Improved Shandalar General Playtesting & Feedback Thread

[BlueTemplar]

Hi, some comments :
1.) I'd warn anyone against investing too much time into balancing card costs/rarities and enemy decks, considering that updates are coming in fast and each one has a risk of including a "format-breaking" mechanic, sometimes in a sneaky way. (But you pretty much said that yourself in your last comment.)

2.) It would seem that the 2 tribute issues (dungeon "farming" and color overlap) would need to be fixed before there's any hope in balancing the game's "economy".

3.) What's the main difference between gold and amulets as currencies?
Gold, notwithstanding the gold=>cards and gold=>amulets Lairs, only allows you to buy *random* cards! (and food, and world magics, but the costs of those could be re-balanced)

I'd rather keep the monsters giving you potentially awesome loot -
especially "mythic grade" cards that you could not buy in towns, trade against amulets, or find in dungeons (getting an extremely good card might make you want to make a 2nd deck based around it!)
- and limit these lairs to the number of cards/amulets you can buy.

In the same vein dungeon "Treasures" should instead be very good cards that can either be used in most format decks (black lotus, emphasis on extremely good mana fixing and artifacts [EDIT: also hybrid mana cost and split cards, so that they're more likely to be of a color you need]), or extremely good for decks that are the most likely to be played in the format.

[BlueTemplar]

4.) A powerful way to affect the balance and economy seems to be the minimum number of cards in a deck, and maximum number of same allowed cards... (for instance Wizard difficulty could be raised to 60 minimum cards per deck, if the starting number of cards can be easily raised)

There's the obvious difference between a 40 cards - 4 repeats, and 100 cards singleton formats (though it also it affects the power of "tutor" cards), but there are more subtle ways like the latest DotP:Duels:Origins does it with same cards restricted to 4 commons, 3 uncommons, 2 rares, 1 mythic rares (for 60-cards decks).

[lujo]

1) Yeah, as far as tweaking enemy decks, tweaking what you can get out of them is for later. Tweaking them to make use of a wider range of stuff and all that is something quite worthwhile, and it's also good for playtesting existing mechanics to determine a nice baseline. AI decks often include ludicrous things because only those were available for similar effects in the OG pool (and are also samey and repetitive because too many decks are using the same cards). My first order of bussiness after I've done sorting through a color is to give this aspect of AI Decks tweaks which can be further refined with future pool updates. Also it might stop raining Dark Rituals, Lightning Bolts and Swords to Plowshares.

2) On one hand yes, but on the other hand you don't have to go dungeon farming and you can play the game without exploiting tribute bugs (to a degree).

3) Gold lets you buy random cards, food and, most importantly, pay off monsters not to fight you. Amulets are used for world magics and buying concrete cards. Lairs notwithstanding, ofc.

The problem with monsters giving you awesome loot is, well, there are several:

- How much loot are we talking about? Currently it's not just (or even "even") card quality, it's quantity.
- How awesome are we talking about? Beating up a druid for hypothetical mythics is silly. This is also why more than 3 rarities is good, because it lets you determing who drops/sells/rewards you with that tier of powerful stuff.
- It's way easier to get "mythic" cards that way than it is by paying amulets for them, but currently you get flooded with quality stuff which you don't need (which is what causes the gold pileup). Really busted stuff can only be balanced if the way of acquiring it required effort and the only way I see that working is if it required more than one duel to get it (meaning having to get several amulets worth of quests).

- There are a bunch more, like, again, red being terrble vs. red, so if you tie the acquisition of red bombs (or even worse, just staples) to beating red guys you're seriously making red mages life a pain. Black-on-black matchups are also hugely weird, half your stuff is completely useless and a bunch of other stuff becomes straight up unblockable. Green-on-green tends to devolve into ground stalls into blowouts with random creatures suddenly being unblockable due to landwalk in a color notorios for not having much evasion due to all the pump and "time-walk-light" fog effects. Blue on blue is also pretty damned weird a lot of the time (your defensive guys are dead cards, and your offensive dudes don't have evasion all of a sudden so it's an air stall, and if both guys are loaded to the gills with bounce like they should be it takes forever to even develop a proper "air stall").

