Part 2

Ok ladies and gentlemen! Let's save Shandalar!



The voice of the people had us choose blue as our color.

For the name, I decided I should do what many goons seem to do when they're blue



Also, for some reason whatever bug stops me from choosing my portrait also forces me to have breasts? I dunno.



Anyway, here's the basic world map screen. That hottie sitting under the palm tree is me. The buttons to the left of the map aren't very useful now but some might prove useful later. On the bottom are my gold, my food, my life, and a little bit of information about my deck. (How many cards are in it out of how many I own.) At this point I have no idea what these 46 cards are. I can use the money to buy things, mostly cards and food. The life total determines how easy it is for monsters to kill me. I can get more in the world, mostly by doing quests for villagers.  In a normal game of Magic, players start with 20 life, so 10 is pretty easy to kill.  I slowly eat food as I wander around, and if I run out, I start moving absurdly slowly, which is not only annoying, it also makes it really easy for monsters to catch up with me.

Below this information are my amulets. I can trade these amulets for stuff or I can use them to power magic items I can collect in the world. The only magic I have so far is the blue one, which is why there is an icon there. Appropriately enough, I also have 1 blue amulet and no others. If I click the magic item icon, I'll travel to a totally random place in the world, and one of my blue amulets might go away. This is not all that useful, but the white one (Sword of Resistance) is great, we'll try to pick that up ASAP.

As for the world itself: the basic terrain types are, like the lands in Magic, forests, swamps, plains, islands, and mountains. You can see some swamps, islands, and plains around where I am now. The land type determines what kinds of monsters spawn there, as well as what kinds of spells nearby cities might have to sell.

That purple building is a city, and the collection of shacks to the north is a town. The only real difference is that cities are sometimes quest destinations, and they'll let you trade in amulets, whereas villages don't do either of these things.

The first thing I want to do is go into town and see how bad the deck is...



This is town. The options are pretty self-explanitory. I can only trade amulets once in each city, and the rarer the spell is, the more amulets it costs, so it doesn't make sense to blow my chance here at any red spell getting some lame common with my single blue amulet. So I'll just check out the deck.





Basically, I hate you all.

Ok, not really. Starting decks are usually this bad. In our 46 cards we have all five colors, some terrible land distribution, and I'm not sure how our playground managed to have this many kids that were always picked last, nor how we managed to pick last so many times. It is particularly bad with blue, but that's the price you pay: phenomenal cosmic power once you get going, but all your friends are pasty nerds. Maybe that's why so many Magic players like it?

If you don't know what these cards do, or don't know the game at all, just take my word for it that they're overall bad. It isn't worth trying to explain them now given it'd take thousands of screenshots and the vast majority will leave the deck ASAP anyway.

So what's the good news? Actually there really isn't any, other than that we will likely not have to deal with this stuff for long. The Black Vise is a phenomenal card that may never leave the deck. A few of the others, like Sea Serpent, Prodigal Sorcerer, and Water Elemental, are solid early stagers but don't have a place in a real deck. Everything else is getting passed off to vendors as soon as I can replace it.

The minimum deck size is 40, so I can cut and sell six cards. I like 23 cards, 17 lands for 40 card decks, so I can't cut any of the lands. Eventually I end up with this monstrosity, plus 420 gold from the cards I sell.



In one of the AI's many quirks, it will pay me for cards like Power Leak and Erosion. Perhaps this world's oppressed peasants are in need of firewood.

Next update coming as soon as I can type it; I'm worried this post will run out of length. In it: I get in two fights. I actually win one!