Shandalar - Feature Requests

Some of what you write here is confusing to me. In my experience, the life thing works like this:

In dungeons, the amount of life you have when a duel ends is carried over to the next duel (plus possible extra from dice bonus(es)). It may be 1 life (or even 0, if both players died at the same time), or it may be over 150. Poison counters are removed.

In castles, you always start with your base life (your number of mana links) + possible extra from dice bonus(es).


I have always wondered what "one deck for all duels" means. Never figured that out (you can't use Conjurer's Will to edit your deck inside a dungeon anyway).

[Korath]

That's the text that gets displayed, though yes, it doesn't exactly correspond to what actually happens. My experience is the same as yours.

My understanding of the "One deck for all duels" rule, based on faint memory and a recent bug report, is that the cards left in your library at the end of each duel are the only ones in it at the start of the next duel.

[Korath]

From duplicate #1301:

There should be more types of dungeon rules. The most obvious suggestions are imposing tournament formats, or elements of those, on them:

1. You have a minimum library size of 100.
2. Singleton - no duplicates except for basic lands. (and Relentless Rats and Shadowborn Apostle?)
3. Pauper - common cards only. This would go by the rarity displayed on cards, not the printing-of-least-rarity; so it's manipulable with the drawcardlib config in DuelArt/Duel.dat.
4. Peasant - either the usual restriction of no more than five uncommons, or just be no rares or mythics.
5. Multicolor cards (and lands) only, per MTGO Kaleidoscope.
6. The AI gets a planechase deck.
7. The AI gets an archenemy deck. Or maybe reserve that for the castle Wizards, or just Arzakon.
8. Modern is tricky, since - although I could limit to sets that are actually legal in Modern - the proper UI would be to instead filter it by whether a card is displayed in the modern or M15 frame or not, and there's plenty of Modern-legal cards that get shown with classic frames. Basic lands not least among them. It's also even more manipulable with Duel.dat than rarity.
9. In that vein, Classic-frame cards only might be more workable. Still too manipulable, but the UI works right.
10. Take that a step further, and only allow cards from The Dark/Fourth Edition and earlier, to approximate the original card pool.
11. Perhaps only allow cards from a given block, once coverage of implemented cards is better.

The Manalink challenge modes, and perhaps the list of ideas for Manalink challenge modes, are worth mining for ideas too.

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There also should be a better distribution of the current ones. "Remaining life added to next duel" gets put on every dungeon and "Life losses carried over" on every castle, and I seem to recall the former looking unintentional (though I haven't yet re-reverse-engineeered that section since losing my old progress). "One deck for all duels" (which doesn't work quite properly), "No [color] cards allowed", "No artifacts allowed", and "No instants or interrupts allowed" are very, very rare, which I also seem to recall looking unintentional.

The last three are also very abuseable, since they just remove the cards from your library and let you play with a smaller one: you can play with a twenty-card deck in a no-artifacts dungeon just by putting 20 random artifacts in your nominally-40-card deck. Replacing them with Wastes seems like the right thing to do. This is of course clearly a bug, but best dealt with in this context.

[Korath]

Implemented:

• Pauper
• Peasant, in the only-commons-or-uncommons sense, not max-5-uncommons sense
• 100-card minimum deck size
• singleton
• classic frames only
• multicolor or lands only

and customization including existing rules, so "life losses carried over" doesn't have to be automatic for castles and and "remaining life added to next duel" doesn't have to be automatic for dungeons. Incidence of the unintentionally-rare rules from the original game also fixed, and too-small decks get filled out with Wastes.

Leaving this open primarily for planechase/archenemy, and because the defaults will need more playtesting. Having a dungeon show up as singleton, pauper, multicolor, and no instants was brutal.