I don't mind powerful cards dropping from fights occasionally, but right now it's beyond silly and pursuing a random-reward system as baseline isn't really viable. An example of silliness: all non-mono AI decks are using the straight-up-strongest duals (because those were the only ones available), which consequently drop like mad. This has it's upsides, but the obvious downsides are crazy - multicolor becomes trivial, which lets you play cheezy stuff from several colors in any deck, any fetch land will fetch anything, and any multicolored card which is in underpriced-in-cc-compared-to-effect doesn't really have a reason to be underpriced because actually including it in a deck and casting it is kind of trivial. Etc. Etc.

3.5) Agree on dungeon treasures, provided the dungeon engine mechanics are explored so that we can maybe get rid of the dice exploits, and we figure out the best way to deal with runaway lifegain in dungeons. Also make better dungeons.

4) Yeah, the 40 card limit is own issue.

[BlueTemplar]

To repeat, I consider that the ONLY way to acquire "Mythics" should be by defeating Monsters or randomly finding them (I though that was already the case, don't remember seeing Mythic cards in pick-your-card rewards?), and that this should be a quite rare occurrence (something like 10 times in a game?)

I don't remember, is tribute the same as defeating them or just one card at a random from their deck? And do you get random cards from defeating Dungeon monsters?.

From what I've understood, after you get through a Dungeon (even towards a completely different goal), you're pretty much guaranteed to get tribute from 1-3 dual color monsters afterwards?

And normal monsters shouldn't have in their decks "Treasure"-grade stuff like dual lands, nor "Mythic"-grade stuff like Dark Ritual, for the reasons you exposed.

[lujo]

Ah I've been too liberal with the use of "mythic". I didn't mean dungeon treasure grade stuff, I means stuff which is currently rare but should really be more difficult to acquire. If I manage to get an effective tier of rarity which would cost, say, 6 amulets, having it rain from monsters for one duel win would be very silly. But that sort of thing isn't moxes, it's just stuff players will and shuold pay through their nose for. Having that sort of thing purchasable is actually good for lower tiers - dumping all your amulets into a bomb instead of a nice playset of an important common is a meaningful choice which makes less powerful stuff interesting simply because it doesn't cost so much to stock up on and draw dependably.

Tribute is when you rack up some number of wins over a particular monster, after which it will, instead of fighting you, offer you a choice between 2 things, chosen at random: a card from their deck, money, food, random number of random amulets, location of world magics or dungeon secrets (afaik). The amulets are obviously dodgy as hell, and cards are currently a problem because of how the decks generally include a lot of stuff like duals and swords to plowshares and such.

As far as how the tribute exploit works, I'm not sure if the two ways it does overlap or not, but it works like this:

- You'll generally be able to find a lot of identical monsters in a dungeon, so if you beat them up it racks up your global win count for these monsters. Which then means when you run into them afterwards they'll just give you tribute or be one win away from it. Beating stuff in dungeons is generally easier because you can start fights at an advantage, or you can just cheeze lifegain. Also, this particular problem is one of gameplay-skipping - you could probably beat up enough Druids to get them to tribute anyway, but this way you can do it in a very short ammount of time with a deck prepped up to beat up druids instantly turning all of them into, well, walking lairs. It's particularly silly with Dragons and djinns, as if you do this you can beat dragons up in a favorable setting while even finding enough of them is pretty difficult otherwise. And those dispense duals if you rack up enough.

- The other situation maybe doesn't even apply in dungeons but happens naturally. Some monsters effectively count as several different monsters (seem to have the same invisible counter). So you can get Vampire Lords to offer you tribute after only beating 2 because beating something else bumped it's counter. This can (and most often does) result in higher tier monsters becoming dual-land / cheeze dispensers even if you hardly ever fought them.

EDIT: And if those two overlap, that just means that every time you go clean out a dungeon you get more stuff to hand over their stuff than you actually fought.

[BlueTemplar]

No, I'm making a distinction between "Treasure" (Dual Lands, Black Lotus, maybe Moxes that are good even if your deck isn't of their color) that are specifically displayed to a player and he can raid dungeons for and "Mythic" (Dark Ritual, maybe Tarmogoyf, Ancestral Recall, maybe Swords to Plowshares and Lightning ), what you're calling "bombs", that IMHO shouldn't be acquired by the player by using amulets, but only randomly (because otherwise you end up for instance with every end-game black deck running 4 Dark Rituals, which is boring). That tribute doesn't give you random cards is perfect.

