Cards can be easily filtered to suit your needs, including or excluding particular colours, series, or card types (ex: lands, artifacts, or interrupts) with the click of an icon. If Spells of the Ancients has been installed the additional cards seamlessly show up as part of the interface, ready for you to concoct game winning decks with (you, probably), or messy collections of disconnected whatevers with (definitely me). There’s nothing to buy, exchange intangible wotsits that aren’t money but still cost money to have, or grind out-everything within the game is there to be used straight away. Deck building… I was going to say “works as expected” but in 2022 and after several “modern” takes on TCGs it’s worth pointing out that here you’re simply given immediate access to every card in the game, and can make absolutely any deck you like with them. So, how does it work? Well, booting up the main menu bring up three main options: Deck building, duelling, and Shandalar. The cards found here are all genuine physical Magic cards in production at the time-I remember owning some of them myself-and the few that have been created especially for the game (the Astral set) were handed to Microprose by Wizards of the Coast themselves. All of the card-based duelling within is based on the 5th Edition rules (the most modern ruleset at the time), and the game is clearly very proud of this fact, the text found on the packaging and in the manual making every effort to boast about how this is “proper” Magic in digital form, with all the right phases firing off in the right order and every rule correctly observed and strictly enforced (the odd unintentional bug excepted).Īnd you know what? For once, this really is more than marketing bluster. Microprose’s take on Magic: The Gathering released in 1997 (the expansion also shown in the photo above, Spells of the Ancients, released a few months later), exclusively for Windows PCs.

It turns out the Magic game I’ve always wanted to play, simply (and unhelpfully) titled Magic: The Gathering, not only already exists but has existed for about a quarter of a century, received a local release, and really I could’ve bought it at any time between then and now if only I’d realised the game was out there waiting for me in the first place.

How to play mtg shandalar windows 10