The EDH Deck Building Process #6 - Playtesting and Asking for Help

TappedOut Commander Series

Suns_Champion

2 May 2020

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Attention passengers, this is your captain, Suns_Champion speaking. We will soon be descending and arriving at our destination of Sunhome, Fortress of the Legion so please buckle your seatbelts! Thank you!

Welcome to or welcome back to my ongoing series, The EDH Deck Building Process! Today I’ll be discussing playtesting our new decks and asking for help. Up to this point I’ve talked about deckbulding philosophy, inspiration, getting started and organizing, gathering cards, cutting many of those cards, my glory days in the Boros Legion, and much much more!

What you should have at this point, if you’ve been following along:

• A full, 100 card deck that you built, on a deckbuilding site.
• A sense of pride and accomplishment.
• A desire to play with your deck.
• A can-do attitude!

I’m sure you’re ready to go off and buy, sleeve, and play your deck! I am too, but I think a little restraint at this point in the game can benefit you greatly. Today I’m going to talk about a few optional steps that can save you time and money in the long run: asking for help and playtesting your deck before buying it.

Asking for Help and Suggestions

Let’s start with the truly optional step, asking for help.

Humans are sometimes prideful, and generally don’t like asking for help. But kindly asking other people, especially those who are better deckbuilders than you, for help with your deck can have huge benefits. First and most obvious, they might know about cards that you didn’t see or missed during your search. They might also suggest better versions of cards you have, even if you’ve already seen them, it’s good to keep them in mind. Second, they might be able to more clearly see the deck as it is, and not the treasured piece of content that you see it as. You might love your deck to pieces, but another player might be able to see you’re not running enough boardwipes. Third, they might suggest cuts for you. Perhaps they have playtested a card you’re looking to run and found it to be bad, or perhaps they can spot a bad card you missed when making cuts. These are just a few benefits of having another pair of eyes on your deck.

Where are some places you can ask for help?

The first is in person. If you know another EDH deckbuilder, perhaps a friend or a person at your LGS, you can ask them to look over your deck list! Easy enough.

If that’s not an option or you want more help, you can ask people online. There’s dozens of places you can ask. The first and best place is the deckbuilding site you built the deck on. This is why I prefer TappedOut over all other sites. The forums are most active, the deckcycling on the front page is fair and useful, and the feedback is good if you ask the right people. You can post on the forums asking for help, or go to individual profiles of deckbuilders to ask for their help specifically, or the comments decklists similar to yours. This can be done on most deckbuilding sites, but I personally think TappedOut is the best because the community is the most active and most helpful.

Hot Tip: When asking for help on people’s personal profiles, give them a bunch of upvotes on their decks. Due to the social psychology concept of reciprocity, it is very likely they will reciprocate the kind gesture and help you with your deck in return. And here I thought I wasted my time in psychology class!

Other places you can post asking for help include Reddit forums, EDH facebook groups, and Magic discord servers.

Regardless of where you ask, some guidelines will always apply.

• Ask. Never demand.
• Be kind, courteous, and friendly.
• Use legible grammar and spelling. (I of course give all leniency to those whose first language is not English. Keep it up, you’re doing great!)
• Use paragraph breaks to separate and organize your thoughts.
• LINK YOUR DECKLIST.
• Seriously, link the decklist you need help on. Don't make people hunt for it.
• Ask for help on one deck at a time. Don’t hit someone with 3 decks that all have different issues.
• Explain what you need help with.
• Give context, like the deck’s mission statement, your budget, and your meta, to improve relevant and helpful feedback. Walk them through your main combos and win conditions (remember, you're intimately aware of what your deck is and what it wants to do, but for someone seeing it for the first time, it is really easy to miss combos and important interactions when looking at a pile of 100 cards).

Building off that last point, let’s talk about Custom Categories again, real quick. If you haven't been convinced of their usefulness yet, here’s another reason they’re great. When asking for help, having custom categories in your decklist and description can be very helpful in getting and filtering feedback. The people who are helping you gain respect for your organization, and gain an understanding of your deck and the deck’s “mission statement” just by looking at it. Then they will be able to give better suggestions. Further, having a description of some sort explaining the deck mission/goal/strategy, combos, and card choices aslo focuses feedback. It doesn't have to be long, just enough so people will understand your thought process. Here are two examples of some quick discriptions I have for my decks: The Rage of Achilles | Haktos EDH and Kick Start My Heart | Winota, Joiner of Forces EDH. Hopefully you can get a sense of what the deck wants and is about, and that helps when making suggestions. Again, the description for your deck doesn't need to be that detailed or long, but the more you have the more helpful it is. Conclusion: custom categories and a good description are very helpful to those who are helping you. Use them!

