We’re currently experiencing a huge renaissance of Magic: The Gathering popularity. The 33-year-old card game designed by Richard Garfield introduced the world to the concept of the trading card game itself: a game where players would collect individual game pieces and craft a deck that represented spells they would cast and creatures they would summon. It was a wild new form of player expression that greatly impacted the world of tabletop gaming for all time. Magic: The Gathering also told players a story–a narrative of powerful wizards known as Planeswalkers that would traverse multiple universes and duel with other powerful wizards in search of power and glory.
So it would make sense that one day, Magic: The Gathering would come to video games. While the game’s digital client Magic: The Gathering – Arena is the premier way to electronically play the game nowadays, there’s a title from Magic’s early years that’s influence is being felt to this very day.
Released in 1997 for personal computers and developed by Microprose, the eponymously named Magic: The Gathering sought to capture the excitement of the tabletop game to players all across the digital realm. Coming off the heels of an unprofitable era for the company, the developers sought the challenge of adapting the increasingly complex game into a single-player role-playing game.
You read that right. Magic: The Gathering’s first video game was a single-player RPG. Magic: The Gathering followed the story of the Planeswalker (the player-character) travelling to the plane of Shandalar to save it from a great and powerful evil. The plane is invaded by five mage lords who are using their combined power to cast the “Spell of Dominion” that will allow them to summon the demon lord Arzakon, who is a Planeswalker himself.
Microprose adapted aspects of the paper game in interesting ways. For example, Magic: The Gathering is often represented by colors that correspond to the game’s resource systems and playstyles. These colors are represented in-game by each of the evil mage lords: White, Black, Blue, Red, and Green. The player will choose one of these colors for their starting spell book, and traverse the overworld in search of more powerful spells to add to their knowledge in hopes of attaining enough power to stop the Spell of Dominion.
While exploring the overworld, players will take on quests and visit towns. These quests will often task the Planeswalker with obtaining a specific powerful card or defeating an enemy. All battles in Shandalar are done using Magic’s robust gameplay rule system, and allows players to hone their card playing skills and decide what works and what doesn’t in their decks. In addition to quests, players can also encounter difficult dungeons that offer the iconic “Power-9” as rewards for completion. To this day, these cards are some of the most powerful cards ever printed and are a priceless tool in player’s arsenals.
When the Planewalker is finally successful in defeating the mage lords, they learn that they’re too late, as Arzakon has been successfully summoned to Shandalar for a climatic final battle. Arzakon provides the greatest challenge in the game as he has the highest life total, the most powerful spells in the game, and access to all five colors of Magic. Though the Planeswalker is unable to fully defeat Arzakon, they are successful in sealing him away for a set number of years, depending on how much damage they are able to land in the final battle. In the real world, this damage is also used to calculate the player’s final score.
Magic: The Gathering for PC was a critical and financial success for Microprose and received long-term support. Spells of the Ancients was the first expansion and improved on the game’s engine and UI and added cards from the Magic: The Gathering sets Arabian Nights and Antiquities that vastly improved its cardpool. This was eventually followed up with another expansion called Duel of the Planeswalkers that added cards from the sets Legends and The Dark.
The game’s life didn’t end there, though. For many years, the game has been modded to add more and more cards from modern sets. These modded versions of the game, often nicknamed “Shandalar,” introduce modern mechanics and designs into the single-player RPG framework that Microprose built all the way back in 1997.
The game was also one of the first acting roles for Rhea Seehorn, now known for the critically acclaimed show Plurbius. She plays one of the tutorial mages in the game’s fantastically retro FMV cutscenes. The game can also be seen as an influence on CD Projekt Red’s Thronebreaker, a spin-off of The Witcher that used the in-universe card game Gwent as the foundation for its gameplay and combat while using a similar single-player RPG framework.
But perhaps Shandalar’s greatest tribute now comes in the form of an actual playable Magic: The Gathering card. Arzakon will be depicted on a card in the upcoming Mystery Booster: Commander set. A five-color Planeswalker card, players can use his abilities to either deal three damage to any target–like the iconic card Lightning Bolt–create a Black Lotus token that they can sacrifice for three mana of any one color, or force all players to shuffle their hands and graveyards into their decks like the powerful Timetwister. Arzakon is also one of the few Planewalkers that players will be able to use as their commander in Magic’s most popular format.
Shandalar was Magic’s first foray into the digital space and laid the groundwork for telling deeper stories using the ruleset that was created in 1993. It proved there was an appetite to play the game on screens and not just tables. It laid the foundation for later titles such as Magic Online and even Arena while also being kept alive and updated by a dedicated fanbase. With Mystery Booster: Commander, it’s a wonderful moment to allow players to reflect on a small but important part of this wonderful game.