Improved Shandalar General Playtesting & Feedback Thread

[lujo]

Ok, got it, that is, got a better functioning experimental Warlock:

Warlock 1.1X | Open

.10410 4 Dread Warlock
.1592 4 Tendrils of Corruption
.1588 4 Corrupt
.239 25 Swamp
.2757 4 Pillar Tombs of Aku
.404 4 Cuombajj Witches
.3373 4 Foul Imp
.11033 4 Runed Servitor
.12594 2 Murder
.13985 3 Squelching Leeches
.1110 2 Phyrexian Arena

After what's now two days, I kind of caved in on some things. Think of this as an experiment in whether I can find the right kind of downside for

- having 4 X Tendrils and 4 X Corrupt in a deck
- inquiry in how low can you go with blacks life loss effects while retaining the enemy a legitimate threat
- seeing what happens if you let certain things hang low for the player

The deal is pretty similar to the one before, but with a few twists and fewer gimmicks (and also I think I'm saving Fog of Gnats for the Witch, and there's quite a few other things I had to save for other folks whos tweaks and re-tweaks are coming up.).

This time Coumbajj Witches are dictating the creature selection - so it's Runed Servitor, Foul Imp, Dread Warlock and Squelching Leeches backing them up. Everything is harder to just ping off the board, and the Imps add more life-loss along with their evasion.

Phyrexian Arena adds yet more life loss, and Murder lets it kill something in ways unrelated to how many swamps are there to help with early bombs. I suspect the deck is a bit low on creatures, but there just isn't a proper, functional one-drop which also isn't reserved for someone else (there is, in fact, Tenacious Dead is perfect, but the AI misplays it and it's not very offensive without aura/equipment backup).

Tendrils of Corruption and Corrupt let the deck kill stuff, kill opponents and get life back. The deal is surviving until at least one of these can be played. Pillar Tombs of Aku are currently only supported by Runed Servitor and Phyrexian Arena, but even if they occasionally do more harm than good i think a deck which could reliably get to it's corrupts to the head would be a tad much for this (or possibly any) tier and the deck needs it's chance to fumble.

If it fumbles too much, the deck probably could be tweaked to support it better or even remove it, but I find it interesting to play against and it actually does a good thing for the corrupt plan - it keeps the opponent busy juggling creatures or just lowers their lives to get them closer to Corrupt range, the question is just how it works out.

Do pick it up, i believe it's much more solid and has a better creature plan and general curve than the one in the package above. Will be in the next package.

---

Enchantress is a swingy deck with very clear mulligan rules IRL. I'm sort of thinking about several things I could do with her, including proper Fearie tribal with Faerie Noble now in, Argothian Enchantress to make the titular enchantress less prone to getting pinged off the board. On the other hand I could use some feedback / a campaign run vs. the current incarnation, because green faeries are a flying weenie tribe - more consistent than anything you could do with Enchantress shennanigans in Shandalar, but also a bunch of flying buggers with pump. I'm kinda exausted from all the warlock bussiness, so I think I'll round out / revisit the first vawe of dual-color dudes before touching her at all.

The spreadsheet I've got here is weird, it's got a mix of friendly and enemy colored pairs in both categories, 16 and 20 life. It's also rather odd about the Djinns, who're all tier6 while the evil wizards are tier 10 - which adds to why I don't really see them as extraordinarily powerful enemies by default.

[lujo]

Here's Mind Stealer 0.6. 0.1 had Agadeem Occultist overwhelmingly bugged, and Trepanation Blade underwhelmingly bugged. 0.2 was doing a wee bit too much with Umara Raptor and was a wee bit too off-topic with Hagra Diabolist. 0.3 was murdering too hard with Baleful Strix and Tidehollow Strix for the actual plan to ever come into play. 0.5 finally got me to notice how truly insane Consuming Aberration really is. 0.6 got the curve smoothed out a bit, and is due for another tweaking but is playable and worth running until I catch a few hours to tweak it again, and there probably might be 0.8 once I catch up with Shapeshifter and Whim and decide how the goodies actually get distributed.

Mind Stealer 0289.dck | Open

.10774 4 Halimar Excavator
.10618 4 Nimana Sell-Sword
.14034 3 Extract from Darkness
.6799 3 Talisman of Dominance
.258 4 Underground Sea
.2140 4 Underground River
.126 8 Island
.239 8 Swamp
.12961 4 Grisly Spectacle
.10677 4 Stonework Puma
.9264 3 Sower of Temptation
.13191 4 Pilfered Plans
.10958 3 Inquisition of Kozilek
.10477 4 Tome Scour

There's quite a bit of experimentation going on here. I knew I was going to go for at least 1 milling deck, and the allies get much more worthwhile in multicolor combinations. Blue and black guys play very well together and while I'm not much partial to the mechanic in general, they do quite add to the pool and play well togather in these colors.

I'm trying out the pain lands as they're a much more sensible general-purpose multicolored land than the duals, and the AI can go places with them. They're backing the duals up here, but we'll figure out how to go dual-less entirely I hope. Talismans are pretty much the strongest mana stones, and it's a bit unfortunate that they only got made in allied colors before wizards decided to give up on them and print less powerful stones.

The "steal your mind" theme is kept here, but toned down and straightened out, and backed up by a milling strategy, and also allies. That's why blue and black allies are actually worthwhile, they have a very nice curve and make for a good multi-purpose milling deck, basically ideal for mind stealer.

The allies which are in are Halimar Excavator, Nimana Sell-Sword, Stonework Puma. Yes, only three for now, but that might change. I had more in the previous versions, but the problem with that was that Umara Raptor is a growing damned flier, and Agadeem Occultist is bugged, so I replaced the raptor with the rather usleless (in this deck) puma (it does trigger the mill), and cut the Occultist until it's fixed. Also I had the Jiwari Shapeshifter, if that's what he's called, but he's obviously been drawn by someone who played Shandalar and I'm pretty sure shapeshifter's gonna be a blue Ally-Milling deck. Mono-blue allies can actually work and not necessarily be too strong (white ones are just cheeze, red ones are too good or too meh, and green ones are pretty meh - or so it seems).

The Excavator is the main plan here, as he can mill you quite a bit. Deck does need at least one more ally for it to really work, it worked very well when I had more allies in, but Umara Raptor kept killing folks straight dead on it's own. Nimana Sell-Sword grows and the puma triggers them both.

Extract from Darkness is reanimation / controll magic / bit of mill and is quite cool. Could even be bumped to 4, but when Agadeem Occultist works he's in, so no need, as I need another ally anyway.

Grisly Spectacle is an obvious choice, and kills black stuff, too, which is nice, mills and provides targets Extract from Darkness, too. Pilfered Plans is the much needed card draw, and also mills a bit.

Sower of Temptation is the choice of mind control, because a) he can be played against creatureless decks b) he can be deal with so he's less stable c) he can also draw removal away from the mill-ally d) I want him played by someone, faeries don't work right and if they did I sure as hell wouldn't want the faeries deck to have him at their disposal as he's a bit nuts in that.

Inquisition of Kozilek and Tome Scour are (needed) 1-drop placeholders - inquisition is a good, much played card, a multi-purpose Duress and adds hand disruption to the deck's arsenal. Not a very good draw mid-game, but hand disruption generally isn't. Tomescour is rather meh, there's stronger one-shot mill options (and all sorts of other things), but it's a single-color 1cc spell and I kept it in for now. It's what's getting replaced for sure, as the mill plan isn't working out in this version (it did in other versions), but I have to decide on what's taking the place of these two and/or other things.

The download is just the Mind Stealer, feedback appreciated. All sorts of things can be done with it from this point, it'll certainly be buffed, but lets see it like this for now. I mean, I can always stick a bunch of Consuming Abberation s in, but then there'll be 20/20 monsters running around and we'll all lose our minds!

---

Went and did some testing of my own, and got my ass kicked left and right ^^ had 13/8 win loss record and I barely only got going. I got lucky and landed a Fate Unraveler (and then picked up another one) and had a few bombs in my black deck so there was stuff I could peel off the top of my deck to win stuff for me (Fate Unraveler is an excellent card to explain why there has to be a rarity tier that asks you for 4 amulets per pop and doesn't let you get any out of quests).

