Shandalar

Here is a look at another Planeswalker. A new version of MTG Forge will be released soon that has planeswalkers. Vess is already programmed.

There exists an old MicroProse game called Duels of the Planeswalkers but many players “in the know” refer to it as Shandalar, which is the name of the in-game world. I downloaded my version from http://www.the-underdogs.info/ Shandalar is pretty good, it has three main parts. One, you can play against the computer using all of the cards, a la constructed. Two, you can play in a sealed deck tournament. I found this very impressive and it actually inspired me to write MTG Forge. Three, you enter the world of Shandalar and try to collect cards in order to defeat the 5 evil wizards, one for each color.

Defeating the wizards in Shandalar takes a good amount of time or luck. It is sort of like a primitive Diablo, you fight creatures (duel) and try to build your deck into something competitive. You usually start out with a handicap, you will be at 9 life and your opponent might have 16 life. Sometimes your opponent even starts the duel with a creature in play, which is really astonishing the first time you see it. Starting out with even Llanowar Elves in play is a huge advantage. All of the duels are for ante (you win or lose a random card from your deck), so you need to win because losing will mess up your deck.

The graphics are very basic, you have to remember that the game was made in 1996. Shandalar looks like a very basic RPG where you walk around from town to town encountering random fiends and completing basic fetch quests. It takes a long time to assemble an optimized deck, so you will often use whatever decent cards that you have around. The duels tend be to short because both you and your opponent start out with less than 20 life, so aggro is the definite way to go. Not being able to mulligan really hurts because you often get mana flooded or screwed. It is still pretty interesting if you want to try it sometime. The last guy has 100 life and finally I did beat him (you just have to play him, you don’t have to win). I did rid Shandalar of evil for 1,673 years. :)