[lujo]

Tribute not giving you random cards is a big problem if the exploits aren't fixed because THAT makes every deck end up with at least Duals currently. I'd preffer tribute giving random stuff, honestly, instead of making AI decks guarantee anything that's in them to a player on every run. It also encourages people to make "all-sideboard" decks and stand in the middle of the forest grinding stuff for concrete cards.

As for where one would draw the line of what's above mythic, that's up for debate, ofc. I was thinking along the lines of that a lot of players love their cheeze and plenty of these things are in ye brokene olde iconic vintage and legacy lists (and there's the nostalgia factor for folks who got used to them from playing a ton of Shandalar and not even realizing those were actually busted). I wouldn't want to deny them the chance of getting what they want but I'd make them sweat for it. If a rare costs, say 4 or 5 amulets, and this costs 10, you'd have to quest up a ton of amulets for a playset - while not spending amulets on cheaper stuff that lets you win more easily.

Should be fun ^^

[jiansonz]

I think that some of the issues that have to do with accessibility of cards can be solved using the customizing options of Shandalar.ini that are already in Korath's latest release. 'Nochoose', 'Disable' and 'Dungeon Treasure' are pretty powerful commands there.

However, I think that the only way to prevent certain cards from being pickable from a creature paying tribute in the form of 'a spell from my deck' is to flag them as dungeon treasures, and as far as I understand it, there's only room for 30 of those.

[lujo]

Eh, I'm not all that into restricting folks from getting what they'd like to beat up evil wizards with, and yeah, what we have is fine for now, but when I'm done mapping it out it's gonna be sort of clear (to a degree) what sort of stuff should have the player working for it and what stuff would benefit from being more easily acessible. All in due time, I suppose.

I'm also kinda sad for talking long, the only relevant theoretical question for Korath in regards to setting up a robust balancing/card distribution system is: can he imagine card prices being determined by "set" rather than "rarity" being worked into the game?

As far as the rest is concerned, I'm sure he'll dig into the adventure mode code at some point if he doesn't burn out (sure hope he doesn't) and then we'll have a ton of options to consider and hopefully a bunch of bugs out of the picture.

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Here's some findings from the run I've run through yesterday and today. Apologies to Korath for very inexpert and overly enthusiastic spamming of the Bug Tracker

I went with third difficulty and blue for variety. I avoided lairs like a plague so that I get to play against the weaker opponents more, I hit the dungeons so I can beat up stuff and check AI decks for bugs, tested a bunch of green stuff I was wondering about and tested a bunch of blue stuff that was worrying me (turns out it was worrying me for a good reason). Also, I didn't pursue tribute shennanigans, although they did happen on their own here and there (I might've mooched some duals off some Fungus Lords).

The deck on the left is what my inital deck evolved into over the course of the run. This discussion made me turn it into a sort of thrown togather 60 card deck by kind of just riveting a casual combo onto it ^^



Explanations and notes:

Adventure Deck | Open

Initial pool turned out kinda blue/green, and I went with threshold last time, so I decided I was going for the bounce this time and that I was also gonna try some high-end green stuff out.

Picked up / quested for a playset of Gaea's Skyfolk. That card is Invasion Block incarnate - nonsense flavor and dodgy mechanics. It's a either a green dude who somehow has flying, or it's a blue dude who somehow has stats and no drawback. That guy's going up in rarity, getting a playset of those takes you places. EDIT: It's a good example why we really need 2 "common" rarities - you can't really call it an uncommon, it's just upsides of 2 commons fused in the only way they could be fused but it then makes it strictly better than way too many commons and it should be more difficult to pick up in bulk.

