Shandalar - Program Bugs

[Korath]

Merging #1248 ("Colored Artifact counted wrong (i.e., as colorless) in the initial pool") and #1249 ("Apprentice difficulty assigns multicolored cards") here as they only make sense to work on all at once, and this tracker doesn't support subtasks.

Do people actually play on non-Wizard level? Why? It does affect a bunch of other things - most obviously starting card pool, as mentioned in #1249 - but they're drowned out by the effect it has on the duel AI.

There's no point to playing at Wizard because of the stressful Seige times. Sorceror has the same problem (even though I do play at Sorceror). Also, it seems to me that most people are really, really casual and play only on difficulties 1 and 2 and find it very dismaying when their inital pools are messed up (and pick difficulty specifically to start with more cards in one or max two colors to minimize mana screw and have more playables).

There's more than a little of that behind the complaints about "I can't make sense of these new cards, how do I install vanilla" that are occasionally seen.

I could bet that the most common option people would pick would be "lvl 1 seige times, lvl 4 AI, lvl 1 or 2 cardpool distributions (old ones before the current mess, where all your cards are within your 1 or 2 colors)". I would go for lvl 3 or lvl 4 distributions personally, but people generally seem terrified of this. To the point that you'll hear people "always importing a deck" or "going around just shopping and poping lairs for a good while before i fight anything", which is the same thing just taken to the extreme.

Another way of putting it would be that if it was possible to only ever have the Highest AI at every difficulty, most Shandalar would be played a Apprentice with lives adjusted to be higher (by some), simply so that the inital pool is all in one color and the lowest seige times.

Also a detail to keep in mind is that Artifacts and multicolored cards are overwhelmingly present in the higher rarities (multicolored cards are only non-rare in multicolored blocks which is 5-ish out of god knows how many, and only a handful of artifacts were made in common until possibly modern). The current pool often assigns way too many multicolored cards, so there's always a good chance many/most of your rares and uncommons will be both multicolored and from those blocks (if I'm not mistaken about how the current formula works). It's also likely to cause a sense of unfamiliarity and alienness to anyone not familiar with those blocks in particular on top of everything. They also strain deckbuilding options and contrary to what may sound logical, you don't really want to run them in more than 2-color decks as they put further strain on your mana base. Yes, there are 3 color multicolor cards, but you don't get to pick your landbase and mana fixing when you start out so they're just a liablity.

My suggestion would be to remove multicolored from the starting distribution completely, or make the distribution setup external (.ini) if possible because anyone who understands what I'm talking about will want to do it or something close to it. Ofc, I'm pretty sure everyone would appreciate customizable starting pool numbers regardless of what they're going to do with them.