There's a lot of equipment lying around and it skews the game in players favor as the player doesn't misuse it and it makes any creature able to win the game (I had Grafted Wargear - you can't really give it to the AI without a lot of considerations while deckbuilding), but it won a bunch of matches for me on it's own. The +X/+Y if the opponent is at default starting life vampires are also a mite busted in the format.

Still - most of the decks I've played against that I tweaked curved out nicely, kept presenting threats, kept at least pinging you. One of the Witches came back from the dead with a very annoying Maw of the Mire and the Warlock pulled a great Pillar Tombs of Aku choke on me (the enormous leeches were a tad overkill, I have to see about that). A Sea Dragon got a bad draw (what was I thinking with the last tweak, I'll get to him soon enough - whish I had Manta Ray, though, and in case I do, then a better eye-brain connection). Druid needs to be a smidge more buff and resilient against equipment (he did arse me up with a Hail Storm I didn't see coming). A witch summoned a Vampire Lord, and Nettling Imp into Wall of Souls was about as annoying as you can imagine. A priestess kicked my ass with the old Wall of Swords into Animate Wall, and I wish I remembered how you turn the mind control off her (she don't really need it anymore). And Undead Knight beat me up fair and square, good curve vs. my sealed deck and a Crusader would've but I had my trusty Hag to barely scrape by. I whish the geography was different so that there was more islands and mountains around, too, I'll have to start again one to see what the blue and red low-end guys feel like. Also, lack of mulligans simply affects too many games.

Seems tough but sorta engaging.

---

Holy cow, I'm 2/3 vs Merfolk Shaman and 1/2 vs. Alt-A-Kesh. The damned Krosan Beast is going out of that deck, and the Shaman wouldn't have been that much of a problem if I was able to mulligan 1 land hands in two games and if Artificer's Hex didn't turn out to be bugged.

Now, there's a Prismat roaming around way too soon, Djinns are spawning, too, and so are Summoners. Something is up with that.

Also Djinns and Dragons are most definitely NOT bosses and NOT supposed to be extra tough. Not kidding on that, they really don't need anything special to be murderous - extra life (for dragons) and access to choice mechanics and mechanic support out of 3 colors with a great mana base is brutal enough. Also - they spawn, like, before you can blink, I didn't even get to 60 cards, I'm bleeding mana links and barely hanging above 10, still fighting tier 1-3 dudes and the Djinns and Dragons are already all over the place. Djinns are fairly common enemies, heck, you know what, I'm making a separate thread.

Also, I get the feeling the AI is somehow dumber in actual shandalar than in infinite duel mode. It's making a lot more mistakes and misplaying stuff it didn't misplay in testing. What could be up with that?

[lujo]

Done some more testing, made a largeish bunch of tweaks, and put togather early verisions of Fungus Master, Tusk Guardian and Sedge Beast

--- Tweaks

As far as tweaks go I can't remember every single one as I haven't written them all down (facepalm), but deffinitely grab the pack if you're using/testing the tweaks because most of them seemed necessary and adress some glaring problems I've noticed in practice.

Druid got buffed somewhat, as did the Cleric. I gave them both ways to deal with artifacts and enchantments, and I gave Cleric some removal (all in place of stuff that the AI was misusing but would otherwise be legit). I also gave the druid Wurm's Tooth, and the Cleric 4 X Flagstones of Trokair (helps with his Threshold plan). There's quite a few tweaks, Cleric got more Possessed Nomads, and even 2 Saltblast, and Druid got Natural End, another Kraul Warrior and another Spidersilk Armor.

Alt-A-Kesh lost Krosan Beast and got Nyx Weaver and 2 more lands (not sure what I trimmed).

Elementalist lost Arc Lightning and got Electrolyze. I want to see what happens.

Elvish Magi got his weenie count trimmed and a midsection added, which consists of a bunch of Elvish Warrior s and Viridian Zealot s (also equipment proofing). It hasn't got much to do with them in terms of buffs and stuff, but it gives him something offensive and utility to play before the big stuff hits.

Sea Dragon lost 4 Harbor Serpents, and got a land and 3 Vodalian Knights. They Leap. And are also quite on theme and add to his arsenal of relatively passive early roadblocks which go mad aggro once the huge stuff starts splashing.

Witch got 2 Gate to Phyrexia. Artificer's Hex doesn't work atm, so that's kinda that, I hope it works out. Warlock lost the enormous leeches and got stuck with a somewhat random Guul Draz Spectre (until I can really sit down and figure out what to give him as 4-5 drop biggie). Leeches were plenty overkill.

Priestess got Wall of Spears replaced with One-Eyed Scarecrow. She might be impossibly annoying to play against now, since Wall of Swords fly and get buffs, while the enemy fliers get less capable of killing them. She's pretty mean now.

Merfolk Shaman lost Flow of Ideas and got Carry Away. Not sure if Carry Away work, but if it does, trolololol. He's also plenty mean. Conjurer lost a tortoise and a tim and got 2 Flow of Ideas.

Sorceress got Fiery Mantle and Rite of Flame removed and Goblin Settler and Goblin Skycutter worked in. Should be interesting but not overwhelming, and she's got more goblins to tutor for now.

Those are the tweaks for now, and I can see quite a bunch more coming.


---

As for new impressions form playing it's a mixed bag, but with more satisfied feeling than before:

- Sorcerer kicks ass. In a good way, you never really feel overwhelmed and you don't get mad at him because he's not burning you to the face, just screwing you up whatever you do with odd bits of junk you can't take seriously.

- Paladin also kicks ass, and it turns out it can use shifting sky the way it's supposed to be used (still unsure what happens if he plays it on an empty board though). I've also not seen him actually activate Northern Paladin, but I can't confirm it's bugged yet. Nothing seems urgent about reworking him so I'll tweak him when I get there (I'm quite annoyed that he's blue-white, and he might be a tad too gruesome, but as far as the "awesome" and "oh crap" factors go, they're through the roof).

Aside about Paladin and Winged Horse | Open

Eh, if I manage to figure out how to shift enemies around, there's quite a good case to be made for Paladin moving over to being the Blue-White minion and the Winged Stallion to just being white. Paladin fits the flavor for a ton of UW cards and concepts (as well as his OG one), and "Pegasus" doesn't really fit blue at all. Pegasi are an overwhelmingly "W vanilla small flier tribe" (with soldier interactions occasionally), they don't mix with anything blue in any meaningful way - and blue doesn't need them in a deck because what blue usually provides is... fliers. If the pegasus was white you could just put a smallish bunch of pegasi into a deck of any concept at all, and it would work simply because any deck can use a few early flying threats. Or you could do threshold if the buyback:sac-a-land pegasus spawner from tempest was in, or you could do W madness with the Pegasus Refuge - blue is lacking a madness card, and doesn't really have any proper threshold.) In short - I'd love to be able to just swap those two around.

- Seer was quite pleasingly annoying. Conjurer hasn't failed to send a Kraken at me yet (no trample or ways to make it fly, so it's not that brutal, it's mostly just a distraction while it pings you / kills you w. fliers).

- All the Djinns and Dragons need their mana looked into again (but I kinda suspected allready). Having said that, Mandurang is absolutely brutal. I'm not sure how you beat that thing if it gets going. Prismat also kicked my ass. Aga Galneer is pretty nasty too.

- Troll Shaman seems quite deadly. I need to sit down and figure out exactly what's wrong with the way he messes up activations in the post-combat main phase, but he's so mean he still kicks you ass.

- Warmage also beat me up, but that's common practice. Summoner also proved to be pretty kick-ass, and it didn't even pull Power Matrix on me.

--- New Decks, somewhat unpolished and untested, and, well, not the most inventive (Yet! They will be, I promise!)

Guardian of the Tusk | Open

.212 4 Savannah
.1882 4 Brushland
.188 8 Plains
.91 8 Forest
.8790 4 Hedge Troll
.10795 4 Loam Lion
.12601 4 Prized Elephant
.2679 4 Bull Elephant
.10331 4 Qasali Pridemage
.10064 4 Sigil Blessing
.10179 4 Nacatl Savage
.213 4 Savannah Lions
.7070 4 Horned Helm

Right, so this is not very well tested (but I did put in some time in sorting though my choices). It's a very basic beatdown concept, so it's a bit hard to make it truly memorable (in these colors especially). I decided a while ago, while sortign through green, that "elephant tribal" is a bad idea because they've got their niche and a tribal which doesn't fill out a curve (or is all-weenies) is neither exciting or truly workable.

