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Magic : The Classroom – Testing Prep

By Dan Eckstein ⋅ November 18, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

If you have been read­ing me the past few weeks you know that I’ve been doing a series on Sealed decks. Today I’m going to stay in Sealed as a gen­eral theme but it isn’t much of a play les­son. Today will still involved Sealed but it won’t be twist­ing your brain any. It still might form a few wrin­kles though.

Today I want to talk to you about prepa­ra­tion and test­ing. In Con­structed we all know how to playtest for an upcom­ing tour­na­ment. Take your deck of choice and play it against the numer­ous deck­lists that can be found all over the Inter­net (the gaunt­let.) What play­ers did before Magic had awe­some web­sites like ManaNation.com I do not know but today it’s easy to get list to test. If your deck of choice fares well against the “metagame” then you’re pre­pared. If not then you either scrape the deck or use your side­board to assist you. The only real hur­dle is fac­ing a “rogue” deck and prepar­ing for what your oppo­nents might board in against you.

But how do you test for Sealed? You can’t know what you’ll face or what deck you’ll get. That’s the true dilemma. Today I’m going to give you a few ideas that you can hope­fully use at home. Each has their own mer­its and dis­ad­van­tages so you’ll need to find the one that works for you the most. If you have another I would love to hear it in the comments.

The Play­ers Gambit

This is most def­i­nitely the best choice for pure Magic play. The time and finan­cial com­mit­ment are large but it yields the best chance of win­ning a Blue Envelope.

I call this the Play­ers Gam­bit because it is what play­ers want to do. Just take a list of all the PTQ’s. Notice I said ALL of the PTQ’s. Not just near you but any­where. Then every week­end load up the Chevy and drive. All you need is a DCI Num­ber, Credit Card, and GPS and you can find your­self in a Tour­na­ment every week­end. I can nearly guar­an­tee that each week­end you’ll get bet­ter and bet­ter at pre­dict­ing what the game is like. You’ll know your oppo­nents next move before he does since last week you played almost his exact same deck.

There is no bet­ter teacher than expe­ri­ence and by the end of the sea­son you’ll have a lot of it. Added bonuses are you’ll increase your prob­a­bil­ity of hit­ting the per­fect deck by virtue of see­ing so many. The “even a blind squir­rel can find a nut” adage works too. You’ll also be gain­ing a truck load of cards for your binder. The friends you’ll make, the sto­ries, the crazy lifestyle, and the thrill of com­pe­ti­tion are all there for the ask­ing. It’ll just cost a “cou­ple” of dol­lars and a few hours behind the wheel.

Unfor­tu­nately there are only like 5 to 10 peo­ple out there who can truly do this and they’re prob­a­bly too busy to read this col­umn. The rest of us can only dream of hav­ing the cash and the free­dom from real life respon­si­bil­i­ties. I would advise going to any PTQ that your bud­get and agenda can afford though. The more you play the more you’ll know.

The Stu­dent Section

This sec­tion is what we do at my school. While almost none of us even aspire to going to a PTQ we really love play­ing the game in every for­mat. We do Sealed in the most eco­nom­i­cal way pos­si­ble. (Warn­ing: it involves proxies.)

Once a new set comes out we get to work. We have devel­oped a pack build­ing sys­tem that works really well. It takes some time and a whole lot of card sleeves but it works well for us.

Step one is to build prox­ies. This is a sim­ple process. For each card we make a fac­sim­ile and sleeved it up. Every com­mon is copied 10 times. We make three Prox­ies for each Uncom­mon and 1 for each rare. Each rar­ity is given its own pile and set in the mid­dle of a table with about 6 to 10 play­ers around it. Each player grabs about a decks worth of cards and begins to shuf­fle. After suf­fi­cient ran­dom­iz­ing we split the deck in half and pass one part to the left and the other to the right. Now each player begins to shuf­fle again and then split and pass. We go for about 15 min­utes and then grab the remain­ing cards and do it again.

Most of the time we stop there as it’s already well after school is out. It was a day of all work and no play but in the end it comes out worth it. Day 2 finds us mak­ing stacks of 10 com­mons from our newly ran­dom­ized pile fol­lowed by 3 uncom­mons and 1 rare. Rub­ber bands hold the new packs together and each is placed a semi-large card­board box. We now have 68 packs that can hold any­thing that might be in a pack from Zendikar. On any given day if there are at least 4 play­ers ready each can grab 6 packs and build away.

After being used each deck is sorted back out by rar­ity. When all or most of the packs have been used we meet again to reshuf­fle and repack our cards. Over time we try to replace as many prox­ies with the real cards as we can. It just feels bet­ter to hold the real cards with the real art. The value of being able to sight and imme­di­ately rec­og­nize a card is invalu­able. Of course the bet­ter rare and uncom­mon cards are hard to fill but between my semi-regular drafts and the guys at my local store that donate to the cause we fill the com­mons pretty fast.

