Here's some info on the Shandalar card list database that I made.
I am using
Magic Assistant (102 MB download from the link). No fancy install, just unzip it where you want and then dive into magicassistant.exe
On your first run, it will ask you for a folder location which will be where you want to store your card collection. This folder will fill up to maybe 300+ MB or more, depending how many individual cards you look at when using it. Most of it is image files of each card that MA grabs from Gatherer, provided that you have an internet connection when doing so.
You can start building your own collection, or take the xml file below and drop it into \magiccards\Collections (I recommend you close MA when you replace the file).
Then you'll have nearly all the cards in Shandalar. Please note that the Astral set cannot be added to this database.
My main purpose for making this was so that I can use the card filter feature while looking in the "My Cards" tab. I will be using this mainly for building enemy decks, but it can also be used to figure out what's out there in the game that you might want for your play deck(s). My intent is to just use MA for searching among the available cards and deciding which and how many I want, then using deck.exe to actually make the decks (note: not all Shandalar cards are actually in deck.exe). This is where you can add Astral cards, if need be. For enemy decks, I just manually cut/paste the deck list blocks from its /Playdeck .dck file and into the /Deck enemy .dck file.
Another advantage of MA is portability. I can use it at home or at work, whenever inspiration or curiosity strikes me, and the only file I need to transport is the the main.xml. I attached it to a draft email in my hotmail account, so I can access it from any computer and then just download MA from SourceForge. No muss, no fuss.
NB: Building this database was a long (10 days, 2-7 hours per day) and mind-numbing process. I may have accidentally added a few cards that aren't in Shandalar. The card total is maybe 10ish cards higher than it should be, but I didn't spot any extras when I exported the collection and added the Shandalar card IDs in excel. Maybe I'm just seeing ghosts. If you happen to discover any, please let me know. I'd love to weed them out.
Example: "How many 1 casting cost Goblins are in the game?" 39. 5 are black, the rest are red. 4 of the red ones are also castable with an alternate color. 6 of the red ones have 2 power, 4 of those have 2 toughness. 3 of the 39 are rare (2 red, 1 black) and 6 of the red ones are uncommon. Only 1 of the 39 has no rules text. Only 1 of the 39 has 0 power. This is all just stats though. You can examine all the finer points of each card in order to pick which ones you like.
I'm excited to get started using it. I hope other people find this helpful.