Then I acquired a playset of Aether Burst, to see how bad it makes regular bounce look, and it makes it look pretty damned bad. That's going up in rarity too. EDIT: That thing is "bouce pileup" all on it's own - a proper bounce deck would have more bounce cards, but with that thing you don't need any. Now hark at the Inv/Ody/7th format which had, drumroll: Aether Burst (c), Rushing River (c), Repulse (c), Wash Out (u), Hibernation (u), along with a of less individually busted bounce also in larger quantity than you get in a regular block. UG Threshold came to be in part because you could run Nimble Mongoose and Blurred Mongoose that couldn't be bounced, and then when Torment came out UG Madness just overtook it because it's dudes were sturdier. You couldn't really play anything else with creatures in it if your local store crew got in on the bouncing, because not even bloody Psychatog could stick on the board reliably enough. We used to laugh at major tourney lists and prey on rich folks who were stupid enough to copy them Secret tech was to merge Madness and Mono-Black Control into BG madness, so you could Duress and Cabal Therapy the runaway blue nonsense, which also worth a lot of sniggering vs. big name big wallet "pro"'s at events, as it worked silly well against everything that was popular with the less crafty MtG communities too, like Psychatog and all that.

Notice that both of those playsets are in my late game deck.

I kept the Mist Raven and the Hollowhenge Beast around the whole time. Raven is obviously a good backup for whatever other bounce you've got, and I wanted to compare different 5cc / 5 power green dudes to make sure I got them sorted out right in my big grid. The beast (and consequently the Silverback Gorilla) are quite good. I went thorugh a bunch of other stuff while I acquired the 3 Iwamori of the Open Fist (whom I've played back in the day when playing one meant you could be staring at dragons, and they were kick ass even then). Iwamori kicks ass. Hero's Bane I haven't played with much IRL. The AI doesn't seem to be very good when it comes to predicting that you'll pump it mid combat, but the card is otherwise kinda not as terrifying as it looks (it doesn't trample). I didn't pick those up, mind you, they kinda just dropped.

Deranged Hermit is just silly. It's from the same set as Might of Oaks, and from the same overkill school of card design. He also dropped randomly, won me a bunch of games (also v. silly with AEther Burst, obv.), but he was just so much fun I couldn't take him out.

Thalakos Scout just kinda kept not getting removed because I didn't feel like craming one more silly thing after taking out the lovely sensible cards little by little. It's OK, it can't block.

The AI can't respond to Claustrophobia (or any similar effect) currently which I duly reported in the bugtracker. That's a big deal, you put a pacifism effect on something the AI keeps stacking its buff auras on it, that makes it better than actual removal not worse.

I had sol ring and both on-color moxes in the same dungeon, so I kinda just picked them up. I suppose the deck was a tad more powerful than it would've otherwise been, but it wasn't as focused as it could've been. I still murdered everything in it's path. Allthough, I wonder how it would fare in a properly touched up environment.

Oh, and Ambush Vipers (and deathtouch) is bugged ATM. Also reported it. Enemies prioritize blocking your vipers above anything else (with their Serra Angels and stuff, even if you attack with 2 skyfolk along with the viper), I don't think they register it properly. I had them in because I wanted to observe the phenomenon at that point.

Wizard/Arzakon Deck | Open

This may look like either a thrown togather pile, or a pile of cheeze, but it's actually sort of both. As soon as I knew I was gonna be UG I decided I was gonna end it with something screwy so I started picking up Biovisionaries and Pack Hunt for the lols. All the tutors were there by accident, I didn't actually hand pick any of that, and it's kinda half-way between a combo deck and a tempo deck which looks kinda funny now that I look at it (and also played funny).

It had a very mixed effect - the first three wizards were green, blue and red and they all went down easily. (I swapped out leviathan for Font of Fortunes to try it out so the blue guys actually put up a fight of sorts, Leviathan would've been a VERY silly card vs my bounce).

The black wizard took a lot of reloading, but not because anything in his casle had anything on the deck but because I had absolutely rotten luck against him in particular as opposed to even his minnions. I'd plow through the castle looking for him easily enough, other dudes would even start with the hypnotic spectre, but I'd get through it. Against him I was mana screwed every time, I couldn't draw bounce, he'd have nuts hands, it was impossible. The time I beat him I just drew a hand that looked meh and easily beat his ass.

Ok, a few explanations:

Get 4 Biovisionary out, you win. Get one out, Pack Hunt, pull the others out, win. If someone tries to kill one bounce it or throw one of the two green protective things. That's the slow back-up plan.

