Diving into some Old School 93/94 precon decklists today, courtesy of the #Shandalar #MTG game from 1997. I'm looking at 5 decks wielded by the "two-colour lesser" tier of enemies and these are fantastic! They'd be a great way to try out #OldSchoolMTG.

https://preconstructedmagic.wordpress.com/2024/12/27/shandalar4/

So since Shandalar is no longer being sold and I guess is "technically" abandonware, is there a way to play it in a browser?

If currently not, well, I'm tempted to do it.

#MagicTheGathering #MTG #Shandalar

I tried out the old Windows 95 #MagicTheGathering game #Shandalar and even played a match online against a friend. I guess when it released it was the only game in town if you wanted to play e-Magic, and it's kinda fun making a deck with 4 Black Lotus in it and other thousand dollar rarities, but the presentation is so bad. It's just an ugly ass game. None of this is animated at all, a huge chunk of screen is taken up by permanent tooltip (in case you forget what "swamp" does), the palette is limited, the sound effects suck. There's constant interruptions for the opponent to confirm "I don't want to do anything", and there's no undo or safeguarding to keep you from constantly mana burning yourself or missing a declared attacker or whatever.

I'm spoiled by Hearthstone's smooth animations and voice acting but I still find it hard to believe this was the most exciting they could do at the time. Almost makes me want to try making a card game out of MSVC6 and see if I could do better.