Shandalar enemy decks overhaul
Posted: 02 Oct 2011, 00:58
I´m a big fan of Shandalar and have played through it many times, for over a decade now.
The two expansions added a bunch of more cards. In the original game, you could pretty much see that some cards were anticipated to arrive in expansions. I have been told that in the first expansion (Spells of the Ancients), the enemy decks were indeed changed to include several new cards (like the green/red Ape Lord creature getting Kird Apes, etc.) but in the next expansion (Duels of the Planeswalkers), the decks were back to how they were in the original game.
Mok´s version does include some changes. I like some of them, but very much dislike other changes. For example, the Arch Angel deck lost all of its cool 'fast and furious flyers' flavour and became something watered-down and weird with Moorish Cavalery, Resurrection, etc.
Forest Dragon and Azaar decks suddenly included land destruction. And so on.
With the current 2010 .iso version of the game, we are once again back to what the decks were in the original game.
I know about the issue of not being able to get more cards into Shandalar - but I think there is no reason not to have the enemy decks make better use of the 646 cards we do have available.
So I have changed all the enemy decks in the Shandalar I play, and this far, I am very pleased with the result.
I have also temporarily moved away all other decks from my Playdeck folder, so I can run Gauntlets and meet only Shandalar creature decks. I think it´s fun both to choose a specific deck to play with, or just go with a random one. I have played at least one Gauntlet (best of 1) with each of the 55 Shandalar decks. I must say I did surprisingly bad here. Lost in the first duel quite often. Maybe I suck, but I like to think I had bad draws more often that the cumputer did (and I was the one who could mulligan...). My best run was with the Arch Angel deck, which won 13 duels and then lost to Aga Galneer. I plan to play four more Gauntlets with each of the 55 decks, to get some more interesting numbers.
.
ANYWAY
.
.
My main goals with the overhaul were these:
1. More flavourful enemy decks, with more cards from the expansions added.
2. Stay with the themes of the decks - often strengthening them, even.
3. Make most of the decks better and more competitive, especially the really bad ones.
4. Adding some cards you can´t buy with amulets, or in Nomad´s Bazaars, so they get slightly easier to get when you play.
My main inspiration for this is a series of articles written by Abe Sargent in 2009. Quite often, I think that this guy really is spot on with his ideas (sometimes I just go with his changes), but sometimes I disagree (a little or a lot). He´s also an excellent writer.
Here are the articles:
Green decks
Red decks
Black decks
Blue decks
White decks
Five 2-colour decks
There are 55 enemy decks in Shandalar:
- 35 of them (7x5) are monocoloured (although two of the 35 splashes another colour and one splashes two other colours).
- 10 of them are two-coloured (one of each possible combination).
- 9 of them are tri-coloured (one of each possible combination except white/red/black). These are the four Djinni and the five tri-coloured Dragons.
- 1 is the five-coloured Arzakon deck.
Abe´s articles cover the first 35 decks, and 5 of the next 10. The remaining 15 decks haven´t been "Abe-d", so I´m more on my own there.
How to change the decks.
The Shandalar enemy decks are stored in the 'Decks' folder, where each file corresponds to one enemy deck. You can open and edit them with Notepad. Each card in the game has a specific number, and the next column tells the game how many copies of that card the deck has. If you need to know certain card numbers, you can just create a 'dummy' deck in the Deck Builder that contains the cards you are after, save the deck, then open that file in Notepad.
It´s a bit annoying that there are only numbers in the file names for Shandalar, but it got better for me once I included these in my reference list (see below).
Sideboard
Most of the Shandalar decks use a sideboard, that adapts 3 cards after your primary colour. I do not know what it takes to get the computer to use the 'v none' version in Shandalar, but this is the one that has traditionally been used in the Dueling section of the game, and it´s also the one I use in my Playdeck folder. Maybe it´s used if your two main colours have exactly the same number of cards? I do not know.
Some of the sideboards have 1-2 cards that is the same in all versions, effectively reducing that sideboard to 2 or just 1 card.
My house rules of Shandalar decks
(meaning: the enemy decks must also follow them)
* A deck has 60 or more cards (except for a player at the very beginning of a Shandalar campaign).
* 4 copies maximum of cards other than basic lands
* 1 copy maximum of restricted cards
(the three lines above means I have no use for the Tome of Enlightenment, so I don´t buy it)
* Mana Vault, Balance, Land Tax and Black Vise are not restriced, so up to 4 can be used
* I used no 'ante cards' other than Bronze Tablet and Jeweled Bird. I would have used Tempest Efreet if it wasn´t so buggy...
In the following posts, I will go over the enemy decks, in alphabetic order. I will first list the original deck and give a few comments, then I will quote the relevant part from Abe Sergent´s articles (if applicable) so you can read it without having to follow the link. Then I will comment on Abe´s suggestions, add some changes if I don´t agree with him, and then list my modified version of the deck, and sometimes add some closing comments. I will try to add comments about at least one deck per day, usually a couple of them.