The actual plan is to put down a Gaea's Skyfolk, Pack Hunt THEM, get a bunch out and bounce anything that's in the way. Tutor up an Iwamori if appropriate, while the enemy is busy set up the backup plan in case the regular plan fails. The actual plan worked quite fine (would be a wonder if it didn't what with the moxes and the sol ring).

Why is there 5 Biovisionaries in there? Because of Ante, the Ante card gets removed from the deck for the duration of the match, and you need 4 on the table for them to work, so you need 5 in the deck. It's a bit sketchy because that way you can afford to lose one if something else is ante, but what could I do? I invested in it for the lols and was looking forward to it all run (and in fact, for days, because I jumped from joy when I saw Pack Hunt while sorting cards. Pack Hunt is one hell of a card, draw 3... creatures. V nice deal.)

Oh, it took out Arzakon in 2 minutes, Llanowar, Biovisionary, Pack Hunt, four Biovisionaries, done. I think my score was in the negative XD So that's that.

Observations from the run:

| Open

1) Shapeshifter is the most bugged enemy in the game. It has 2 ways to crash the game in it, and the list of stuff that's flat out bugged in it or that it misuses is long). I reported it and filed a suggestion for a temporary rework ala-merfolk shaman. It's very frustrating when a dungeon or castle is full of those guys, or when they're attacking cities. I know many bugs about the shapeshifter were sorta known (in fact I remember that some were present in original original shandalar and patched in expansions), but I still reported every one I found separately because I was asked before to do one bug per post. Sorry if I caused a mess

2) The way mana sources are prioritized when autocasting is dodgy as hell. I've got myself screwed over many many times. Also reported.

2.1) Instants (at least Aether burst) if not spells in general are bugged if they're the last card in your hand. If you double click to cast something else and press done or spacebar the game will autopay for the instant in question and attempt to cast it. Also reported.

3) It would possibly be a VERY good idea to swap all the Mana Vaults with Grim Monoliths until Mana Vault is fixed. Every other deck has Mana Vaults in it, it can't untap and just keeps pinging people to death, and the worst is when they tap a mana vault to cast a mana vault Not sure if reported and suggested.

4) Power Surge doesn't do anything too meaningful anymore since the mana burn rule change. Swapping it out of anywhere where it's present is also probably a good idea, anything at all is better. I'll check out where it is and make a note of all the places. I'll probably do the same for Mana Vault and post up quick/fix vanilla deck in a zip tommorrow.

5) Game's perfectly playable without any dodgy lairs. Much better game, even. They can get bent.

6) I aboslutely have to hurry up with the sorting for a provisional touchup on all decks just because there's so many little things that can be improved in a flash.

6.1) Blue decks are massively hurt by the general lack of playable blue stuff in the core pool. Most of them are actually artifact decks, and the AI can't play half of what's in them properly. They're barely holding on because of the low-life format, once Zephyr Falcon + Unstable Mutation stops being a threat they just fold. They lack an early game and a midgame, and many of them a non-artifact late game, too, and they trip over their own cool moves which they can't do right (and just end up wasting time with them).

6.2) I haven't played against red decks much (in any playthrough) simply because there's generally fewer mountains around than anything else. I think this was deliberate on part of the developers because they realized that playing vs. red in a low-life format is kinda senseless. You can also kinda beat them senseless once you get your life up which is sad. Also they lost power surge and some effects of mana flare (namely the mana burn which it used to cause), and they need serious help. I wish there was a way to up the mountain terrain ratio, I see plains and forests and Tusk Guardians everywhere, but hardly ever any Centaur Warchiefs or red dudes in general.

6.3) Black Guys have dark ritual into hypnotic spectre, and the AI seems to be a bit better at handling Lord of the Pit than it used to be, but the color sucks vs. bounce and pacifism effects like you woudn't believe. All the Unholy Strenghts end up on the tapped down guy, and all their accelerated stuff ends up bounced, and they have hardly any removal or discard.

6.3.1) I think Hypnotic Spectre should be removed from random starting creatures, though, because it's way over the top. An evasive black bugger for free is a fine threat, an evasive black bugger who hits you with a Hymn to Tourach for free just forces the player to pack ludicrous removal or die just because of that one thing.

