Exploits in Shandalar

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Since this is pretty much the most active place on the internet for Shandalar, I thought I'd share a couple things which may change the way you play. Both of these absolutely mess with the balance of the game, so you may choose not to use one or both of these as they can make life too easy.

The first is a timing trick on the five colored events that pop up over the map. You know, the things that can result in nomad's bazaar, diamond mines, gemcutter's guild, etc. If you save your game just east of the event, you can load in and click to move to the event. Try the first time after a save by clicking to move almost immediately, if you find an event rather than a card you can keep reloading and clicking that fast to see a different event. If you don't get it the first time, just pause a fraction of a second before you click to move when you load. If you find an event that way, you'll need to mimic that same timing to get new events when reloading the save. This attack works because it uses time as a seed value to determine if an event is found, but not which event is found. It's also an old game, so the timing on the seed is well within the human range of replicating, so it's pretty easy to trigger once you've got the hang of the trick. This means you can basically trigger those events at will assuming you're willing to spend a bit reloading to fish for the event you want.

The second trick involves the problems with how Ring of Ma'Ruf is implemented. In current use, Ring of Ma'Ruf will just fetch a card from your sideboard in a tournament setting, or at most a card you own in a casual setting. This is not how the game has it coded. You simply get to create a copy of any card in the game. This includes cards which you do not own yet. Now, this alone isn't enough to be broken because you don't get to keep that copy... until Darkpact enters the equation. The game has created the card from the Ring which won't get kept normally, but if you make that card your opponent's ante, you do get to keep the card. Not only that, but you also don't even lose the Ring of Ma'Ruf you used to create the card that you get to keep from ante. Now, how you do this depends on which version of the game you're running.

The classic version of the game uses yet another 'bug' to accomplish this combo. Library of Leng isn't errata'd because the game is too old, so even when you force yourself to discard, you can place a card on top of your library instead. So, the classic combo uses Ring of Ma'Ruf to create Timetwister, you have a Library of Leng in play, use a Disrupting Scepter to discard your Timetwister but to the top of your library because of Leng, then use Darkpact to swap the Timetwister on your library with the opponent's ante. Now when you win, you'll get a copy of Timetwister in your rewards. I used Timetwister in this example because when you play using this glitch you'll find the fastest way to reliably make this work is to create cards in this order: Timetwister x2, Demonic tutor, or alternatively Timetwister, Regrowth, Demonic Tutor if you want to keep to strictly 1 copy of cards restricted in that era. You may also want Jeweled Bird(or x2 if you're running Contract from Below), which combined with your graveyard recycling means you can't lose a combo piece. This means if a combo piece is destroyed, you have to discard it early on, it ends up in ante etc, you can just twister it back eventually once you've stabilized the game.

If you're lucky enough to still have a copy that Korath made, there's a little change in how this exploit works. Library of Leng has the errata, so we can't use that to put the card we want on top. This makes getting new cards a bit more difficult, but makes getting duplicates easier. Here the original combo is Ring of Ma'Ruf x2, Long Term Plans, Darkpact. We use both Rings to get Timetwister. Now we can cycle until we enter a state where we have a Timetwister in our deck (shuffled back by the other twister) and a Long Term Plans in hand to target the twister in our deck. Two draws later, we cast Darkpact when Timetwister is on top. Here our starting three cards are Timetwister x2, Vampiric Tutor. Vampiric Tutor can target all card types, and we no longer need to wait for 2 draws after Long Term Plans before we use Darkpact. This means when you're getting a new card you still need to use a Timetwister to shuffle your new card back into the deck and then get both the Tutor and Darkpact in hand to find your card then stack the ante. If you're getting a duplicate of something still in your deck at the time though you only need Vampiric Tutor and Darkpact though making it trivially easy to pull off. Imperial Seal will also obviously do for this combo if you're getting the cards naturally from the events and want to pull off a limited version of this to break the game less and only create duplicates of cards you've already gotten.

There's a side note about the problems with Ring of Ma'Ruf creating cards out of thin air which isn't as broken as being able to keep copies of any card in the game, and that's it's ability to create Bronze Tablets. This allows you to steal permanents that your opponent plays (such as Moxes, Sol Rings etc). This is convenient because it's only a single card in your deck to steal some great cards without having to lose anything yourself, but it's at the mercy of what your opponent plays and doesn't work on spells. Again, just as the Ring doesn't get removed from your collection when you place the card you generate with it into their ante, so too you don't lose the Ring when this Bronze Tablet that it created is "exchanged" with their card.

So, to sum this all up we have two game breaking exploits. The first allows us to easily force any random in game event we want. The second allows us to add any cards in the game to our collection at the rate of one card per game won so long as we take control of the game and don't win until our combo has been assembled. They're so game breaking you may just play around with these then go back to playing how you used to. You may just use one or the other, or maybe use them in some limited capacity. Whatever you want, I'm not in charge of what you do with this information. I just thought some other people might be interested in both of these tricks that can drastically change how easy it is to construct the Shandalar deck you want.