I did decide that Hedge Troll is in. It's a nostalgia card for all us nerds who grew up with Shandalar - they color-shifted Sedge Troll, and by god, that thing has tusks! So it's gonna be played in Tusk Guardian, for the dental plan (and also, obviously for being on color and kicking ass).

Other than that I kept with the semi-african theme with the choices, which wasn't difficult. Made it supper efficient (although not as maniacaly efficient as it could've been), gave it no flying or fancy moves (OG deck didn't have any either).

You got Loam Lion (hah, Kird Ape!) and Savannah Lions as one drops, Qasali Pridemage and Nacatl Savage as 2 drops. The pridemage has exalted and is there to deal with equipment and enchantments, and the Nacatl Savage is immune to artifact removal but also to being equipped (not everything has to be madly efficient).

Hedge Troll is the only Three Drop, but that's because I didn't want to choke that slot up, the idea is that at 3 mana lots of things can be done with the cheaper guys and the equipment and pump, too.

There's 8 4 drops, Prized Elephant and Bull Elephant. The Bull Elephant has a straight up drawback but is quite sturdy, and the other guy doesn't have a drawback and is just sturdy (and also tramply if need be).

Sigil Blessing is plenty powerful in a deck with a ton of creatures (it's also got a rhino on the art), and it needs to be seen if Horned Helm works right but I sure hope it does as that's the exact equipment I'd want to give this deck.

Let's see how it goes, it's simple, flavorful, I make a point not to overdo on multicolored cards, and a lot of stuff can be fitted in afterwards. It'll probably need something more than this, at least artifact hate, but it has plenty of cards that look like they're straight from the OG Shandalar, and I think it makes a nice start on for a functional Tusk Guardin not overburdened with Elephants.

Sedge Beast | Open

.239 6 Swamp
.164 6 Mountain
.9 4 Badlands
.2126 4 Sulfurous Springs
.219 4 Sedge Troll
.1406 4 Pillage
.1278 4 Wrecking Ball
.5869 4 Rancid Earth
.3658 3 Ogre Arsonist
.13419 4 Deathbellow Raider
.13711 4 Felhide Brawler
.13885 3 Felhide Petrifier
.1337 2 Blightning
.11274 4 Grasp of Darkness
.11209 4 Blackcleave Cliffs

This is another thing that's quite difficult to really get creative with, at least before I really sift through the pool. It's a concept that never really evolved past it's inital form historically - cheap buggers and land destruction, you can build it again and again, change all the cards and it's always the same deck.

What I did was flavor it a bit, make it somewhat more flexible and chucked the Strip Mine and Sinkhole out. For reasons other than personal preference, too, 4 Strip Mine WILL cause issues with no mulligans and ruin games for the deck (as well as the opponent occasionally), and if your deck need sinkhole to work, something's wrong with the deck.

Hark then at... pretty much the same deck, but more interesting (but somewhat undertested). And possibly a bit more interesting to get your ass kicked by.

Sedge Troll is joined by these minotaurs Deathbellow Raider, Felhide Brawler, Felhide Petrifier, which you might also recognize as Erg Raiders, Ironclaw Orcs and... well, a minotaur lord which doesn't pump the other guys but makes them trade better which is nice. Replaced the Uthden Troll, who's a mean card, but there's already a pain in the ass deck with those, so now it's a minotaur deck and they've got a troll buddy. Or cook. Or he's boss because he can beat them all up and regen from their deathtouch.

They also have an ogre buddy - Ogre Arsonist, who's a very handy LD spell, as has probably been noticed by anyone who played vs. the Sorcerer lately (where his job position is occupied by a bunch of violent Chinese guys).

The other LD spells are - Pillage (kills equipment too, woot!), Wrecking Ball (cheaper fissure, woot! Can be regened, boo! But it's cheaper!) and Rancid Earth (if it goes later it can wipe up weenies, or even mess up bigger things that fought your crazily agressive creatures, yay!).

Those are backed up with Grasp of Darkness (no regen, yay!) and some Blightning (discard + burn to the face, woot!).

And it should work, i think. Every time you're slightly mana screwed - you're dead, if you're not, the deck has plenty of ways to screw you over, make you trade unfavorably, color screw you, use it's ld to snipe your equipment and creatures, and whathave you.

Feedback appreciated, allthough what with playing against this sort of deck being highly unfun, I don't suppose I'll get any (I will test it out a bunch personally, now that it doesn't have Strip Mines and Sinkholes and is less one-dimensional it's gonna be more fun to play against, I think).

Fungus Master | Open

.8316 4 Vigean Hydropon
.94 4 Fungusaur
.3429 3 Spike Colony
.1687 4 Rootwater Hunter
.11394 2 Turn Aside
.5457 4 Yavimaya Coast
.252 4 Tropical Island
.126 8 Island
.91 8 Forest
.10379 2 Acidic Slime
.3814 3 Launch
.12970 3 Gyre Sage
.1365 3 Assault Zeppelid
.12909 3 Cloudfin Raptor
.13031 2 Prime Speaker Zegana
.10993 3 Might of the Masses

I'll adimt, I was a bit lost here. Not in the sense of there not being enough places to take it, but there being too many, and most of them being decks with a ton of stuff going on that it was hard to tell what the AI was capable of and what it was missplaying or even how to build it properly.

I actually spent a few hours with this one until it got to here (it's why the other ones are so undertested). But I'm not yet sure whether to go forwards, backward, sideways... UG is a strange combination of colors in a sense that blue and green have so little in common that it always feels like either blue stuff is tacked onto green cards or the other way around, and making the deck was an endless struggle not to just make it mono green.

And also, I got to adimt I don't have that much first hand experience with graft and evolve. I have some but not enough to really be sure how you combine graft, evolve and spikes in the most optimal and dazzling way, so it's gonna take me some time to really get into it and make it do magic.

What we have here so far is:

I kept the Fungusaur in (even though I wanted it removed from the pool, as it's a terrible card which has long been outclassed by a million things that just grow on their own. Like the Evolve cards, or a million Oozes, or anything you put Forced Evolution on, or...). Anyway, I decided to keep it in.

So there's Fungusaur and Rootwater Hunter (kept it from Conjurer). There's Vigean Hydropon (which I need to report as being misused for one small but important detail - it shouldn't graft onto other copies of it'self that's a bad move). Vigean Hydropon is actually good with either of them as it grafts counters onto them when they come into play, making the tim harder to kill and the Fungusaur able to attack without being pinged or otherwise buffed.

Now, if the various fight cards were in, the hydropon would be very awesome - you could make it fight stuff and it's huge, and it's fungusy, and the deck would be so incredibly cool. They're not, so what can you do.

The thing is also plenty good for Evolve guys because it's bound to trigger evolve all the time (it's quite large), and it's basically an enchantment. I don't like any of the nonsensical evolve guys art, so most of them aren't in (more importantly, they're pretty brutal, so I kinda gotta playtest them a bunch before I decide which ones get in).

Other than the hydropon, the AI isn't too good with most graft guys, and evolve guys kind of suck if drawn too late. I did put in a bunch of Cloudfin Raptor , but I'm not happy with it. Gyre Sage is somewhat better.

Assault Zeppelid is sufficiently fungusy, and while it looks like a phantom monster with trample tacked on (because it is, that's who UG cards are made), if there's a hydropon down it'll come in as a 4/4 flier. That's also a bit of a pickle with these mechanics, cards don't really tell the whole story by themeselves.

Spike Colony I'm quite happy with - it evolves stuff and provides the deck a means to pump stuff further - even mid combat. I was a bit afraid that the AI would mess up (it's mana) with activations for other spikes, the Colony is expensive enough that by the time it hits the board it has mana to spare. They're actually pretty good, I like them. Dunno if the AI is misusing them too much, gotta see.

Acidic Slime is also on-flavorish, and well, just look at it! Kills equipment, lands, stuff in combat (or would if the AI understood deathtouch better). What's more, it should be coming in after the hydropon so it should also be bigger than 2/2.

Prime Speaker Zegana is something I put in because the Deck needed card draw. Err, she can be all over the place from quite meh to brutal. Also gotta see how it works out.

Launch is there to make the Fungusaur fly. It's practically equipment (there was a cycle of these in every Urza block set, people mostly remember Rancor but a few others were quite good, too). I'll be sorely dissapointed if I end up seeing it on hydropons. The AI can grow a fungusaur very big, but eh, you know how it goes, gotta make stuff unblockable, grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter.

