for a small, exclusive audience – shoutout to Nightbot for always watching my stream, love you man!

As you can see, I also ooze high quality non-cringe humor so that’s a plus!

On a serious note now, I’ve been playing Minion Masters since December 2016 and sometime during May-June 2017 I figured I could do some tutorial/beginner guide type of videos since almost no one did that. I began by focusing on the Draft mode first because I thought that that provided more of a challenge for newer players – what Masters to pick, how to build your deck, how to make use of cards that are normally not played in constructed mode and so on.

You published several YouTube videos in the past. Some of them are meant to help new players with the Expedition encounters. That also means, you spent a lot of time in Expeditions. What do you think about our new Expeditions and how do you feel they help new players?

Expeditions... this is a tricky subject to discuss at this point in the game (and for the readers, try to keep in mind that Minion Masters is still in Early Access). Basically, the general idea of having many themed ‘areas’ to explore and giving the player the option of where to go to try and find a certain card is good. “I’m a new player and I want to build a Demon Warrior deck – guess I’ll go to the Demon-themed expedition then so that I can find the card and not have to rely on 100 Power Token spins to get it.”

The problem right now is that there aren’t all those expeditions available and thus new players have to rely both on tokens and on the two existing expeditions to get new cards and that’s probably harder to do since the recent economic changes that basically converted gold into supplies. Don’t get me wrong, the newest feature which lets you choose in expeditions if you want to receive the card that you found or to receive its value in gold is really good. So, once again, when there will be more expeditions added I think that it is going to be easier to get the cards that you want compared to getting them from the Power Token system.

Zgriptor, we saw you competing in King Puff Cup 10 and The Master’s Challenge. What are your thoughts on the current state of competitive Minion Masters and what would you like to see in the future regarding competitive events?

Another tricky question. Anyway, as probably many have said before me I think that the game sometimes takes the shape of a more complicated rock-paper-scissors match. There are some decks to which you absolutely must bring 2-3 hard counter cards otherwise you have no chance of winning (let’s take Lightning Bolt -> Succubus Buff decks and Defenso Chopper -> Dragon Nest decks as examples). I’m not saying that there should be no counters but I think that the game would benefit if people were able to run more “all around” decks and rely on smart plays and efficient trades and pushes to win instead of “oh, I queued into X deck and I don’t have Y and Z counters, might as well concede”.

In that sense, I find more enjoyable tournaments that have some “meta-breaker” rules, like KPC 10 or the upcoming one that FORCES you to use a certain card. Those rules will most certainly bring more variety to deck building and maybe give some less used cards a chance to shine.

In the future I’d most likely like to see some new and “wacky” rules for the tournaments, something beyond simple card restrictions – how would a format in which you get to build half of your deck and your opponent builds the other half of your deck sound? Or maybe, everyone has to include Gax and 3x Blood Imps in their decks, see what comes out of that.

We had some discussions on the Steam forums lately about “underpowered” cards. What’s the most underrated card in your opinion?

For me, the most underrated card has to be Infiltration. It has a huge potential as a finisher in Draft, especially with Settsu but it should work fine on the other Masters too. In constructed however, you never see this card, and why would you, actually? You can run Beam of Doom as a more reliable finisher or just the ol’ regular Plasma Marines (cards that which might not be offered to you in draft).
So yeah, that’s my underrated card. Not exactly underpowered but it doesn’t fit in the constructed meta.

One last question, Zgriptor: where do you see Minion Masters in two years, based on today?

Overall the game has a great potential but let’s make some predictions:
    • new game modes: maybe something in the form of Tavern Brawls from Hearthstone, maybe a Free For All mode or the elusive 2v2 Draft mode!
    • since you guys are already planning on implementing a spectate mode, I think that’s gonna naturally lead into an in-game tournament mode.
    • and finally, there’ll probably be big card expansion packs (think “Curse of Scrattramas”, “Puffs vs Scrats”, “Blackdrone Mountain with Scratnaros the Scratlord”) BetaDwarf’s note: At this point we kicked Zgriptor out for blatantly ripping off other games.

Thanks for the interview, Zgriptor! If you want to leave some shout-outs, feel free to do so.

Thanks once again for having me! I’m just gonna give a general shout-out to the Minion Masters Community – be you a streamer, youtuber, or just a regular player!
Also, just as a small teaser, there might be some really cool Minion Masters stuff happening soon. Or there might not. Who knows? I certainly don’t. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet! Or should you believe? “What’s he talking about?” - you’re thinking right now. The world may never know... OR WILL IT KNOW?

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Well... we think that's enough for this week. Enjoy your weekend everybody and shake the ground of the flying arenas on Saturday, when the next King Puff Cup takes place.


Cheers from BetaDwarf