Collectible Card Game Headquarters

What difficulty do you guys play on? On easy, you can play with only 30 cards, which seems fair since since I played 10 years ago and thought the game was too hard. Your deck usually sucks in the beginning so having fewer cards makes it more powerful.
Here is my deck from my first game since 1998. (This is the more primitive form of the deck which I used for most of the game (and won nearly every match). Please post your decks if you played with 30-cards, too.
(Note: you can only have 3 cards of each type until you get the Tome of Enlightenment)

3 Kird Ape
3 Lightning Bolt
3 Blood Lust
3 Ball Lightning
3 Storm Seeker
3 Pyrotechnics

3 Forest
6 Mountain
3 Taiga

Kird ape helped make red/green a great starter deck. The trick is to not be tempted to bolt his creatures, but always go for the opponent. The deck Evolved into:

4 Kird Ape
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Wheel of Fortune
4 Ball Lightning
4 Storm Seeker

6 Mountain
4 Taiga
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Ruby

If you don't mind ignoring restricted-list cards, you should get 4 black lotuses. It will enable turn 1 kills since you can cast storm seeker on the first turn for 7 damage, then use wheel of fortune to do it again.

The downside of this deck is that you wont win against the final wizard with it--it's only designed to take out an opponent really quuickly.

Another 30-card deck that's pretty powerful: It works well in dungeons, but there are a few decks that can beat it. It's pretty inexpensive, with only the dual-lands & royal assassin being rare, and they are both optional.

4 Black Vise
4 Blight
4 Sinkhole
4 Stone Rain
2 Royal Assassin [for defense; can use Lightning Bolt too]

4 Strip Mine
4 Swamp
4 Badlands

The strategy is to put a black vise out first turn and then continually kill his lands every other turn. Unless he has moxes and black lotuses (or you have a bad draw and he gets out sol ring/felawar stone) he will be unable to cast anything and will be wittled down slowly by the black vise. If he does cast anything, you have royal assassin to take them out (and ping him for 1 if necessary). I'm curious to know what else you guys might suggest besides a Royal Assassin, especially for early decks.

It seems like the Black Vise is a great complement to almost any deck in Shandalar because it's available, inexpensive and almost always useful, especially in those crappy decks you start with.

If you have 4 Badlands and 4 Bayou, you can use Ice Storm instead of Blight.

I always play on the hardest difficulty, so I'm using 40 card decks (and 60 when I get the Tome of Enlightenment and feel like making REALLY broken decks, since then you can use unlimited copies of a card...)

Unless I'm playing black, I always grab as many Black Vise as possible in the early game. In black, I use Hypnotic Specter, which obviously works poorly with Black Vise. The other card that I always grab early, and combos well with Black Vise, is Strip Mine. Mishra's Factory can work quite well, too.

When in dungeons, I will typically make a deck like this:
4x Savannah Lions
4x White Knight
4x Crusade
4x Swords to Plowshares
4x Spirit Link
5x other stuff (Serra Angel, Disenchant, Balance if i've got it, maybe jihad, or a couple more weenies like Rainbow Knights or Tundra Wolves or Benalish Hero)
15x mana (moxes/black lotus if I've got it)

The idea is to gain buttloads of life by spirit linking your stuff, and after each duel you hopefully have more life than you started. You can even plow your own unneeded creatures when going in for the kill. It's pretty sick to finish a dungeon with a triple digit life total Besides just being a decent white weenie deck, the life total carrying over in dungeons means that if you get a bad hand (as long as it's not too early in the dungeon) you can survive for a long time and hopefully draw land or whatever you got screwed on.

The Crusades are the most expensive card; the rest are common wins in ante games, and aren't more than 200 gold or so to buy if I recall.