Turn Aside is there to keep stuff alive. There's a lot of creatures involved in decks with these mechanics around, and a lot of building them up too, losing them isn't fun for the user. Again, I wish Confound was in, but it's not, so this will have to do. It might even not be necessary but it's somewhat difficult to really come up with what blue could even be doing here. I think Psychic Purge will eventually make it in but I need to see which creatures to actually use and in what distribution.

Might of the Masses was the pump of choice. There's probably better options, but there seemed to be a lot of situations where the deck would have a lot of creatures on board (the hydropon may be a non-combatant but he counts, too), so I tossed it in to try to get the deck to be more aggressive.

It'll take tweaking and a decent ammount of work, but I suppose it's not half bad even in this state (and if something major is off, like too top-heavy curve, mana base issues, etc, those can be easily spotted).

Also, graft isn't too bad, the AI doesn't trigger it on enemy creatures or anything like that, it's just that it doesn't understand the fine points (for example if you put an enchantment that gives a +1/+1 counter every turn on a 1/1 for G graft guy, you don't want to sit there until he grows (and gets removed), you want to graft those onto incoming buggers every turn, etc.

Also, I whish there was a way to make the AI play Cephalid Constable in this combination properly. I really do. Counter him up, send him through, blow up everything. That would be an interesting (although a bit too brutal if it worked) deck.

I'm not that hot on making Fungus Master a Prodigal Sorcerer + Fungusaur deck, because pinding has for ages now been a red thing, and Conjurer is already a perfectly fine blue tim deck, there's really no need to waste the UG slot on a gimmick like that. It's not that it couldn't work, and most other UG stuff is somewhat blunt and powerful, but there's just no real space for 2 blue tim decks when you get down to it. I mean, if this deck ran Mawcor (which it could and wouldn't mind one bit), it could also run Reef Worm (because, hey, 2 pingers), also Plated Seastrider (good for evolve!)... You get the idea. It's not like having a mono-blue and a black-blue miling ally decks, they can be / are sufficiently different and there's enough various milling/milling support/milling payoff/even allies in both colors to make them feel like different decks entirely, here it kind of feels like what the decks wants to be is mono green and if it put what it wants from blue in it would be mostly poaching from a different deck. And what Fungusaur wants to be in is a green/red or green/black deck, not a green/blue one, and it's not a good enough card to waste two decks on

Anywho, I think I can still get it to work non-the-less.

Only things that haven't been touched at all so far - Ape Lord, Centaur Warchief and the evil wizards Lots of stuff needs to be readjusted (possibly everything), but I'm doing my best. Enjoy.

[jiansonz]

- Sorcerer kicks ass. In a good way, you never really feel overwhelmed and you don't get mad at him because he's not burning you to the face, just screwing you up whatever you do with odd bits of junk you can't take seriously.

Sounds awesome.

Old Tusk Guardian did have flying, but only in the form of Birds of Paradise. But in a pinch, they could sometimes still get things done with Giant Growth (and optionally Berserk).

[lujo]

^ Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm something like 2/5 vs him, so he kicked my ass quite a lot (some due to mana screw being 3 colored and all), but it's just that I always felt like saying GG or wp afterwards. Also, it would've been much easier to play ws him if I was red, which is revolutionary. The degree to which Veteran Brawlers can screw with you without ever attacking is quite high. Also, I think bushido cards seem to be really difficult to evaluate in a vacuum (like outside of a match, while looking at spoilers or the deckbuilder). "Hur, dur, I won't block it so it won't get the bonus, useless overpriced card". Turns out the card has evasion, because you won't block it XD And even if you decide you had enough of Battle-Mad Ronin pinging you all the time - there's a Prodigal Pyromancer just sitting there. You'd have to block with a 3/5 to survive, and a 3/4 would trade with a measly "1/1 for 1R, has to attack all the time". But then, just as you've carefully managed to put down something big enough to block the pest (minding the 4/4 dude just waiting for you to tap out, and the land destruction) - Act of Treason, lol.

And you can't get mad, it always looks like it you just took him seriously enough you'd win. I wish I could make them all that enjoyable.

Some other stuff I didn't hit needs express nerfing though, Alt A Kesh is a mite brutal even though I got 4 Siege Rhino at this point. Winged Stallion ought to work in some way that doesn't involve Sacred Mesa (or I just have to seriously start packing enchantment hate, I just got 4 Qasali Pridemage because I decided I've had enough of getting my ass kicked by equipmnet).

---

The current Tusk Guardian doesn't have flying but it has probably the craziest creature base in the pool which may or may not need nerfing. It's nice and flavorful, direct and simple and all that, but it seems too efficient now that I've played vs. it a bit. The Horned Helm giving everything Trample is kind of all the evasion it needs (except it's wasting all it's mana on activating it all the time, but I can't really take it out, it's kinda key.).

---

Also, the summoner pulled a burtal move on me which I didn't see coming (probably should've) - Power Matrix on my dude into Return to the Earth. What this also means is that she can kill your dudes by activation monstrosity on Arbor Colossus, too! I mean, I knew Power Matrix was a brutal card, and I knew I replaced Flying Carpet with it, but I totally forgot by the time I was putting Return to the Earth in in place of Disenchant ^^

I'll make the preliminary ape lord and Centaur Warchief versions later today, apply some more tweaks and put it up. I made a mistake with the Druid, I took out Bee Sting and kept Hornet Sting, but it should've been the other way around. 1 mana direct damage which can go to the head is essentially unplayable, the AI wastes it for no tangible gain all the time. Fungus Lord is also a bit swingy and the evolve guys either explode or don't get to do anything, I need to straighten him out a bit (not that he can't beat you up).

Conjurer always manages to ALMOST get there. There's always a whale or a kraken or something, but it eats some kind of mass removal and falls short of winning.

Although, I think I'm getting a bit too much done with Fate Unravelers and Siege Rhino, and I'm even pulling low shots like a horsemanship dude and a shadow dude, and that's practically cheating. So the pool is probably a bit too difficult to handle overall, but hey, I suppose noone could get it right the first time without a fully sorted list of all the stuff and a global plan for the metagame.

Also, enemy manabases - way too good. Not in the sense that I managed to hit some magic numbers of excellent rations of lands-to-cards, but that mono decks have a big edge vs players multicolor with no manafixing, and the multicolor guys have so good mana fixing that they're effectively not playing multicolor at all. I think this (and lack of mulligans) accouns for a about 2/3 of my loses. Not that I would've necessarily won all those games, but I had no chance because the other guy could play his spells and I couldn't. Right now I'm conducting an experiment - I'm picking up a mana base exclusively, and as my mana base gets better fewer and fewer things beat me. The rest of the deck hasn't changed for the better (I lost a lot of cards which won matches for me, and I think I had a comparatively stronger deck before but with very few non-basics and a huge potential to get screwed out of a color).

Gotta think about what exactly that means in terms of tweaking opponents, but it's quite visibly a big deal.

[lujo]

Lord Almighty, here's an Ape Lord. Making this deck was "all that's wrong with Shandalar" rolled into one exhausting sleepless night.

I noticed that Fires of Yavimaya don't work very well when I was making Dracur (it's easy to notice they don't work because if you're making a deck with red and green in it there's pretty much no reason to not stick a bunch in). So I left the Ape Lord for (among) the very last decks because I knew I'd give trying to get it to work my all and if I failed I'd have to write something along the lines of what I wrote in the "mechanics that need support" thread. If Fires of Yavimaya (or Fervor for that matter) can't be played by the AI it's got brutal issues that go way beyond Fires of Yavimaya.

But wait, that's just one of a longish list of things that you've got to go through if you want to try to do this thing right, and as I've said, it's a veritable buffet of facepalming.

Ape Tribe! They're all vanilla groundpounders (apart from Zodiac Monkey but I'm staying away from landwalkers) so the AI won't attack with them for love or money unless you put pump in. You put pump in you've got pump and Kird Ape in the same deck, recipie for trouble. You get Kird Ape, Kird Chieftain and Silverback Ape in the same deck - you don't need pump at all, but if you want the AI to use them you need pump in the deck. Oh, and I've never once seen the AI actually use Kird Chieftains built in pump (although that might have something to do with the curve, but I'll get to that). That doesn't stop it from murdering everything I put against it

But you do need pump if you're looking to use other apes, because the AI certainly won't attack with them with no pump, but they don't have reach, either, so if you put them in the AI is likely to oscilate from brutal murder hands to sitting there not doing anything hands.

