Magic the Gathering

Theory

You Don’t Playtest Enough

By Trick Jarrett ⋅ April 30, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

If you’re read­ing this, then this sen­tence applies to you: You don’t playtest enough. How do I know this? Sim­ple. No one does. Why doesn’t any­one? The same rea­son no one is per­fect. “Enough” is, by def­i­n­i­tion, ade­quate. How­ever, what most play­ers con­sider “ade­quate” has become, in truth, hor­ri­bly inad­e­quate. Ergo, you don’t playtest enough.

Let’s begin by defin­ing the ideal sit­u­a­tion and then I will work back­wards and ana­lyze where play­ers fall short.

In an ideal world, you would play against a vari­ety of oppo­nents with no fore­knowl­edge of their decks and under time con­straints which mir­ror tour­na­ment play. Your decks would be prop­erly shuf­fled and pre­pared, pre­sented to an oppo­nent for the best out of three. You would play it just as seri­ously as you would against a tour­na­ment oppo­nent and keep notes on issues with the deck while doing so.

Where real­ity breaks in:
These days, a fair amount of play test­ing takes place on MODO. These games may be com­pet­i­tive in the 8 man tour­na­ments but you still aren’t guar­an­teed the proper playtest­ing. As a non-Pro player, you MUST playtest the deck more and more. Once you’ve set­tled on a deck to play it now becomes an issue of find­ing as many matchups as pos­si­ble and ham­mer­ing them to look for weaknesses.

It’s like buy­ing a car. Sure you can go to the lot, you’ve got an idea of what you’re look­ing for, and after a test drive for a while you decide you were right: this is the car for you. But then you might buy it, get home and the trans­mis­sion falls out after you hit 70 miles an hour. Oops. Guess you should have taken it on the inter­state to try that out before buy­ing it.

The­ory is a great tool and much of today’s com­pet­i­tive Magic is built on it, but as a non Pro player, it becomes extremely impor­tant that you also seek real expe­ri­ence with these decks. Good play­ers can play good decks, but what hap­pens when one good player meets another one of equal skill, the one with more expe­ri­ence wins.

“If you’re not prac­tic­ing every day, some­where some­one is, and when they meet you they will beat you.”

A great teacher I had was also the bas­ket­ball coach and he had gone on to build a very impres­sive win­ning record before retir­ing. Dur­ing our class though he would con­stantly drill this phrase into us: “If you’re not prac­tic­ing every day, some­where some­one is, and when they meet you they will beat you.”

I know Lee and I ham­mer playtest­ing a lot, but for casual play­ers to make it to be com­pet­i­tive play­ers or even pro play­ers, this is by far the biggest step up and will really help you reach your next level. It is also some­thing you can directly affect. The the­ory some­times hard to grasp and playtest­ing is a direct action which you can do to get bet­ter. There is no if ands or buts, with enough play­ing and test­ing decks, you WILL GET BETTER.

Let me shift gears and explain that in my mind there are five lev­els of “Spike.”

First there is “Noob” for obvi­ous rea­sons this is the per­son who just began com­pet­i­tive play, brought their casual deck to a tour­na­ment and lost hor­ri­bly. The step to reach the next tier is to get past los­ing and actively research­ing bet­ter decks to play, per­haps through their own design or online.

The sec­ond level is for the peo­ple who have got­ten their decks online, bought or bor­rowed the cards to build their deck. They’ve learned to proxy cards and use them to test decks so that they have a bet­ter idea of what they want to play, but they only play so far as to decide if they like the deck or not. Maybe they play a few more games to test it for draws. TGhen they build their side­board based on the­ory largely or on the other sim­i­lar deck­lists rather than for their spe­cific deck.

The third tier is much more com­pet­i­tive, they travel longer dis­tances to play in tour­na­ments, they play on MODO, they play in the store. They’ve got the fire in their heart that they’re going to get on the Pro Tour. They playtest a lot, they’re usu­ally part of a team or group try­ing to break through and win a PTQ. If they do win it though they make it to the Pro Tour and then scrub out.

The fourth level is where I see the vast major­ity of Pro Play­ers. These are the peo­ple who are either active on the Pro Tour or have been and retain the habits and con­nec­tions. They’ve now reached the level where they need to fin­ish in the top X to get money, they have their teams and groups that build and playtest. They’re always look­ing for the next thing. A lot of them write arti­cles for other sites (writ­ing arti­cles doesn’t auto­mat­i­cally qual­ify you for this level.)

The fifth group is com­posed of the play­ers like Pat Chapin, Kenji Tsumura, Raphael Levy, etc… who con­tinue to make money fin­ishes. They may be true pro­fes­sional magic play­ers who live off of the Magic income they make. While Magic is still fun, it is a job and one where if they don’t use the right deck they might have a lean month or two before they can make more tour­na­ment money.

If you’re read­ing this, you’re most likely in the first, sec­ond or third tier. And of those it’s most likely you’re in the first or sec­ond tier. These are the peo­ple Man­a­Na­tion is really aimed at. We’re try­ing to help you guys move up in lev­els. But we can’t do it for you. We put out the episodes, the arti­cles and the forum as tools to help you grow in your abil­i­ties. Tell us how you’re doing. Where do you fall on the chart?

So how much playtest­ing do you do? How much should you do? I would say that if you’re level one or two, you should playtest as much as pos­si­ble. Fifty, a hun­dred games, those are the play­ers who go on to win tour­na­ments and progress to the next level. If you’re three, you most likely already do. Four and five, it’s a moot point, you do.

See you next week,
–Trick

Trick Jarrett is the host and founder of ManaNation.com, he writes, edits, covers, and spoils Magic for a living. Playing it whenever he can manage to find the time. He is engaged to a lovely woman who refuses to learn Magic, and they have a cute cocker-spaniel puppy who is all too eager to play Magic.

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