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here are two of my deck ideas:

for just generally running around killing things (today i even wiped out most of the dungeons with variations of it)

40 cards:
all the time;
4 kird apes
4 lightening bolts
4 giant growths

part time (not gonna give specific numbers here as it depends on what you have)
elvish archer
sprites
lanowar elves

filler cards
roc of kher ridge or granite gargoyle
ernham djinn
bloodlust
fireball

and of course when you get them add in
berserk
ancestral recall
timetwister
wheel of fortune
fork
at which time you might also slip in some birds of paradise

this deck makes short work of most matches (so fast i dont bother to put time walk in
it would just slow down the time it takes to win the duel).
another fun variation on this is to add ice storms and stone rain.

here is the basic idea for the deck i took out the uber villain with today:

5 serra angels
5 tetravus
5 angelic voices
5 thunder spirits
2 moats
2 spirit links
3 swords to plowshares
2 disenchants
3 timetwisters (all i had)
1 ancestral recall (all i had)
5 timewalks
2 demonic tutors
2 regrowth
2 armageddons
cant really recall what all else. it was actually a 70 card deck since its been awhile since i played
and i couldnt recall just how many permanents i would get into play and didnt want to get so many that
i screwed up my recursion. as it was i pretty much walked all over him in under 15 turns.
i could have gone with a 60 card deck maybe even 40 and honestly i didnt even use my timetwisters i had a serra, a tetravus and an anglic voices in my opening hand and regrew a demonic tutor for a moat
and more voices. at that point as he had no cards in hand i figured why bother to fill it when i couldnt guarentee a time walk trip.
what killed him was 2 serras 2 tetravus and 3 angelic voices and of course my trusty moat (he only got one flier the whole time which i promply swords to plowshared). since one of my serras had a spirit link i ended up with over 100 life from a starting 25.

tetravus with angelic voices is a really nice combo; in this particular game each tetralith was worth 20 points of damage a turn. tetravuss are also a great combonation with transmutation. if you have mishras workshop you can have a kill force in no time flat. you can also just transmute artifact mana sources to kick start that combo.

ah well back to shandalar where i already have this hypnotic specter and time elemental deck started that is eating them up...

I started a new game and wanted to do something other than timetwister+timewalk. So I started building Moat.deck
4 Moat
4 Serra Angel
4 Tetravus
4 Swords to plowshares
4 Wrath of God
20 Plains

The deck is so good but I found that only have 8 creatures made some games take too long because some opponents can kill several in a row. So I started turning it into a Control/Millstone deck


4 Moat
4 Swords to plowshares
4 Wrath of God
4 Spirit Link
3 Howling Mine
3 Millstone
18 Plains

I have tried Racks and Disrupting Septers, I have tried Black Vise and Howling mine. So far the best non creature solution I can find is milling them out. I haven't faced arzakon yet, but even when he has 400 life, I bet he still just has 60 cards (or does he have 100?)

jasonbrown669 wrote:I started a new game and wanted to do something other than timetwister+timewalk. So I started building Moat.deck
4 Moat
4 Serra Angel
4 Tetravus
4 Swords to plowshares
4 Wrath of God
20 Plains

The deck is so good but I found that only have 8 creatures made some games take too long because some opponents can kill several in a row. So I started turning it into a Control/Millstone deck

Nice deck with a simple idea. I couldn´t have made it exactly like this, because of my self-imposed rule that I must have 60+ cards in the deck (apart from the very beginning, of course).

One card that would be great in this deck is Angelic Voices. With half of the deck being lands, I think you can easily just add 4 of them, and it will still work. The beauty of the combo of Angelic Voices and Tetravus is that you can split a Tetravus and get four 2/2 creatures. And that is with one AV...

jasonbrown669 wrote:4 Moat
4 Swords to plowshares
4 Wrath of God
4 Spirit Link
3 Howling Mine
3 Millstone
18 Plains

I have tried Racks and Disrupting Septers, I have tried Black Vise and Howling mine. So far the best non creature solution I can find is milling them out. I haven't faced arzakon yet, but even when he has 400 life, I bet he still just has 60 cards (or does he have 100?)

Depends on the setup. In Mok´s version of Shandalar, he has a decently strong 60-card deck. In the original setup (which the 2010 .iso-version of the game has) he has 130-something cards, including a Timetwister...

On the two highest difficulties, I have only managed to beat him with a poison deck. If I can be bothered (sometimes I only care about defeating the five wizards), I will collect cards for a special deck just for the Arzakon fight. I have one that wins >85% of the time.

I remember the end boss having a 5 color deck that was garbage, then someone updated it to an artifact deck that actually gets to play some cards before dying.
But then I used to play it on easy, now i crank it up to expert. The only real difference I see between easy and expert (aside from the initial cards you start with) is that on expert you never-ever hit Nomad's Bazaars. [which sucks]

Here´s another tip: The Mana Links quests from villages will either be the easy one of simply getting to a specific city, or they will be of the type: 'take a <colour> <card type> to City X'.

So once I am past the starting phase with its dire financial needs, I will keep some cards ready for these quests instead of selling them. Of the colours that are not in my playdeck (or goal deck, as the case may be), I will keep a basic land plus the least valuable Creature, Enchantment and Sorcery I have happened to find of these colours.

Artifacts and instants are never asked for in these quests.


And one more thing:
When you ask for a quest, if the text says: 'Take a (empty space) <card type> to City X' - meaning, there is just an empty space where the colour name should be, then the wanted colour is always white.

Hey to you all, first of all, I am amazed how many people still play this incredible game...

As a blue lover, I tried something interesting, mixed it with white...

Northern paladin + sleight of mind... That way I can destroy any color of permenant (except artifacts) of course white knights can be modified to have any color protection...

