You begin by designing your character’s look in true RPG style, then select the starting colour which will form the basis of your deck. So: you star as a planeswalker come to save the Land of Shandalar, threatened as it is by five wizards who in turn somehow answer to a final monster who has a Very Large Deck, Unfair Starting Life Total and a Silly Name. Those of you looking to Wikipedia for a quick summary of the game will have come back disappointed at the time of writing the entry for Shandalar entertainingly expounds for its entire duration on the game’s bizarre and mostly irrelevant plot without touching on anything so mundane as how the thing actually works. Part one: “What is the toughness of the Ironclaw Orcs?” The second will explore some interesting issues that playing the game raises: what it shows us about just how different the theory of design was in 1997, what a ‘metagame’ of dozens of opposing decks and a starting life total of 10 does to your deck design, and why a fun game with rubbish graphics from 1997 is still the best computer version of Magic around. The first will introduce Shandalar, the Microprose computer game of Magic released in 1997, describing the game’s world and mechanics for those unfamiliar with it and explaining why it’s such fun to play. This article will be split into two parts. That’s right, it may look like you’re playing an unholy mix of Vintage and 4th Edition sealed against Mike Long in judgeless hell, but in fact you’re playing Shandalar and you’re enjoying a wild and entertaining version of Magic that’s as close to the original vision for the game as you’re going to get without selling your house to crack some packs of Beta. Plains, Lotus, crack the Lotus for WWW and drop… Pearled Unicorn? You’ve heard of losing the game before you even sat down to play, but you assumed that applied to having a defeatist attitude, not facing a 3/2 creature while you’re at 11 life without having taken a single turn yet. Tough break, since you haven’t taken your first turn yet and you’re already at 11 life. Your opponent leads with turn 1 Savannah Lions, letting you know he’s playing White Weenie. You want to call a judge on this blatant cheating, but you can’t. You’re on the draw too, which is going to make things tough since your opponent, dressed head to foot in white robes, already has a Crusade in play. You take a look at your opening hand: only one land, the sort of hand even your grandmother would mulligan (if she hasn’t been at the whisky again).
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March 2023
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