There's only 3 red apes, too, and the third one is interesting but it destroys nobasic lands, which means it destroys it's own lands if there's none on the other side. But if does that then it'll never reach the expensive burn you gave it, and if you give it inexpensive burn it'll either throw it away mindlessly, play it instead of curving out (which RG absolutely wants to do) or just combine it with the pump to murder the other guy in 3-4 turns. So then I gave it ye olde cip-tapped fetches and all basics.

I had to, too, because it's too damned fast and efficient, and Kird Ape, Kird Chieftain and Silverback Ape don't really need a deck, the former just beats face and the later only want Fires of Yavimaya to be in so that they can beat face faster. Well, the first thing I put togather had the three clowns, Flinthoof Boar and Brindle Shoat and Fires of Yavimaya in it - it was brutal, but it was flavorful (apes chasing boars, one of the boars has flint for hooves, this starts a fire, mayhem erupts, there's now boars and apes stampeding at you, getting murdered by that would at least be enjoyable - apes are just massively difficult to keep in flavor with the rest of the cards, they were a really minor tribe most of the time, especially when it also happens to form a perfect classic RG beatdown). But the shoat was being misplayed (and also crashing the game), Flinthoof Boar and Kird Ape in the same deck was too damned brutal on it's own, and of course, Fires...

Eh. AI could play ferocious in the deck, but it either misplays it or is too damned strong with it (because of the three OP clowns), so no ferocious, it doesn't need equipment, but it couldn't play it even if it wanted to because Uktabi Orangountan is obviously in, he's pretty safe, but kills his own equipment if there's no targets. I could've given it Darksteel Axe, but doe you really want to play vs Kird Ape and the rest of the bunch with an indistructable +2/0 buffs accumulating all game long? Well, the 6cc burn kills equipment too, and there's a seal of primordium, too, but wth.

And then if I gave it more LD I've just made an unholy combo of Sedge Beast and Tusk Guardian, except with way stronger creatures than both and it's probably a huge pain living through the onslaught as is. And you can't NOT play most of these cards, really. If I took out Kird Ape and Kird Chieftain, and Fires isn't there, what's the deck RG for anyway?

I mean, I could, in theory, try something with Grim Lavamancer and Gorilla Titan, but I'd have to really sift through the pool carefully to find what would make that deck work, if it worked it'd be brutal, and if I put the other quality apes in they'd just murder you every time before it happens.

Long story short, this is a very bad combination of colors / flavor requirements to be fiddling with in Shandalar. Key iconic stuff either doesn't work or breaks the format, signature mechanics are either mishandled or can't be played against to any reasonable degree except by specific decks, multicoloredness translates to just pure unmitigated upside (and then some) and you're stuck with a deck full of non-evasive stuff which the AI can barely play at all - unless you add things that inadvertedly add to the general overkill.

Here's the decklist, it works, beating it is a tall order, and I'll put it into Shandalar for now and probably nerf it some after I've played against it a bunch with a Shandalar deck or two before I hopefully manage to rework it in some other direction.

Ape Lord 0437.dck | Open

.14125 3 Kird Chieftain
.437 4 Kird Ape
.4379 3 Silverback Ape
.91 10 Forest
.164 10 Mountain
.2548 4 Mountain Valley
.14074 3 Blastfire Bolt
.1242 2 Ancient Silverback
.8843 2 Seal of Primordium
.14281 4 Heir of the Wilds
.8752 4 Brute Force
.3541 4 Ravenous Baboons
.1698 4 Uktabi Orangutan
.1124 3 Rampant Growth

It's got barely any ramp, it's got too many utility apes, it's got a severe lack of one drops - and it still kicks ass vs other decks reliably. Note the absence of anything spectacular - no Wildfire, no Pyroclasm, no Flinthoof Boar, no actual burn, no Rancor (don't get me started, I put it into the original Fires variant, was too gruesome). It's basically the most modest and power-shy incarnation you could think of (well, Barbary Apes for Heir of the Wilds but it's all so vanilla that way - and the AI doesn't handle deathtouch properly ATM so it's not a big deal).

Heck, no Taiga, because of Ravenous Baboons and hope the damned thing occasionally gets mana screwed or doesn't have a 2/3 ape on turn one every time.

I might go for the regular apes with some spiders for reach and darksteel Axe, but it'll take me a while to figure out how to make the deck have an actual point for having red in it. Brute Strength is already cheating in that direction and giving it better burn and a 2 mana activation equipment will certainly make making it flow difficult.

Eh, I knew that one's gonna be trouble. Just Centaur Warchief left before massive tweaking, but I was going to get them both done and play around with the hex editor and get some adventure mode testing done today

[lujo]

I tried to make a Centaur Shaman. I had 125 cards I picked out of the pool which all delighted me and could be made into a huge bunch of Onslaught, Smoke and Vigilance decks, would play awesome with the white Centaurs, be flavorful, strong, cool... No, ofc not. Theme of the original Centaur Warchief? It's not Kismet + Smoke, it's not Vigilance + Smoke it's not anything, it's Serra Angel, a 4/4 flier that nothing in the OG format can touch. That's it. All the other stuff is just so the deck has an excuse to play Serra Angel, just like every other OG deck that plays Serra Angel does (see Lord of Fate, if I put Pyrohemia in place of smoke into the OG Centaur Warchief and added a bunch of auras, it's pretty much the same thing - and another deck that the AI can't possibly play which occasionally wins when it puts Serra Angel on the table -.-)

I feared this deck would have a lack of on-flavor cards. It's not, the pool is excellent for it, I could make dozens of decks all perfectly suitable for the Centaur Warchief. And I'll have to, and go through them 1 by 1 until I find one that the AI can play, which I might not even ever find, because the centaurs don't fly and are thus useless garbage, and the buildarounds require it to play stuff pre-combat, so they're useless garbage, too, and I ought to just give it one symbolic centaur, 4 Satyr Hoplite, 4 Brute Strenght, something which makes all his creatures unblockable, a bunch of fliers and some expensive removal, and that crap would work. Again, for what, the 50th time...

How about just giving it one centaur, bunch of pump, wall of omens and 20 shadow guys? Make pump red, because he's W/R and all that?

[lujo]

This turned out even more frustrating than usual - the first centaur deck was the least complicated thing. All the AI had to do was play it's s**t before it attacked and the deck did it's thing, and if the AI had been capable of that it would have had 0 problems playing it - it was another "plays itself, 100% fool proof deck", you play stuff when you have mana for it and attack, that's it. Onslaught would've tapped everything down so it would evade a million of it's regular issues and could actually attack with ground troops. But no - it will BY GOD! not be able to play anything that would get it to attack with creatures right and no, nothing is foolproof even stuff that's foolproof.

Everything else was a huge mess of the usual problems so it took 17 versions. I've been kindly advised to just take it easy with the deck, but that's the problem - i DID take it easy with the first version, it was the simplest thing in the universe. The AI would have none of it. I've been raving too much so I won't talk about the other attempts. Lets just say that the AI managed to misplay everything you can imagine, a lot of stuff you didn't even know existed and then some.

What I ended up with is:

Centaur Warchief v.18 0897.dck | Open

.189 4 Plateau
.188 6 Plains
.164 6 Mountain
.5334 4 Battlefield Forge
.12623 4 Staff of Nin
.897 4 Windseeker Centaur
.13472 4 Lagonna-Band Elder
.10619 4 Nimbus Wings
.13372 2 Anax and Cymede
.11906 4 Clifftop Retreat
.12943 4 Firemane Avenger
.13940 4 Nyx-Fleece Ram
.318 3 Fellwar Stone
.3157 3 Gerrard's Battle Cry
.1746 4 Arc Lightning

What it does is... Play stuff it has no business playing instead of stuff that makes sense and some of this stuff is too good to fail too hard with so it kinda works.

Staff of Nin is the card draw. Yes, really. Yes, white and red are colors of Heroic and handy cantrips and red even has some card draw except the AI kept my head dunked in the card pool until I let it have the Staff of Nin. Since the colors have no ramp (or talisman) I had to give it Fellwar Stone (or I could've given it something else but wth it can't arse up too hard with it).

