I recently found my old Shandalar install discs when moving, and it inspired me to check if there was a speedrunning community around this game.

It seems there is, but everyone is using this version of the game from archive.org that's been patched to run on 32 or 64-bit systems.

I thought it would be fun to use PCem to set up an emulated PC and install Windows 95 + the original game to do some speedrunning.

However, I'm curious if that would be allowed for me to submit a run or would it be considered a different version of the game? Also, does anyone here know if the patched app has been modified in any way that would impact speedrunning? I assume the game everyone is using in the videos I've seen is not the original Shandalar, because the original game doesn't have the option to disable the coin flip (that option has only existed since the Spells of the Ancients expansion). I've also observed that on my copy of the game, I almost always get at least one copy of Eternal Warrior in my red deck when playing the original Shandalar or Shandalar + Spells of the Ancients, but if I install the Duels of the Planeswalkers version, I tried like 10 times and I never got a single Eternal Warrior in my deck, which seems like it is a fairly important card to avoid getting raced by the opponent in some of the runs I've seen.

Has anyone done much research into the amount of variance in randomly generated decks or noticed differences in the RNG between versions?

Also is there a discord for this game, or would people be interested in one? It'd be nice to have a place to discuss the game if anyone else is still playing it.