Responding to Feedback

• Respect the time of the people you are asking for help. Don't ask too many follow-ups or try to constantly enlist their help on a myriad of different decks.
• Be respectful when you disagree with someone's suggestions, and explain why you disagreed, as the explanation might lead to additional productive feedback.
• Most importantly, say THANK YOU to those who have helped you

Finally, as a way to really show your appreciation for people helping you, try to reciprocate the assistance. This is harder if you are a new deck builder, as you might not have the experience necessary to give aid to a person you may view as a superior deck builder. You can still give your hand at feedback, and most will appreciate the gesture, even if the advice might come off as amateur. That’s okay, you are learning! Alternatively, if you cannot help them out in return, leaving an upvote or compliment on their deck is generally a classy move. A good compliment generally includes something specific about their deck to show you are not just giving a platitude, but actually took the time to look at their creation. For example: “I really like how this deck [some interaction and/or other specific trait of the deck you find neat].”

So there’s asking for help in a nutshell. Might seem obvious, but if this helps just one person phrase their call for help a little nicer, or makes one person double check their grammar, it’s worth it.

Playtesting

Let’s move on to the main topic, playtesting your deck. It might seem optional at first, but you’ll discover that playtesting happens whether you like it or not. The key is, I think, to make it happen before spending money on cards. Remember that in this series I’ve assumed we don’t have the cards to the decks we’re brewing.

The process of playtesting your deck, also known as “goldfishing,” starts with just you and your deck. On Tapped/Out, as well as most other deckbuilding sites, there is a “sample hand” feature and also a playtest feature. The sample hand feature is great at quickly randomizing and looking at possible opening hands. You can use this feature to see how often you’d need to mulligan your hand, or how often you’d keep it. Are there enough lands? Is there enough draw and ramp? Are you constantly stuck with high CMC cards in your opening hand? All of these questions can lead to changes in the deck.

Using the playtest feature is even more helpful, as you can get an opening hand, and then “play it out” with yourself. Here’s the playtest page for my Gisa and Geralf deck. Vaguely pretending you have opponents, you can draw cards each turn, play your spells, and put certain cards into different zones, and test combos and synergies. Sometimes playtesting is great at putting two cards together that you hadn’t considered as a pair before. This can lead you to discovering new combos, synergies, or conversely, discovering non-bos and anti-synergies within your deck. While playtesting, pay attention to your lands, your draw, and your ramp. Are you playing a land almost every turn? Do you consistently have a bunch of cards in hand? Are you ramping stuff out faster than you would with just lands? Then consider removal. If your opponent played a big threat turn five or six, would you be able to deal with it consistently? Then think about your strategy. Are you getting all the pieces for it? Do you have too much of one category or too little of another?

Additional strategy for playtesting alone is pretending you have opponents and simulating some interaction. What if they block this creature, counter my commander, or cast a board wipe? How do I rebuild or respond to people attempting to stop me? You can also set up multiple tabs with other decks to playtest against. I’d suggest picking some opposing decks at similar power levels to yours or decks that are common in your meta. If your friends have online lists for their decks you can ask for links to use them. This is much more involved than just goldfishing but can really give you a good idea of how your deck is going to perform in real life.

Keep playtesting until you are confident your deck will be fun, while standing up in your meta against real decks.

Optional and not necessarily recommended for newer players: Free online MTG playing sites.

There are a couple of sites that let you plug in a decklist and play online with real people using virtual cards. I don’t really recommend them for newer players, so I’ll be brief here. The best known sites, and the two I’ve tried personally, are untap.in and Cockatrice. Both have their pros and cons for gameplay, communication, user interface, customization, deckbuilding, speed, and other factors, but the main difference is that you have to download Cockatice. Both are rather confusing at certain points in the process and both have a wicked learning curve.