6.4) Green guys are green. Too many decks either get to do something because they have Giant Spiders or don't get to do much because they don't. When I have a slight decklist tweak for green dudes which lets them breathe without Giant Spiders I'll know I got a good starting point for building up a serious meta.

6.5) White has too many rares floating around too many decks, and often the same rares. The AI tends to screw itself over by not playing agressively enough, but the next update looks like it's gonna bring in some serious powerups for white.

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7) Multicolored cards are dodgy as hell. This has something to do with the general availablity of the best dual lands ever. (Note that I didn't use fetches this time around as a slight attempt at compromise because I used moxes). It has more to do with the fact that a lot of them are were a market-friendly way of making cards with no drawbacks. Even something like Gaea's Skyfolk (or that unblockable clone of it from one of the ravnicas which I had a playset of but didn't use) is hella dodgy. It's gonna be tough making them play nice with the rest of the stuff, since if you're 2 colors there's pretty much no reason not to fill up various cc slots with obviously better multicolored variants of cards from one of the more powerful multicolored blocks. It's a big reason to expand rarities, an apocalypse/ravinca/rtr common is an uncommon/rare in most other places. Shadowmoor/Eventide/general hybrid stuff is just cancer - I love it, and those are some damned strong cards, but sweet jesus the power level...

Duals everywhere is a bit silly, but we knew that already. Still folks like it when they can't get mana screwed and when they can just play whatever cards they have without having to agonize over mana bases. But again, almost none of the multicolored cards were really made to be played in a format with as effortless mana fixing as Shandalar currently is, and when such formats happened the extended family of Kird Ape all got thrown into a deck called 5color zoo which tended to reliably kill you from 20 to 0 on turn 3-4 (and I believe all components are there, heck, Shandalar has stronger duals).

I'm on the fence about this. The AI needs all the help it can get, and lands which come into play untapped and make it not be mana screwed are a big deal. But I kind of think a traditional metagame of 2cc artifact mana acelleration and not as ludicrous lands and actual defensive creatures that let you set your stuff up would be much better.

9) Nothing works for the AI once the player gets above 20 life. That's very easy to do even if you're not trying and at one point I had to open up the map and hand count how many mana links I had because I couldn't remember how I got to starting with 27 life. I'm beginning to strongly believe that life should be capped, for the player, at 20, damn the concequences. The stuff you can allow yourself when you get above that is ludicrous.

Also that if we one day get the lower level critters not to dissapear from the map that their lives should increase over time. If Korath figures out how to do that.

10) There were some odd happenings which I didn't report because I'm not sure how to report or reproduce them, and in some cases that I'm not hallucinating:

- The invisible monsters (Troll Shaman, Conjurer) (which I'll hex edit next time, ty Korath), aren't invisible when moving diagonaly towards south-east. It think that's the only direction when the game draws them if they're not a target for the quest. I feel like it's one of the most obscure and difficult to work into a conversation bits of information I've ever possessed and will keep sporadically remembering it until I die.

- In one match I had Aspect of Wolf in my hand, but I didn't remember putting one in my deck. I had no idea how this happened, and I checked the deck afterwards and it had 40 cards in it like it was supposed to an no aspect of wolf. V strange.

- I had several quest failures listed. I suppose those were from wizards taking over cities (I didn't find the sword for a long time), but if not that's weird because I didn't fail any quests.

- At one point I went looking for my Pack Hunts that I had been stacking to put them in my deck and they were gone. I figure I must be imagining things and that I must've bought something else but just contemplated buying them so I went and bought / quested for 4 more. But then I notice that my 2 Vesuvan Dopplegangers I had certainly bought were missing, too. Very, very strange. The only explanation I've got is that they got lost in trades for mana links but it's highly unlikely that I had 4 green sorcery and 2 blue creature demands and that those 6 ended up being picked out of the hundered of cards I had piled up.

- Also, my kill tally was weird, too. I was certain I had fought some troll shamans at one point and more sorcerers and sorceressess than I had listed, and I had barely any red monsters beaten. It might be that I did it in a dungeon and reloaded that run, but I'm not entirely sure.