I haven't tried yet but if I can put an instant (sleight of mind) on cleanse (destroy all black creatures) the deck could be perfect...

The only problem is my deck is mainly white and it is kinda slow, even with benalish hero and tundra wolves...

One rule that I've always tried to adhere to (except when going after some of the nastiest bosses) is to only have one of any given card (except for basic lands). This encourages some fun experimentation.

I also love putting as many of the special Astral cards in there, just because they're a lot of fun. I've only found two so far (Jaguar and Faerie Dragon), but I've had quite a few good laughs over the crazy things the dragon does. As for the jaguar, he's one of my favorites; the Tracker was always one of my favorite Magic cards, and he's an interesting variation on the theme.

I've also (with mixed success) tried to stick to a no-reload policy. If I lose a battle or a city, I'm trying not to reload - just roll with it and see if I can recover.

Just did a run through at level 2 difficulty using Blue.
Saving and re-loading is almost a must in my opinion as it's too easy to lose power cards due to bad draws.

At first, I went with a control style deck using flying creatures mostly at first (zephyr falcon, phantom monster is good 4 mana for 3/3).

Final deck is Blue/White + Demonic Tutor control and looks something like this:

Control:
4 swords to plowshares
4 counterspell
4 wrath of god
4 ancestral recall
3 disenchant
2 timetwister
1 braingeyser
1 copy artifact
1 demonic tutor
1 time walk

Creatures:
4 savannah lions
2 onulet
2 serra angel

Combo:
4 howling mine
4 black vise
3 ivory tower
2 library of leng

Mana Sources:
6 plains
4 island
4 tundra
2 underground sea
2 city of brass
1 black lotus
1 mox sapphire
1 mox pearl
1 mox jet

It's sitting at 68 cards and I'm willing to up it to around 80 if I find some more power cards (demonic tutor, another ivory tower, another time walk, another copy artifact, etc.)

It does lose occasionally but if you can establish board control you can pretty much win with either a Serra Angel beatdown or a braingeyser + black vices combo.

I decided not to splash green/red for their power cards. Fork, regrowth and wheel of fortune are great but I experimented a bit and found this to be a more focussed deck. If you don't get a crappy draw and lose to a quick 3 turn beatdown then it's pretty easy to rattle off a few removal cards and stabilize.

I haven't beaten the game yet but will probably try it out some time. This deck was inspired from a play through I found on youtube. In that play through the guy dealt 160 damage in one turn using two forks on a braingeyser for 12. With 4 black vices in play and 44 cards in hand, the uber villain crumbled ezpz.

Hm, typical strategies of mine with this game:

1. If you don't start with white as the main color, do anything possible to get the white spell that lets you teleport to cities under siege.

2. Early game, I will often walk out of a town and if there are no hideaway places that pop up before an enemy appears, I go back to the town and then try again. If there's nothing in the area, use the roads to zip to the next town and try it there. A lot of the cards that sell for unexplainably high amounts of gold (Carrion Ants, Sylvan Library, a few others) pop up often in those areas, sometimes you don't even have to fight to get them. Then take them back to town and sell so you can buy cards in the color you want.

3. Bronze Tablets! Good for getting moxes.

4. Shapeshifters and Elementalists will sometimes reward you really well. One will let you pick any card of your choice (other than the ones that appear in dungeons) and the other will let you pick any card in your deck to duplicate (even moxes/lotus!).

5. Black vises in any early deck. Later you can start shifting the deck toward a specific aim, and they can come out.

6. Very careful use of the bonus dice in dungeons/castles. + to Life stacks with previous + to Life, and it is possible to have both a starting card and + Life if you get them in the right order.

Good tactics there. I use most of them myself.

This needs a bit of correction, though.

Technetium wrote:4. Shapeshifters and Elementalists will sometimes reward you really well. One will let you pick any card of your choice (other than the ones that appear in dungeons) and the other will let you pick any card in your deck to duplicate (even moxes/lotus!).

Creatures that can duplicate a card for you:
Sorcerer
Conjurer
Shapeshifter
Elementalist
Mind Stealer

The creature that can reward you with "Any card in the game" (i.e. out of those you can normally trade for amulets) is the Lord of Fate.

I always play on the hardest difficulty, the opponent deck overhaul was AMAZING. Most of the time I pick a color and stick with that color until I defeat a castle, then I will splash in the correct dual lands and some of the 'defeated' color.

At the start of the game, I play all my cards until I have over 60, then I start actually making the deck better by removing the excess stuff. If my deck ever goes below 60 after a loss, I head to the nearest town to get it back up to 60. This makes the early game very difficult, which is kind of the point. I also never re-load or quit out. Losing cards in ante sucks, but it's not worth cheating!

My current run-through I am playing enchantress, although it seems that I somehow broke the save file, because now triggered abilities never resolve. I am thinking about taking advantage of this somehow, maybe a bunch of lord of the pit or force of nature or something like that.

During the endgame if I want to roll through a dungeon, I just use this:

8 swamp
30 dark ritual
14 contract from below
8 drain life

If this game ever got new cards added somehow, I'd probably never be seen again.

After my last run-through broke, I started a new one a couple days ago. Decided to go blue/black control. My first 'random' encounter was a diamond mine. Obviously no money, so I can't get anything. As I exit out...."You found.....Black Lotus."

Yes. Yes I did.

Ran around a little, avoided fighting long enough to trade my two blue amulets for 8 islands and I eliminate my off-colors. I win my first battle. "You get a duplicate card of your choice!"

Yes. Yes I do.

Easily the most fortunate start ever in one of these games.

I have also self-banned Contract From Below from this playthrough. So broken.