Apprentice sealed timeshift bug

ColdBeer · Joined: 05 Jan 2006 Posts: 89

If I draft a Time spiral sealed in apprentice, no timeshifted cards appear. At first glance this seemed to be a problem with the distro file. The file sets boosters at R1,U3,C11 and tournament packs at R3,U10,C32. I tried changing these to R1,U3,C10,S1 and R3,U10,C29,S3 but it still did not work. I'm no programmer so at this point I am at a loss as to what the problem is. Any chance of getting this fixed?

Thanks, ColdBeer

Concepcion · Joined: 29 Jun 2006 Posts: 85

If you just wish to practice building Sealed decks, I have a temporary solution. Set up a NetDraft game with 5 packs of Time Spiral, and with you as the only player. Draft all the cards and that's your sealed deck to practice building.

Alternatively, you can set up multiple drafts with 5 or 10 second picks and let it goofgrab all your picks. I did this with 5 drafts running at the same time. It took about 10 minutes to draft up 5 Sealed Pools to practice with. You could even run 10 or 20 or more drafts simultaneously to create your sealed pools all at once.

Just an idea until Apprentice or MWS allows creation of Sealed Decks with Time Spiral.

Edit: You have to choose a new port for each draft you run simultaneously, and you need to add basic land and save each deck at the end of each draft. Now that I think about it, the whole process took more like 15-20 minutes.

cyprus_shade · Joined: 27 Apr 2005 Posts: 4

Has anyone solved this problem or are you still encountering it with TS sealeds? For me, the boosters don't have Timeshifted cards either. Any ideas on how to get the Generator to include them too? I hear MWS has Timeshifted packs. Couldn't we do something like that with Apprentice just by changing the size of the Time Spiral and Planar Chaos packs and adding Time Spiral-Timeshifted and Planar Chaos-Planeshifted packs to simulate the real thing?

sigma969 · Joined: 25 Feb 2007 Posts: 1

I ran into this problem as well. Unfortunately, it seems that Apprentice only supports 3 different rarities in the distribution: R U C.
HOWEVER, it is possible to get the correct distribution for sealed deck generation, if the shifted cards are setup as their own set and then included. You have to change the TS distribution as well as this new set's. I wasn't aware MWS had something similar, but this is how I had made things generate correctly for me back when I was doing testing for TS sealed release event.

This requires 3 steps (the usual disclaimer: this is for info, not responsible for problems... etc.)
1) Setup a new set in EXPAN.DAT. This must have a unique 2 character abbreviation. E.g.
PU-TimeshiftedTS
2) Generate a CARDINFO.DAT file where all of the timeshifted cards are included as RARE in this new expansion. E.g.
PU-R
NOTE: The CARDINFO.DAT file has a specific format so manually editing it doesn't work if the format is altered in such a way that it becomes invalid. It should be generated. I don't know if info on this belongs in this thread or a different one.
3) Modify the DISTRO.DAT file to change the card distributions for both Time Spiral and this new set.
a) Instead of 45 cards in a Time Spiral Starter, we say there are only 42 cards. And in a booster we say there are only 14 cards. This is as follows:
[TS]
Starter=R3,U10,C29
Booster=R1,U3,C10
b) THEN (the trick!) we setup boosters for our new set with only ONE card in each, a rare (since all of the Purple cards have the same rarity this is correct):
[PU]
Booster=R1,U0,C0

So now when you want to do a Time Spiral Sealed Deck you include:
* Time Spiral Starter(s) [42 cards in each]
* Time Spiral Booster(s) [14 cards in each]
* AND you add 3 PU boosters for each TS starter (to make a total of 45) and 1 PU booster for each TS Booster (to make a total of 15)

E.g. If I wanted to do a sealed deck that in real life is 1 TS Starter and 2 TS boosters, with the above setup we would do this in Apprentice as:
1 TS starter (42 cards)
2 TS boosters (14 cards each, 28 total)
5 PU boosters (1 shifted card each, 5 total. 3 for the TS Starter and 1 each for the TS boosters)

Of course, the problem is unless this is incorporated into the official patch, these changes get overwritten the next time a patch is installed for the next set.

NOTE: There's Planar Chaos changes too, but those are trickier. There are 4 shifted cards per booster, one which is either a rare or uncommon and then the other 3 are commons. This implies that PC shifted rare and PC shifted uncommon both have to be the same rarity in the new shifted set that is created just for the PC shifted cards. There are 15 Uncommons and 10 Rares, and that's 3:2 straight up (i.e. 3 uncommons for every two rares). However, Rosewater said somewhere that the ratio for that slot is 3:1 (i.e. 3 uncommons for every one rare). To get it exactly 3:1, takes a lot of messsing around (you could create duplicates of the uncommons for example).

LASTLY: The new foil policy from Time Spiral on forward is really tricky (where the foil you get replaces a common regardless of what rarity it is). Because of the restrictions of what the application currently allows, you just have to accept that you get very unlucky in Apprentice, since you never get any foils Smile