Next, there’s playing with a webcam via a video chat service such as Discord, Zoom, Whereby, or Skype. This can be done with friends or with a group such as the PlayEDH discord, whose subreddit I will link here.

I have not tried it myself (being content with webcam games), but I’ve also heard good things about Tabletop Simulator. Apparently you can flip the table, adding that extra bit of realism.

Use these if you don’t have an LGS or playgroup, or if you prefer playing online, or if you truly need to playtest right now. Or if you’re stuck in quarantine, as half the world is right now. Since the COVID-19 crisis started, many Magic players have been looking for ways to play Magic and socially distance. Thus I thought I should expand this section to accomodate for the current situation.

Proxies

Perhaps not immediately relevant given our current situation, but here is how to playtest in real life with real people without buying the cards first: Proxies.

Look, no one wants to make a bad investment. And magic can be an expensive hobby. So what I recommend for real life playtesting is to proxy out your cards. Proxies are just homemade, printed-out versions of magic cards, just paper and printer ink. Using proxies comes with it’s own baggage, but first, here’s what you need to make a respectable proxy deck:

• 100 Magic sleeves. Recommended: the cheapest you can find.
• 100 Magic cards. Recommended: 100 basic lands or worthless commons.
• A printer. Recommended: Colored Ink. Not Necessary though.
• Paper. Recommended: Plain paper without lines.
• A computer. Recommended: Internet connection... wait-how would you be reading this? Whatever.

And here’s what you do:

• Step 1: go to MTG Press and plug in your decklist.
• Step 2: Print out your cards.
• Step 3: Sleeve your 100 basic lands.
• Step 4: Cut out your proxied deck.
• Step 5: Put proxied cards into sleeves over the 100 basic lands.

You now own a proxied deck! You’re almost ready to play test it in real life!

Of course, there is a certain stigma against proxies, one that I don’t really understand. Perhaps a full discussion on proxies is warranted, but maybe that’s for another article. For now what you need to know is a few simple facts and some proxy etiquette.

Proxies are best and most likely to be successful in playgroups of friends. At a game store meta, there might be some people who don’t like proxies and refuse to play with or against them. If someone refused to play with you, don’t argue with them. Just grab a real deck if you have one, or find someone else to play with. I think on the whole, people are usually cool with proxies. That’s just been my observation. In any case, it’s very important to ASK BEFORE THE GAME STARTS if it is okay to use proxies. It’s also helpful to explain that you just built the deck, and you want to test it out before buying it. Explain your budget and what the power level is. Most people, I think, after hearing the context, will happily let you play. The best advice I have for facilitating this is: proxy within your normal budget and at your normal power level. If you do that, I believe most people will be happy to play with you.

Then, if everyone is okay with it, knock yourself out! Start testing, playing, and having fun! When starting out with a deck, I like to take notes on the cards that did well and the cards that did poorly. That will help me make revisions based on the testing I did.

You can also go crazy with proxies for designated fun nights if everyone is on the same page. Try no budget, no ban-list, all-proxies EDH. Print out those moxen and lotuses and play Magic the way Richard Garfield intended!

A final word on proxies: Don’t abuse the good faith other people give you. Don’t proxy cards way out of your budget that you have no intention to buy. Don’t proxy cards to win; proxy cards to test your deck. Don’t play proxied decks you have no intention of buying unless that’s okay with your playgroup. Don’t be that guy.

Recap:

• There’s more to asking for help than meets the eye: follow the proper etiquette.
• Custom categories and a description help people help you.
• Make sure you respond to feedback, and thank helpers with words and/or upvotes!
• Drawing sample hands and playtesting (goldfishing) your deck can help you make changes and decisions before you buy your deck.
• If you want, you can also play for free online on a few special sites.
• Proxying your deck is a great way to playtest in real life before buying the cards.
• Understand proxies and follow proxy etiquette before playing.
• Don’t abuse the opportunity to use proxies.
• Take notes during playtesting so you can look at them while making revisions.

Hopefully the amount of bullet-point lists wasn’t too distracting. As you can tell by the length of this article, the bulk of the deckbuilding process is through. But we’re not quite done yet! We need to talk about making changes after the fact. Join me next time for The EDH Deck Building Process #7: Making Revisions!

Until then, for the Legion!

Suns_Champion