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.

as for the single player, the roguelike contrivance and collecting cards is kinda neat, but because every battle drops you into this awful interface to play a short round it just makes me try to run from fights instead of engaging
@greg There's honestly nothing worse than a TCG where it's hard to even see what is in your hand. That was the worst part of this. I at least need to see the art because I'm not going to remember MTG card names.

@greg I wish they'd make a new singleplayer-focused Magic game like Shandalar but with the gameplay and presentation of Arena

But I guess they'll probably never do that because you can't sell people microtransactions as easily that way

@greg A very old game that could be more polished, but from the standards of the time, it wasn't all that bad.

I liked the adventure map part from single player, that gave the game something more. It was kinda cool.