Postmortem – what went wrong?

Nothing specifically went wrong. The visual interface was gray and more pleasant on my computer because I was using Java 1.3 but Java 1.5 changed the color scheme so the screen seems way too white, and it is hard on the eyes. I have tried to fix this, but that will have to wait until the next version. Currently I could not program any X spells like Fireball, or some combat damage abilities like first strike and trample. Decks do not have a sideboard, because at the time I couldn’t figure out exactly how I would let the user do that.

The biggest complain I’ve had is that the computer cheats when it plays cards. The computer might pay for “W” by tapping an Island. This isn’t an error, in so much as “designed to work that way.” The computer only counts the number of lands it has in play, this was done was a patch and I never updated it. Technically I could fix that, but the computer randomly plays a land, so that would have to be fixed too. Trying to make the computer just a little bit smarter is really hard. 90% of the time the computer is still beatable so I never saw it as much of an issue. Version 2 will have the computer paying the correct mana costs; I’m tired of getting e-mail commenting on this issue.