Wherein Spidermage continues to spin the lore of the online Magic saga, this time picking up at the beginning of the Microprose era.
The Microprose Game
Part 1: Shandalar
In 1995, Wizards of the Coast entered into agreements with two different companies to produce electronic versions of Magic the Gathering. The first, Acclaim’s Battlemage, was a real-time action game that bore little resemblance to the card game[7]. The second, produced by Microprose, was directly based on the card game and was popular enough to merit two expansion packs, the second of which would be the first officially sanctioned engine for online play.
The original game[8], packaged on CD-ROM, allowed the player to travel around the world of Shandalar (located in the plane of Dominia), meeting up with various other wizards, sorcerers, dragons and the like[9], and getting into duels with them. Shandalar itself was strongly imbued with magical energy; each of its five types of terrain was home to magic-users of the appropriate color (for instance, the zombie lords hung out in swamps and used mono-black decks, while the elephant lords were found along the borders of forests and plains and used green/white decks).
As a beginning wizard, you were given a choice of a starting color and skill level. Depending on your choices you were given enough cards to start off with a 40-card deck. The more difficult the starting skill level, the more colors you’d get in your starting deck, with absolutely no color-fixing cards included. My first time through I chose to be an apprentice-level black wizard. All my non-land cards were black (except an Ornithopter or two) and all but a couple were the kind of cards that generally go 16th in a 15-card draft: Plague Rats, Scathe Zombies, Vampire Bats and the like. There may have been one Zombie Master as well. For removal, I was given a couple copies of Weakness (Terror would have to be earned). An additional handicap was that your starting life total was something like six to eight, depending on skill level. All games were for ante, and even with a life total of eight, with your starting cards you were bound to lose more duels than you won.
So how did you succeed in Shandalar? Well, obviously, there were two areas you needed to work on: your starting life total and your card pool. The only way to raise your starting life was to create what were called mana links with various towns on the continent. The map was shrouded, so the only way to find these towns was by exploring. Luckily, in addition to the towns, there were also smaller villages where you could speak to the local wiseman, who, if you were not already on some sort of quest, would give you one. One of the possible rewards for completing a quest was to create a mana link with the destination town. Others included free cards and/or clues to navigating various dungeons hidden throughout the land.
In addition to the wisemen, villages and towns had other places you could go into, including a place to buy food and a place to buy and sell cards. Food was important in that if you ran low on it, you found yourself traveling at a much slower pace; not a good position to be in when trying to outrun a particularly powerful minion whom you weren’t yet ready to face. (A town or village was a safe haven. No one could challenge you while you were in one, although they often lurked just outside waiting for you).
There were, of course, other ways to acquire cards. You could check out various places on the map (such as graveyards or arenas) that would pop into view when you came into proximity to them, then disappear again when you left. Often you would find a stash of gold or even a card or two at such places. Occasionally, if you were fortunate enough to win a duel with a more powerful foe, that foe might give you bonus cards (or a dungeon clue) as a token of respect. Eventually, you would find yourself selling off some of the higher-priced cards in colors you weren’t playing in order to buy quality cards in your own color(s).
The best cards, however, could only be acquired by visiting (and conquering) the five dungeons scattered across the land. Each dungeon would have various minions affiliated with that dungeon’s color (not all of them human) waiting in the passages to challenge you. Only by winning every duel (including the final duel with the dungeon’s master) could you claim the treasures within (a Mox and at least two other powerful cards, often including another of the Power Nine). To make it more of a challenge, losing a duel inside a dungeon would result in the dungeon itself changing locations. You would then have to acquire more dungeon clues to determine the new location.
Throughout all this you were also working against a deadline. The five uber-wizards (one for each color, natch) would periodically send out increasingly powerful minions to capture towns throughout the land. As an attack occurred, your magical sixth sense[10] would give you a news flash about what was happening. You would then have a very limited amount of time to get to that town and win a duel with that minion. If you lost or were too late to help, the town would become part of that uber-wizard’s domain, bringing him (or her) one step closer to world domination (and costing you any mana links you might have in that town in the process). Of course, attempting to re-take that town was risky. You would have to put up two cards as ante instead of one, and the minion would have certain advantages, such as a card already in play before the duel even started.
Eventually, you would have to go after the uber-wizards themselves. As the game went on their attacks became more frequent, often catching you on the opposite side of the continent (although there were ways to overcome even this handicap). Each uber-wizard resided in a castle. The same rules applied in the castles as in the dungeons, except that the various wizards in the castles were more powerful than their dungeon counterparts.
The ultimate goal was to defeat all five uber-wizards and take on the Big Cheese[11], a planeswalker with a five-color deck and 200 life. This could only be undertaken after defeating the five castle wizards. The only way I was ever able to do it was by taking advantage of a bit of stupidity programmed into the AI. Under 5th edition rules, which were the ones used by the Microprose game, one’s life total could temporarily go below zero, provided that by the end of the current phase, that total would again be positive[12]. This made Spirit Link an effective means of neutralizing an opponent’s creature. Oddly enough, even with a Spirit Link on it, the creature would continue to attack every turn, as long as I didn’t have a blocker or blockers big enough to deter it from attacking. My brilliant strategy was to put two Spirit Links on the critter, and let it attack turn after turn until I had enough extra life to feel comfortable taking on an opponent with 200 life of its own.
The important thing to remember about the Microprose Magic the Gathering game was that it had fully-automated rules enforcement and a clear, efficient interface, with easily-readable card text; all features that the Apprentice program lacked. The drawback was that it was only playable against a reasonably competent (but still somewhat deficient in some areas) AI. A second drawback was a somewhat limited card pool: The Unlimited set, (essentially the Beta set missing a few cards such as Word of Command and False Orders). That particular problem would be partially alleviated when Microprose released its first expansion pack: Spells of the Ancients.
Coming Next Week: Spells of the Ancients
[7] And was almost universally panned by critics and gamers alike.
[8] Incidentally the last game that Sid Meier would work on before leaving Microprose.
[9] Most of whom were actually minions of the five uber-wizards of Shandalar. More on them later.
[10] Actually a banner across the screen against a bright red background.
[11] Not his real name.
