Leagues were very popular during our Attack of the Artifacts launch week. What’s coming next?
Monkey Magic
We’ve been working hard on four new leagues that will be available for play very soon. My favourite of the bunch so far is Monkey Magic. You can find full details on it here, but I’ll give a short summary.
Monkey Magic is a fixed deck league (where we build the monsters and decks) that lets you play around with the steal mechanic, otherwise only available to monsters. The two key cards are variants of Steal and Pickpocket. Why variants? The originals do 5 damage, but the new ones just steal a card without doing any damage.
Each side has two thieving monkeys but also gets a maple tree. The tree is slow, but tough and hard-hitting. The trick is to use your monkeys’ agility: dodges, blocks, step attacks, and cantrip moves to get in and try to steal the tree’s powerful cards. But, of course, the tree can fight back with nasty cards like Maze Of The Mind, Entangling Roots and Reactive Trip. 
It’s a fun battle with lots of dramatic moments but also a ton of interesting strategic thinking. We hope you enjoy it when it goes live later this week.
League Prizes and Pricing
Many of you have been wondering what the league prizes will be and how leagues will be priced after the free launch week promotion. This first batch of leagues will cost 50 pizza to enter and will pay out prizes including brand new figures, chests and pizza. The top four players will all get Epic chests and even those finishing last will get two Magnificent Chests! In addition if you come first or second you’ll win your pizza back and even the third placed finisher will get 25 pizza.
Here’s a full sample prize list for Monkey Madness. It includes the brand new foil Gromgrik figure. Gromgrik sparkles and glows in game! Don’t forget that you also get another Epic chest if you win a league and already have the figure.
(Edit: updated and improved first prize – 75 pizza instead of 50!)
| Rank | Chests | Pizza | Figure |
| 1 | 1 x Epic Artifact Chest  |
75 
| Gromgrik |
| 2 | 1 x Epic Artifact Chest |
50
| |
| 3 | 1 x Epic Artifact Chest |
25 |
|
| 4 | 1 x Epic Artifact Chest |
||
| 5 | 2 x Magnificent Artifact Chest  |
We’ll announce the full list of new leagues and the league schedule in the next few days!
May 6th, 2014 at 3:36 pm
Will the old leagues ever come back? It’s great that there are 4 new ones, and I think it’s good that you’re not just keeping the same rotation but charging pizza (because a lot of the people who would pay for a chance at those prizes has already received said prizes), but I also think the old leagues are still a valuable asset. They could be run in rotation with these, or after these, or something. I just hope they come back.
May 6th, 2014 at 5:11 pm
/me aggrees with Flax. Im missing geo!
May 6th, 2014 at 5:55 pm
Hi,
Great that leagues are coming back, the fact that they are off for the weekend and then some is surprising. The ‘old’ leagues really deserve some more time on the board and the gap a week after launch feels awkward, why not just add price tags and leave them for a week if you are developing new content, c’mon. Overall – good work on the expansion but sloppy in terms of marketing, change management and building/keeping the interest of players.
You could so easily have launched a league every day or two for the first week with on-server announcements and mailing action to the registered people. Extra prizes like ptp league entry tickets for the first week to ensure p2p leagues keep rolling at launch.. gradual introduction of p2p leagues while keeping a few free weekly or bi-weekly ones, after all it’s not supposed to be a pay2win game… etc etc.
Aaaanyway… Looking forward to trying the new leagues.
May 6th, 2014 at 11:04 pm
Yes, the “old” leagues will definitely be back in the future.