The centaurs are Lagonna-Band Elder and Windseeker Centaur. Windseeker Centaur is there... for no good reason, really. It's just there. It can get Nimbus Wings attached to it. Lagona-Band Elder is there... for less sensible reasons than in many versions 1-17, but it can get some life with Gerrard's Battle Cry, Nyx-Fleece Ram and Nimbus Wings. The problem with the wings, though, is that HE's the main target for them, and the other problem is that the AI will BY GOD stack all copies on the same thing, because why have 2 4/4 fliers when you can have 1 5/6 guy (who dies 1 for 3) instead.

In fact, what the wings end up on most often is Anax and Cymede . Occasionally this makes short-term sense, most often it doesn't, but who's complaining. At one point the deck featured a number of Arc burn spells which were used to trigger Heroic (yes, really), and Lagonna-Band Trailblazer and various other heroic things and Dwarven Song. The song was OK, but the problem was that all the other guys were non-evasive, and it would stick all the Nimbus Wings on the same guy and spam Dwarven Song at every opportunity. It was able to use arc spells to trigger heroic, but since those are burn and removal they got priority over creatures and got thrown at the opponents head (doooh, is there another way?). Since I scraped all the heroic guys apart from this one, they're not all that necessary so I only kept Arc lighting around as there's a slim chance it gets to use it to trigger heroic on occasion. It also needs a way to gain card advantage to survive until Staff of Nin so that's that.

Firemane Avenger was chosen over the 2RW Flying Trample mantis. I saw it happen to trigger it sometimes (when it cast a bunch of nimbus wings on the legendary duo and actually attacked w stuff). It's not really a proper deck for either it or Gerrard's Battle cry as the creature count is kinda low, but eh, why not, it's evasive, there has to be something evasive.

I seems to work from what I've seen in testing, nothing gets missplayed in a spectacular way (or, rather, stuff does but in the common ways) and the deck isn't trying to be anything other than a pile of too-blunt-to-fail-hard-with stuff with as much of an (otherwise rather deep) Theros vibe as could survive the AI.

What I did countless hours ago would've worked with a 5 minute tweak if I could just tell it to bloody just play it's stuff pre-combat, but, eh...

Right, only evil wizards and Arzakon left. The perma-duel mode seems very keen on saddling me with their decks for some reason, so I wish I done them earlier. I think they might turn out to be the easiest of all - give them all fliers/shadow/landwalkers/protection and super-efficient removal. Making decks that kill you in under 5 turns or are unbeatable in a world wihtout sideboards (particularly when they start with an enchantment and a creature in play) is not that hard at all. I'm not sure that's the right way to go, though.

[lujo]

I'm ashamed and disappointed. I've tried an apprentice red game with enemy lives boosted to start from 10, and I couldn't get off the ground at all. Then I tried another one, and I got off the ground after about 5 loses, once I managed to get some quests done.

Part of the problem was the pool of cards you can get your initial cards from being too large and diverse and giving you multicolored cards which you can't really use. If you start of multicolored, though, especially more than 2 colors, you can get mana screwed and your enemies can't.

Another thing is that the game tends to spawn tier2 enemies more than tier 1, at least in the case of red guys. Sorcerers everywhere, Sorceress nowhere (and when you do see one, she summons a Troll Shaman). Now that I've had the chance to play (and lose) against it a bunch, the Sorcerer feels like it would make a damned fine War Mage

It gets much better when you do a few quests IF you know what you're looking for and pick accordingly. God help you if you don't have board sweepers.

Stuff needs nerfing. I apologize. The decks I've made don't look threatening, but the original decks were so essentially misplayed and awful that just having a deck with creatures it can play, enough spells of the right sort and a plan makes that deck on par with the old Beastmaster. And you're supposed to play vs. that with 10 lives and a sealed deck.

What do you guys think, has anyone tried any of this yet and what are your impressions?

[lujo]

Found my resolve, went to fix my mistakes and do some testing, taking it easy.

First thing I noticed -

Initial Sealed Pool Issues | Open

the initial deck pool card type ratios are making the early game silly difficult. Starting in red at apprentice, for example, can land you with so many auras that it's impossible to put togather a working deck. (tried it again and again). I made a feature request that would address this issue - if all enemy decks are working, you need to be able to put together at least a semi-workable draft deck from the get go, not be stuck with more auras than total non-creature cards you'd put in draft deck and 0 removal of any kind. I can't possibly nerf enemy decks for the player to have a chance of beating any of them with that sort of thing.

Draft decks, btw, usually go something like 17-19 lands, 5-7 non-creatures, 16 or so creatures. Beating a constructed deck with a draft deck is usually a tall order, even ones that try their best to be beatable by a draft deck, but expecting the player to beat (even weak or lousy) constructed decks with something significantly worse than a draft deck is unworkable.

A big problem with my decks as they currently are, is that I've been testing them against other Shandalar decks and not a variety of random pools. Because the low level opponents really are not that difficult against decks with 4-8 removal. A red deck with 4 Arc Lightnings would have a chance / not too difficult time vs. them, and I was tweaking them to be somewhat resistant to barrages of removal - but now if you try to play against them with a sealed pool (so far 100% chance of 0 removal), you have no chance and most of my tweaks are just nightmare difficulty.

---

Second thing that became apparent

enemy tiers and player life | Open

The game is very liberal about spamming enemy tiers 1-3 and doesn't seem to differentiate much between when it's appropriate to spawn them. Druids seem to be common, as do Seers, but I tend to see more Black Knights than Witches, more Priestesses than Cleric, more Enchantresses than Elvish Magi, and almost exlusively Sorcerers (because I can't find the place where I got the explanation of how I hex edit the invis off Conjurer and the Troll).

This means that actually tiering enemies is... kinda pointless. You start with a sealed pool and in order to get better cards you must win duels, and if you lose duels your deck gets worse and worse. But this means you have to be able to take on tiers1-3 with a sealed pool. Currently, because of the lousy card type distributions this is most often impossible. Also, my tweaked decks, for example, aren't actually that insanely strong on paper most of the time, but the're constructed decks which the AI can play - and you can't really expect to beat those at all even with better sealed pools. It would maybe be ok if you started with 20 life and they started with 10 or whatever, but then the whole manalink acquisition mechanic would be sorta pointless.

I actually wouldn't mind scraping it in favor of having a better "build your deck" experience. Have player life fixed at 20 life, beating constructed decks which the AI can actually play while you acquire the right deck would be plenty fun. The way you have to build decks for the AI kind of mandates it - the AI won't attack without either pump or removal. If you don't have a blocker and it draws it's pump - it'll just kill you, and if it removes your blocker you won't have a blocker next turn either. And if it's hitting you with something evasive - it doesn't take long for you to die that way. There's not that many way to deal with an evasive guy, if you sealed pool or shops don't contain enough removal, you'll just lose every game.

This is, I think, well worth considering - fixed 20 life for the player, scaling from 10 for the enemy, no mana links - just assembling your deck and defending from baddies who're trying to win. With a better sealed pool distribution properly tweaking enemy decks would be quite doable.

---

Another thing to consider, additionally,

Virtues of 40 card decks | Open

is giving tier1-3 enemies 40 card decks. The reason for this is that the AI can get ludicrously swingy hands if it has too many 4-offs. And it's hard to fill a particular decks with 60 on-flavor, on-topic cards. What happens is that you may have 0 removal in your deck, and the enemy will, because it's playing a 60 card deck, have 12 or 16.

Even if you withstand the early onslaught (which will easily happen if it draws all it's 4 drops or all it's 2 drops), you can't hope to draw something impactful before it does. At the very least it'll end up with more dudes on the board and it can win a battle of attrition if one somehow happens.

This sort of thing tended to happen a lot with Undead Knight, so I put in some effort to tweak it, even as a 60 card deck.

He had 4 Tormented Hero and 12 Auras. I had 10 starting life. If it drew one hero, it could take my life to 7 without even attacking me. If it drew 3 creatures and a removal spell (20 creatures or so 12-ish removal, easy as pie), it would play 2-3 by the time you've played one, kill that one and swing for the win. Happened almost every time.