Finally, some downloads:
My current Decks folder, zipped
My current Playdeck folder, zipped
Decks reference list for my modified versions.
The two expansions added a bunch of more cards. In the original game, you could pretty much see that some cards were anticipated to arrive in expansions. I have been told that in the first expansion (Spells of the Ancients), the enemy decks were indeed changed to include several new cards (like the green/red Ape Lord creature getting Kird Apes, etc.) but in the next expansion (Duels of the Planeswalkers), the decks were back to how they were in the original game.
Mok´s version does include some changes. I like some of them, but very much dislike other changes. For example, the Arch Angel deck lost all of its cool 'fast and furious flyers' flavour and became something watered-down and weird with Moorish Cavalery, Resurrection, etc.
Forest Dragon and Azaar decks suddenly included land destruction. And so on.
With the current 2010 .iso version of the game, we are once again back to what the decks were in the original game.
I know about the issue of not being able to get more cards into Shandalar - but I think there is no reason not to have the enemy decks make better use of the 646 cards we do have available.
So I have changed all the enemy decks in the Shandalar I play, and this far, I am very pleased with the result.
I have also temporarily moved away all other decks from my Playdeck folder, so I can run Gauntlets and meet only Shandalar creature decks. I think it´s fun both to choose a specific deck to play with, or just go with a random one. I have played at least one Gauntlet (best of 1) with each of the 55 Shandalar decks. I must say I did surprisingly bad here. Lost in the first duel quite often. Maybe I suck, but I like to think I had bad draws more often that the cumputer did (and I was the one who could mulligan...). My best run was with the Arch Angel deck, which won 13 duels and then lost to Aga Galneer. I plan to play four more Gauntlets with each of the 55 decks, to get some more interesting numbers.
.
ANYWAY
.
.
My main goals with the overhaul were these:
1. More flavourful enemy decks, with more cards from the expansions added.
2. Stay with the themes of the decks - often strengthening them, even.
3. Make most of the decks better and more competitive, especially the really bad ones.
4. Adding some cards you can´t buy with amulets, or in Nomad´s Bazaars, so they get slightly easier to get when you play.
My main inspiration for this is a series of articles written by Abe Sargent in 2009. Quite often, I think that this guy really is spot on with his ideas (sometimes I just go with his changes), but sometimes I disagree (a little or a lot). He´s also an excellent writer.
Here are the articles:
Green decks
Red decks
Black decks
Blue decks
White decks
Five 2-colour decks
There are 55 enemy decks in Shandalar:
- 35 of them (7x5) are monocoloured (although two of the 35 splashes another colour and one splashes two other colours).
- 10 of them are two-coloured (one of each possible combination).
- 9 of them are tri-coloured (one of each possible combination except white/red/black). These are the four Djinni and the five tri-coloured Dragons.
- 1 is the five-coloured Arzakon deck.
Abe´s articles cover the first 35 decks, and 5 of the next 10. The remaining 15 decks haven´t been "Abe-d", so I´m more on my own there.
How to change the decks.
The Shandalar enemy decks are stored in the 'Decks' folder, where each file corresponds to one enemy deck. You can open and edit them with Notepad. Each card in the game has a specific number, and the next column tells the game how many copies of that card the deck has. If you need to know certain card numbers, you can just create a 'dummy' deck in the Deck Builder that contains the cards you are after, save the deck, then open that file in Notepad.
It´s a bit annoying that there are only numbers in the file names for Shandalar, but it got better for me once I included these in my reference list (see below).
Sideboard
Most of the Shandalar decks use a sideboard, that adapts 3 cards after your primary colour. I do not know what it takes to get the computer to use the 'v none' version in Shandalar, but this is the one that has traditionally been used in the Dueling section of the game, and it´s also the one I use in my Playdeck folder. Maybe it´s used if your two main colours have exactly the same number of cards? I do not know.
Some of the sideboards have 1-2 cards that is the same in all versions, effectively reducing that sideboard to 2 or just 1 card.
My house rules of Shandalar decks
(meaning: the enemy decks must also follow them)
* A deck has 60 or more cards (except for a player at the very beginning of a Shandalar campaign).
* 4 copies maximum of cards other than basic lands
* 1 copy maximum of restricted cards
(the three lines above means I have no use for the Tome of Enlightenment, so I don´t buy it)
* Mana Vault, Balance, Land Tax and Black Vise are not restriced, so up to 4 can be used
* I used no 'ante cards' other than Bronze Tablet and Jeweled Bird. I would have used Tempest Efreet if it wasn´t so buggy...
In the following posts, I will go over the enemy decks, in alphabetic order. I will first list the original deck and give a few comments, then I will quote the relevant part from Abe Sergent´s articles (if applicable) so you can read it without having to follow the link. Then I will comment on Abe´s suggestions, add some changes if I don´t agree with him, and then list my modified version of the deck, and sometimes add some closing comments. I will try to add comments about at least one deck per day, usually a couple of them.
Finally, some downloads:
My current Decks folder, zipped
My current Playdeck folder, zipped
Decks reference list for my modified versions.