Gaming on a Budget: Magic the Gathering: Shandalar

It’s been a fun month, but I’m all Final Fantasy’d out.

And how do I follow up and entire month of borderline obsessive coverage of a super nerdy RPG?  By covering something even nerdier!  After all, what’s nerdier than Magic: The Gathering?

I have played MTG for a very, very long time.  There was a time in my life that I was ashamed of that, but that time has come and gone.  I may not have the time or resources to dedicate to the game that I used to, but I still like to play any way I can.  That usually means playing digitally and unfortunately, I have always found Magic video games to be lacking.  They usually fall into one of two situations, either they require too much of a financial commitment or they deviate too far from the actual game to be any fun.  But now, Thanks to the (pun intended) “magic” of the internet, I have finally found the game I was looking for.  And the best part?  It’s abandonware, so it can be downloaded for free.

Actually called just “Magic: The Gathering” but called “Shandalar” to differentiate it from the actual card game, this week’s subject was released for the PC in 1998 by MicroProse.  It featured two primary game modes, the first being a turn based strategy game based, unsurprisingly, on the plane of Shandalar. It was designed by Sid Meier, known mostly for the “Civilization” games.  Honestly, I was never really able to get into it.  For one, it won’t run on my laptop for more than an hour without crashing.  But my biggest issue with it from an actual gameplay perspective is that again, it deviates too far from the actual card game.  At least the battles in this mode are conducted through games of MTG, but it just leaves you wanting to skip the strategy portions.

Fortunately, MTGS lets you do just that and shuffle up against digital opponents.  There are tons of pre-constructed decks to play as or against, ranging from well made to complete junk.  You can also build you own decks with a pretty sizeable card pool from Magic’s early days.  It would have been nice to be able to unlock more cards as you played, but I can’t complain too much.  You have access to the entirety of the early base sets (Alpha-Revised), Arabian Nights, Legends, Antiquities, The Dark and Fallen Empires.  With more than 600 unique cards, there are plenty of ways to build a really good, solid deck.

The interface is fine, each player gets their own half of the screen and you can move about your permanents as you see fit by clicking and dragging.  Your hand gets its own little pop up window so you can clearly see which cards you have yet to play.  It does get in the way sometimes, but you can move the box around as well.  I still had problems with it once the board got crowded, but it was rarely gamebreaking.  All you need to do is click on cards you want to play and the game will prompt you to spend the appropriate mana.  Click on your lands or sources and the game will automatically use the mana as requested while automatically floating any leftovers.  It’s all very easy and self explanatory.

 You can set each phase of your turn to either be played automatically or manually by right clicking your player avatar.   This can speed up the game if you want to just burn through a few rounds or give you more control if you want to run a more complex deck.  It does default to automatically playing your upkeep, so you need to set that to manual if you want to play abilities that can only be activated in that phase.  You also get plenty of time to respond to enemy actions.  Building decks is easy as well, just click the cards you want to add.  If you want to just jump in and play, you can pick one of the preconstructed decks, all of which are relatively streamlined and fair.  

But who wants to play a fair deck?  There’s no banlist here, nor are there any financial restrictions.  Remember how fun it was getting killed on turn one by Chanel/Fireball?  No?  Well, your opponents aren’t going to play with it here, but you sure can.  But even that’s boring.  Who wants to use relatively easy to find cards when you can play with full play sets of the power 9.  Here’s the super fun deck I built:

Lands:

Who needs ‘em

Artifacts:

4x Black Lotus

4x Mox Ruby

4x Mox Sapphire

4x Mox Pearl

4x Sol Ring

4x Black Vice

4x Ankh of Mishra

Creatures: 

lol

Spells:

4x Ancestral Recall

4x Time Walk

2x Timetwister

4x Braingeyser

4x Balance

4x Lightning Bolt

4x Swords to Plowshares

4x Armageddon

4x Wrath of God

2x Manabarbs

4x Wheel of Fortune

Non MTG players are probably lost, while those that do play the game are probably like “wow, that is completely broken.”  Yes, yes it is.  It’s a good thing you can only play against computer opponents, because playing this kind of deck would cause someone to lose friends.  Not that it would ever happen do to a variety of factors, chief among them:

1. Most of those cards are restricted or outright banned in almost every format of MTG 

And

2. I could buy a house with the amount of money the deck would cost me.

And not a small house either.  A mint condition Black Lotus just went at auction for $166k.  I can’t imagine ever paying that much money for a piece of cardboard.  But thanks to MTGS, I can build a deck around it without paying a dime.  

I can’t say the game is without its flaws.  For a game that’s literally just a digitized version of a card game, it sure slows down a lot.  Sometimes games drag a little bit because it can take a long time to deal with full boards with a lot of effects.   Part of what makes Magic such a fun game is the speed at which turns occur and that is lost here (and in just about every kind of digital MTG for that matter).  The AI is decent, but I wish it were a little better.  Finally, having some different formats would have been nice.  MTGS is very much pre-Commander, but some two headed giant or 4 player would have been great.  Also of note, this also pre-dates the 6th edition rule changes so there’s no stack, which kind of sucks.

But at the end of the day,  Shandalar is a free way to get a in few games of Magic: The Gathering, even if its just against the computer.  It’s a little slow and wonky and has an outdated rule set, so I don’t think Shandalar is a great place for new players to start with MTG.  However, experienced Magic players will enjoy killing a few minutes with a trip down memory lane with the obscenely broken cards from the old days.  I’m not sure it would be worth paying for at this point, but you can’t go wrong with free.

Was it worth it at this price point? - I mean, yeah, its free.  It’s hard to regret paying $0 for a game, even if you despise it.

Would I have bought the game at full price? - Now, no.  It’s too limited and too outdated to be worth paying for 22 years after its release.  But if I had a computer that could have run this in 1998 I absolutely would have spent the $50.  

8/10