What I did was this

Undead Knight v.3 0016 | Open

.4271 4 Corrupt Court Official
.13542 4 Scourgemark
.239 24 Swamp
.2702 4 Fallen Askari
.2422 2 Cadaverous Knight
.12602 3 Public Execution
.1835 4 Thrull Retainer
.667 4 Headless Horseman
.1651 3 Torture
.12498 3 Undead Executioner
.361 2 Skull of Orm
.7188 3 Cursed Ronin

And this is banking on the idea that the abundant removal was the problem (which it was, but most likely not the only problem).

I took out Merciless Executioner and Phyrexian Boon. Chump-blocking flankers is a pain as is, and those were getting played just at the right time. I gave it Torture because I hoped it would tie up it's mana, and I gave it Undead Executioner because it doesn't get played for the win (and is more expensive).

I also took out a few Carrion Knight and all Tormented Hero , and upped it's overall creature costs with 3 Headless Horseman and 2 Cursed Ronin.

Also I cut one Public Execution and somehow found space for the Skull of Orm, which may or may not be fair, but at least it's expensive to get going.

The mostly unimproved red sealed pools fared significantly better against this. I'm not sure if it was enough, but the biggest offenders were nipped and it should be quite a bit easier to play against. Improving the pool structure and fixing life at 20 is still a good idea. That way I wouldn't have to nerf starting decks into oblivion as to make playing against them a yawnfest as soon as you get a decentish deck of your own going.

Also what happens to the deck now is what pushed me to make the deck the way it was - the AI will be unable to factor in flanking and lack removal, so it will just pile it's stuff and sit back and the game can devolve into a non-dynamic ground stall. That sort of thing drove me mad - the knowledge that if I do what I set out to do, tweak decks to be more enjoyable and sensible, would result in decks being unplayable against because the AI can only play things that flat out win on the spot or sit there doing nothing.

Anyway, expect the deck to mess up with the Cursed Ronin, expect it to waste time with Torture occasionally, expect it to sit back stupidly because it can't take flanking into account. It can still beat you, but now the player at least has a chance. If flanking AI is improved, if the core pool distribution is made customizable and if we can experiment with a fixed 20 life total for the player, I can possibly re-buff it in some ways, otherwise it might need further nerfs and tweaks.

Anywho, I'll be doing a deck-a-day for a while starting with that one, until I've done my best to nerf down offending decks. Flavor might suffer, but I can't expect any of my decks to be commendable or usable tweaks, even if they're just temporary solutions. I've been testing them the wrong way, and there's a too fine line between "horrible" and "too damned strong" with this AI.

[jiansonz]

I haven't yet started that campaign against "your" enemies that I talked about. I will do that once my cousin has the time to visit me (we both love this game).

A few things:

* You are correct that there will be (at least) just as many tier 2 (and 3) enemies as tier 1 enemies early on. But in general, 'small' enemies will at least be more numerous than 'large' ones early on. In the late game, the tier 1 enemies will instead be rare.

* Red and blue are way harder to start with than the other three colours, mostly because there is so much less terrain on the map tied to these colours. It affects the number of enemies, lairs, and maybe most importantly, the number of cities and villages (that often sell cheap but useful cards) of these colours early on.

* Personally, I like that the start is brutally hard. If I can avoid it, I do not even think of duelling (other than in lairs - the duels you can't lose anything in) until I've narrowed down the starting deck to 3 colours (or even two colours) with quite a number of creatures in it. Hopefully, I can collect at least a few mana links, too. I buy cards in villages and sell cards in cities, visit all the lairs I see. I may sell a card worth 400 gold even if it's great and useful, since it means I can buy maybe half a dozen more creatures. Artifact creatures are great at this stage, considering the crappy mana base one usually has. Direct damage is also great vs 10-12 life enemies.
I run from enemies. If they do jump me, I pay them off if my chosen ante card feels valuable at the time.

* I prefer the enemies to have 60-card decks. The swinginess of it means I at least have a chance that the enemy gets a somewhat crappy draw.

Anywho, I'll be doing a deck-a-day for a while starting with that one, until I've done my best to nerf down offending decks. Flavor might suffer, but I can't expect any of my decks to be commendable or usable tweaks, even if they're just temporary solutions. I've been testing them the wrong way, and there's a too fine line between "horrible" and "too damned strong" with this AI.

Thanks. I will keep your revised decks in a different folder, because I love to still have the option of playing against the 'un-nerfed' stuff you've made this far. In fact, I wouldn't mind the option of having a deck set available that's 'stupidly hard' (but still Vintage legal, of course).

[BlueTemplar]

Not to mention, they should be more interesting to play against in the Duel part of the game!

[lujo]

I really appreciate your reply I've been ranting and writing too much lately, and that just tires people out, I'm sorry. I'm keeping the un-nerfed decks in a separate folder, too There's really some kick-ass stuff there that can even be used for wizards (or if we get the enemies to use different decks for scaling). Heck, the current Sorcerer, would quite possibly make a sweet ass War Mage (and also Seismic Spike is really Sinkhole 's more cunning brother).

A lot of my decks need re-tweaking or even actual work put in regardless, so there's no rush to try to enjoy a campaign yet. I've played a lot in the same way you describe, but I feel like I'd make everyone happy if I made the game more approachable without metagaming (whether at the adventure map or in-match).

But I'm not kidding about them being brutal XD There's the fun kind of brutal and there's the un-fun kind of brutal and playing the current folder felt downright stresfull and traumatizing - and I'm the guy who made the decks (and also been playing against them for a month or so). For someone just walking in, all confused by the awkward card picker for rewards where you actually get a chance to pick what you're missing, it would be well beyond unreasonable.

If it sounds strange that it's like that even after I've pulled Strip Mines and such out - when I say the AI was lousy and misplaying most of the decks it had in the OG pool, I'm not kidding. It was so bad at playing a lot of them that folks who've played Shandalar time and time again couldn't tell what the decks were actually meant to be about. Sid Meyer made a lot of great games (I played too much Alpha Centauri in my life, too ), but he was just out of his element here. I pulled out all the eyebrow raising stuff, all the protection creatures, all the landwalk, all mindless sideboard match-wreckers, all the gimmicks that made decks look like they worked, I didn't go for most of the obvious blunt trauma like Overrun to replace them... and the nature of the AI and the card pool and the life-related rules STILL made basic-functional decks too damned good.

For a taste, just load up an apprentice tier mono red deck with enemy stats boosted to highest difficult and go around picking fights with Sorcerers (and Trolls, for that matter). I feel like I accidentally made it a roguelike, which is a cool thing and I'm certainly keeping the decks around XD, but... I'm pretty sure most folks couldn't handle that and that complaints would be perfectly legit.

Also that with testing, general improvements, bugfixes, more functioning cards, more "less brutal" cards in the pool, a mapped out pool and stuff, I can make them all scale up and down from casual to hardcore. Right now the AI is capable of stumbling through non-specific hardcore, making it able to go just a peg lower would be much nicer.

40 card decks thing | Open

Oh, and the thing with 40 card decks is that while 60 card decks let you catch a breather and a weak hand occasionally, more often what you get is the opposite. Pump of any kind is a good example - you want enough of it in for the AI to draw it if you want the AI to attack. But if you put enough of it in a 60 card deck, along with enough early threats for the AI to draw one consistently, what'll happen is that the odds of getting randomly murdered by it in an instant will be really high. It's accidentally powerful in a very unfun way. Or overly efficient beaters - if I wanted you to see a Kird Ape on a regular basis I have to put 4 in, but you don't actually want to or even have to face 3 Kird Apes on turn 2 with below 20 life - not all that many constructed decks handle that. Redundancy requirements for 60 card decks produce randomly unstoppable results or overloads more often than ones for a 40 card deck. Just take Lightning Bolt - if I gave a tier 1 opponent 4, every times it draws 2-3 of them in the first 10 or so cards you're just dead. If I wanted a 40 card deck to semi-consistently draw a Lightning Bolt, I could put 2 into the deck and it won't straight up murder you with what is meant to be a utility card. That sort of thing is all over the place. Instead of having a fun match there just isn't any match, you just get trounced (sometimes somewhat depending on who goes first). AI draws it's one 2 drop and 4 of it's 3cc removal, you get killed by a Grizzly Bear.

I still have to test it out properly, though. It's like a difference between two different instruments, and if I'm trying to make the earlier opponents more enjoyable to play against but still use their thematic stuff and play out their gameplans in a tricky 10 life + sealed deck vs. constructed decks format, I think that would help.