This method takes team work. The more hands at the shuf­fle night the faster it goes. It’s kinda unwrit­ten rule that you have to shuf­fle up some to get to use the packs. I per­son­ally like this process because it allows some of my finan­cially chal­lenged stu­dents the oppor­tu­nity to play with­out the high cost involved.

The largest draw­back is the pack con­struc­tion. In real Magic packs you will never see a pack with two of the same card in it (over­look­ing foils.) I mean, you might get two or three copies of a card in a Sealed pool, but you won’t see them in the same pack. This method is unfor­tu­nately fraught with this prob­lem. It seems that at least once per shuf­fling we have some­one hit two copies of a card in the same pack. Also each rare is only used once which means if you draw a Sorin Markov you already know you won’t see it played against you. We thought about mak­ing more copies but that just becomes too over­whelm­ing. If you decide to make say 3 copies of each rare for exam­ple then you would need 9 copies of each uncom­mon and 30 copies of each rare. By the time your done shuf­fling all of that you would feel like the art from Ad Nau­seam.

The Store Angle

I live in a dif­fer­ent town than the school I teach at. I have the for­tune of being able to play the game against adults every once in a while when Real Life lets me, and the orga­nizer at my store is very smart. Since I started there the FNM crowd has evolved. A lot of it has to do with under­stand­ing your store. Many of you prob­a­bly play at a store where the owner is a miser: packs are always full price, the prizes are weak, draft is forced since it makes the store money, etc. Dustin is smarter than that. He knows that if you keep play­ers play­ing cards will sell them­selves. When we draft it’s because we like it and if it’s a sched­uled draft night but no one has the cash then we eas­ily shift to Stan­dard, Extended, or even Pau­per depend­ing on the room.

A few of the play­ers there are prep­ping for the one day where a PTQ is within a 4 hours drive from us. There are actu­ally two on the same date (Boo to who­ever sched­uled that). So for them to be ready Dustin has made the fol­low­ing playtest system.

From his own col­lec­tion Dustin has made sev­eral “packs.” Like we do at school only his cards where gen­er­ated by actual packs. Many of the packs he used where exactly the same as he opened. He just sleeved and rub­ber­banded them. Some of the pack list he gen­er­ated from the mul­ti­ple draft util­i­ties that are out there. He just started a Zen/Zen/Zen draft and wrote down the cards in pick 1 for each pack. These lists he then recre­ated in Real Life and then sleeved and banded.

From these newly gen­er­ated “packs” he has them grouped into Ziplock bag­gies with 36 packs each to rep­re­sent a box. Each bad has a check­list with the con­tents of each pack so they can be recre­ated after each use. Once 6 play­ers are ready to test they get a ran­dom bag/box. Each gets ran­dom 6 packs and then each builds a deck. Round Robin play leads to 5 games of test­ing. Do this for a week and you’ve sim­u­lated 4 or 5 week­ends worth of the Play­ers Gam­bit with no cost and no travel.

All of this occurs at no profit for the store other than the occa­sional Soda sold. That is why my area has gone from 4 DCI rated events within 40 miles for a year to 3 stores within 40 miles host­ing rat­ing events every week. If any­one out there lives near the Kansas/Missouri/Oklahoma con­ver­gence drop me an email at daneckstein@hotmail.com. I would love to hear from you.

Next Sealed Season

If you’ve read pre­vi­ous weeks you know that I will be unable to attend ANY of the nearby PTQ’s this sea­son. But I have a plan for next year already. I am going to do sim­i­lar to what Dustin has done at my local Store. Only I’m going to put the “packs” in dif­fer­ent col­ored card sleeves. Between myself and my stu­dents we have a plethora of dif­fer­ent sleeve designs and col­ors. Each pack in a “box” will have a unique sleeve so we can avoid has­sle of rebuild­ing a pack by the check­list. Instead we can just sort the sleeve types. Sure you might be able to tell the next draw is from a cer­tain list of cards. Each player will just have to be honor bound to avoid mak­ing plays based on this information.

At least that sounds cool right now.

Bonus Fun

All the kids at school are pumped about Pau­per Draft­ing. I don’t know if it is sanc­tioned or any­thing but what I’ve done is shuf­fled all of my cur­rent stan­dard com­mons and banded them by 15s. Then each week we meet and draft. Dur­ing the week you are sup­posed to find time to play each per­son in the pool. After a round is over we take out the land and reshuf­fle. It’s pretty fun and cheap to play I would sug­gest it to any­one look­ing for some­thing to do.

There’s the bell. If you want to stay after today we’re start­ing a new draft!

Dan is a High School Teacher who does everything he can to squeeze Magic into his schedule. Between being a Father, Husband, and Coach it’s pretty hard. Articles by Dan focus on tips and lessons for beginners that he has learned while teaching his students how to play their best. As a player Dan has a propensity to go Crazy For Combos so occasionally these articles happen as well.

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