- Tribute counts also behaved even stranger than usual. There were the usual guys who'd hand over tribute even though I only had two wins on them (Vampire Lords for example), but there were guys I had 7 wins on that didn't. Tusk Guardian, for example, they even ran away from me and everything, but no tribute ever (not near a castle). I could kinda understand it for Tusk Guardians if there were some wacky terrain thing going on, but Crusaders only walk on plains and I killed about 8 and still no tribute.

Ok, that's way past enough, I'll shut up for a few days and just get actual stuff done.

Oh, and one more thing:

wizard animations | Open

I seem to have read something somewhere about wizard animations not running. All the animations ran fine for me, zaps from killed monsters, wizard deaths, even Arzakon (i think). If those have been enabled at some point then cool, but if them not running is still a ting then weird.

[jiansonz]

the only relevant theoretical question for Korath in regards to setting up a robust balancing/card distribution system is: can he imagine card prices being determined by "set" rather than "rarity" being worked into the game?

I do not understand what you mean with "set". How is a "set" defined? Is there a list somewhere?

Interesting to read about your playthrough. What setup of enemy decks were you using?

From your bug reports, it looks like you were using my old overhauled Shapeshifter deck. It did not cause crashes in 'classic' Shandalar but as you wrote, is currently very unstable and buggy. For less frustration in the dungeons/castles, I recommend you play with rodil's or guinsoo's new versions, or make these little changes that will go a long way to prevent crashes:
Swap out Drafna's Restoration for Reconstruction.
Swap out Clone for Vesuvan Doppelganger.

[lujo]

By "set" I mean expansion. Like "Tempest" or "Portal" or whatever. If I arranged, say, 5 groups of cards to belong to 5 different custom named expansions called "1amulet", "2amulet", "3amulet", etc. could the game read that column when determining what sells for what instead of rarity?

Because I seem to remember that at some point cards from the original game expansions were in the game, but you could only buy them (I think) and you could only win 4th ed in duels (i think). Or something like that. If we could recreate that as a pricing system that would work out fine.

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I was using the default list that comes with the Thieves Hideout. I didn't see Clone in the Shapeshifter Decklist at all, but there are more bugged cards in it than those two.

Is there an established way of easily editing enemy decks? Because I was going to run through all of them and replace Power Surge and Mana Vault with something and Grim Monolith.

[jiansonz]

Is there an established way of easily editing enemy decks? Because I was going to run through all of them and replace Power Surge and Mana Vault with something and Grim Monolith.

It's easiest to use the deckbuilder in Manalink. For how to make the deckbuilder show only cards that are in Shandalar, look here.

Edit the deck, save it, open that file (it's in the Playdeck folder) with Notepad, then copy/paste the whole decklist over to the correct creature's file in the Decks folder. The file names for those 55 enemy deck files are just numbers, but there is a handy spreadsheet showing which file belongs to which enemy in this post.


BTW, Power Surge is still in the Hydra deck when I play, because I prefer to play with the old mana burn rule.

[lujo]

Ty, I was wondering if there was a faster way than that, been doing that for ages XD

The list of ID's is handy, I lost my old one and never made one That's gonna be very helpful!

Also, Abe's been wrong about quite a bunch of stuff, and missed a bunch of themes (sometimes because the AI isn't able to execute even the simplest ones - blue decks are severly gimped because of this in OG shandalar). He also wasn't aware enough of the importantance of a below 20 format for card evaluation. Decks which look like a pile of chaff to him are actually very functional in terms of Shandalar decks, and there's too much rl "wisdom" in the way he looked at things which doesn't apply. Right now I can't back this up with facts, but I'm itching to make a comparative analysis.

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Power Surge XD Well, I'm kinda playing without mana burn as it avoids the AI burning itself (used to be annoying in OG Shandalar), and it turned out to be very handy because of how the autopaying works currently which would've burned me out on top of all the other problems.

Right, I'm off to make a few quick tweaks. Hmmm, do I try to tweak the Abe lists (which seem to be the default in current setting) or go back to the OG stuff and tweak that? Hmmm. BRB.

I think I'll just paste all the decklists into one file, and then search up default problematic stuff that's spammed out all over the place first, like Mana Vault.

EDIT: Damn, Why did I think Grim Monolith was in Shandalar? And there's nothing that would let any deck ramp to 5 at turn 3, and a ton of AI decks are baking on that... If I replace Mana Vaults with anything it won't work. Darnit. Most other stuff can wait for the sorting to be done and for the next update...