And I really hope Korath indulges me and tweaks up an ini option mode where ante doesn't remove cards from decks pre-match, but post match (ante cards be damned*). It's so important that I my mind seems to melt when faced with the prospect of having to attempt explain why. I do understand that someone who doesn't understand it already would be suspicious of anyone asking for this (or there being that much more to mtg/deckbuilding that they're not aware of and they're sinking enormous amounts of time and effort into it already. But there is Not my fault! How many copies of what a deck has in it is a huge, enormous deal, especially in a below 20 format - it turns a deck with turn 2-3 kill hands into a deck that can't do that on one hand, or it makes it possible or impossible to even have a high-control-card-count/low-win-condition-number in there at all. Randy Buheler (or however it's spelled) won a pro tour with a deck with all counters and disks and just 1 single Rainbow Efreet, you can't do that with the Efreet randomly missing. Or Honden decks - they can't be running redundant copies of legendary enchantments in case one gets removed before the game starts (or like... I could start enumerating all that's wrong with it and probably continue for a month non-stop without even getting into the math of it at any point)

*And the ante changing thing world power thing - trust me on this, in a Shandalr with working decks, brutal ones like my current one, you WOULD be hitting that thing like mad. Every time something you busted your ass to get a playset of pops up as the card you would lose, you auto-hit it. Any deck can beat you! The "removed from deck" thing is insignificant, just a chance to not to permanently lose that Siege Rhino or Brushland or Form of the Dragon is more than enough for that power to be VERY relevant. If anyone doesn't believe me - get my latest deck pack, talk Korath into allowing us to somehow toggle ante somehow (make it just mark the cards and then remove them at match resolution, and disable ante manipulating cards as they would interfere), and see if you don't hit that power all the time as soon as it becomes available. Or facepalm if you forgot - not only did you lose a rare, you have to risk losing as many more cards as it takes opponents to beat to get another one back again.

[BlueTemplar]

Considering when the game was made, I doubt that anyone could really have advised Sid Meier. At that time, Circles of Protection, Karma, Protections from Color, Landwalk, etc... were part of the "metagame" (and remember he had a much more limited pool to work with).

Your math seems about right, assuming of course that the pseudo-random numbers generator works properly :
http://www.kibble.net/magic/magic10.php
viewtopic.php?f=62&t=17477
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0
While
There's 31% chances of drawing 2 or 3 out of 4 cards in a 60 card deck within your starting 7 card hand plus 10 extra cards you've drawn.
And
There's 17% chances of drawing 2 out of 2 cards in a 40 card deck within your starting 7 card hand plus 10 extra cards you've drawn.
But
There's 19% chances of drawing 2 or 3 out of 3 cards in a 60 card deck within your starting 7 card hand plus 10 extra cards you've drawn.
Also
There's 3.4% chances of drawing 2 or 3 out of 3 cards in a 60 card deck within your starting 7 card hand.
There's 2.7% chances of drawing 2 out of 2 cards in a 40 card deck within your starting 7 card hand.

So while 60 cards allow you for more options, in this case the odds of drawing 2 or 3 out of 3 at start are relatively much higher in a 60 card deck than drawing 2 out of 2 at start in a 40 card deck (while they become relatively similar over 10 turns).

But I have to disagree about the ante card, it doesn't seem to me such big a deal. Assuming you're not searching the library, I don't see a difference with a card being placed in ante or at the bottom of your library. The only difference is that in the first case you KNOW you won't get it, which allows you to adapt (and use ante-changing cards, but IIRC they have been disabled?) EDIT: though since basic(?) lands won't be placed in ante, there's a higher chance for a card to end up in ante as compared to the bottom of the library, depending on the number of lands in the deck...

[lujo]

About Sid Meier: I know, I know, but it's pretty clear that his AI couldn't execute a lot of what was meta back then and what was in the pool. I'm not blaming him or anything, it's just inadequate and always has been. Has to be better XD

About 40 cards:

It's not just the math - "scripting" a 40 card deck to do something interesting but not wildly off kilter is much easier because if you want to draw a card relatively certainly you need about 7-8 in a 60 card deck and much fewer in a 40 card one. So the numbers for avoiding multiple copies are quite a bit better than even that. They're just much easier to tune, 40 card decks, and, strangely enough, allow for variation-adding singletons to show up more often, etc, etc.

Also something that's not readily apparent, but a lot of MtG is still played (and always has been) in 40 card format - sets are designed for draft more than constructed, and draft is played that way. 40 cards is actually plenty if you want to show off a mechanic or block-theme something, the last 15-20 cards are most often either filler or redundancy overkill ^^ It's not necessarily for every type of deck, but it has is pro's and cons.

About ante:

As for ante, you misunderstand - there's no placing a card at the bottom of the library. What I mean is "mark" the rewards and remove them from the deck at the end of the match, instead of having the player and the AI play the match with missing cards. As things currently are cards anted before the match starts aren't in decks during the game, and that's a huge deal. If I put 2 lightning bolts into an AI deck I have a very good reason to put 2, not 3, not 4, not 1, but 2. Having them missing without the opponent expending resources on it (a card to mill the opponent, a turn to play the card, mana, deck slot for the mill card etc.) just randomly messes things up. Even in 60 card format, but even more so in a 40 card format (because the whole point of it is that I can achieve more with fewer copies.

If you mean that this just lets you have awareness of the fact that a card is effectively placed at the bottom of the library - any time anyone cracks a fetch land or mulligans the library is shuffled. There's a lot more tutoring than you'd think, there's scy, there's card draw, there's singletons. There's Biovisionary which you need 5 in a deck to make sure it works. I can't BUILD decks with the certain knowledge that any card can go fully AWOL at any time, and there's a million decks designed to mulligan until they have a certain card. And proofing AI decks against this sort of thing would have me have to add additional copies of everything that too important for the deck to risk a chance of it being randomly harder to draw or have in the opening hand (than it is anyway). Which means everything, which means killer redundancy and card inflation for every card that's not affected... I can't even...

Simply put - if a card could just go missing before the match, that card would not be in a deck in the first place, except cards like Manamorphose. Every single one of them is there for a reason, exactly that many of them. There's a very simple way to think about this: if the suggestion of cards randomly missing form decks pre-match doesn't make you feel like wanting to scream "WTF IS THIS I DON'T EVEN WHO ALLOWED THIS WTF WAS THE PERSON SMOKING KILL IT WITH FIRE" at the screen, it's not that the reasons to do this aren't there it's really that you aren't aware of them enough.

I wish I could explain this better, it's just that I can't tell how far back in the "understanding MtG" I have to go and through what steps I have to take a person I would be explaining this to until that person also gets a brain stroke every time they become acutely aware of this going on in what is supposed to be a MtG match simulator.

It's like you program something and every time you run the program a random line goes missing. Eh, possibly not the best analogy. It's like every time you go out of your house you forget to take a random article of clothing/cellphone/keys/car keys/ID/money. Eh... It's like the game has a feature that randomly puts bugs in my code or disables a function or messes with important percentages and it's murderous enough to script stuff in the language/engine already. How do I explain...

Crap, I need to find someone IRL who I know that plays magic and doesn't immediately do a backflip and start hyperventilating at the suggestion to see how to explain this. I've never had to explain it to anybody before... IDK, try to talk someone into letting you take a random card out of their constructed deck before the match starts, if the person has any clue about the game (or care about the outcome of the match) they'll look at you as if you were mad.

Hell, try to do that with someone who's good at drafting for a match between their draft deck and yours - they actually picked their precious 22 cards very deliberately and I really couldn't blame them if they punched you or really thought your were mad or asked you something along the lines of "You really have no idea what you're asking me, do you?" in a disbelieving tone of voice.

---

How many decklists of decks I've played in sanctioned events which I couldn't reliably play in sanctioned events do you think I'd need to write down and explain? I've played multiple decks with one copy of Academy Ruins and several Etched Oracle and no specific tutoring which I could just scoop up if my Academy Ruins was missing, but could quite reliably prevent the other guy from milling/extracting/discarding them if they so attempted? Or UW controll decks with only 2 cards which could actually kill the other guy? If I knew anything but a hugely redundant basic land was on the bottom of my library I'd mulligan instantly, and if I knew it was missing I'd just kindly ask for my entry fee back right away.

I'm sorry. The epic hugeness of why this is wrong kills my ability to communicate as a sane human being. My power doubles, I get trample and feel the urge to sacrifice myself at EoT