[jiansonz]

problematic stuff that's spammed out all over the place first, like Mana Vault.

EDIT: Damn, Why did I think Grim Monolith was in Shandalar? And there's nothing that would let any deck ramp to 5 at turn 3, and a ton of AI decks are baking on that... If I replace Mana Vaults with anything it won't work. Darnit. Most other stuff can wait for the sorting to be done and for the next update...

I've seen the Manalink AI handle Mana Vault pretty well. Hopefully Korath can do something about it in Shandalar, too.

Otherwise you have Sol Ring, which would ramp to 5 at turn 3 (provided 3 lands are available) or Basalt Monolith which ramps to 6 at turn 4.

[lujo]

You know thinking about what you just said made me realize that an article I read recently had been spot on. It argued that Sol Ring, rather than Black Lotus, was the most powerful card ever made (or rather, the guy who wrote it said that over the years the opinion of the vintage playing community has shifted in that direction). And this actually so true when you consider this conundrum!

Interesting bit of MtG theory | Open

What Mana Vault is there for in so many decks is to be a colorless one-shot mana ramp effect which would let the AI cast huge threats out of order. Often because it couldn't exectute the actual gameplan of the decks, or the pool didn't have enough diverse stuff to give so many decks, so the developers simply put that bit of cheating everywhere. A non-black dark ritual, so to speak. It's sad, but true, that so many OG shandalar decks have to resort to that sort of thing.

But if I took that out right now a lot of decks would be completely harmless, making them not be harmless would take large reworks, and in some cases putting an actual gameplan in. Not yet ready for that.

But if I put Sol Ring in, I'm not putting in a one-shot colorless Dark Ritual, I'm giving them a Dark Ritual EVERY TURN. That's NOT what Mana Vault is, heck, if I replaced Mana Vaults with Black Lotuses I'd be much closer to what the Vault was meant to do for those decks. And the silliest thing is it wouldn't make the decks more powerful than they are, because they're all resorting to a gimmick that is pretty much equivalent to that. Grim Monolith would be equally close, instead of the effect costing 0 it would cost 1 more, but it wouldn't ping them. They'd maybe use Lotuses to ramp out 3cc worth of stuff on turn 1, but most mana vault decks don't have that kind of stuff (and besides Hypnotic Spectre not too many 3cc things are as much of a problem as a Serra Angel is on turn 2 or 3).

Strange but true.

Basal Monolith dosn't cut it, it takes up all their mana to cast on turn 3 and can then only ramp out a 5cc thing on turn 4 - not nearly the same deal. I could give them Marble Diamomd eqivalents or mana myrs that way.

The question is do I just flat out weaken them by giving them a weaker bit of ramp but one which doesn't ping them to death and which they're potentially less likely to missplay? Is it worth it?

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Also, what do you mean by Manalink AI being competent with the vault?

I mean, with blue decks in Shandalar it's actually quite sad - some have a lot of cards which were mostly meant to be used to manipulate Mana Vault but not even Mana Vault very often (twiddle, for example, becomes Dark Ritual with Mana Vault on board, Tetravus is supposed to be twiddle-vaulted into play, put unloading his flying pests on stack, hurkyll's recall him and the vault in respose, etc. The AI will Twiddle your land and Hurkyll's Recall your moxes, and would even if it had Mana Vault to manipulate. It just never plays the blue decks remotely sensibly so folks who don't know how stuff is supposed to work (like Abe Seargent who gets puzzled by even the original Seer deck, and gives Psyonic Blast to an enemy with 4-10 starting life, etc -.- abe, if you're one of the folks here, I'm sorry, I just get so mad at you every so often XD) look at them and think they're just piles of random cards

But in cases where the one-shot vault is the only thing a deck has got, replacing the vault for just about anything that's not Grim Monolith would mandate reworking the whole deck.

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Err, I'll do a bit of light tweaking anyway, seems like, with diamonds or myrs in place of mana vaults, just to see how that goes. Anyone know where I could find the original decklists? Abe's articles don't have all of them, and the vanilla instalation of shandalar I had seems to allready have all his rewords implemented