3 Ways To Test Your MTG Deck
3 Ways to Test Your MTG Deck
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3 Ways to Test Your MTG Deck

For many players, to test their MTG deck is an important step in the deck building process. Testing your deck, or ‘play testing’ as it is called, can really help tune out a brew before buying those new expensive pieces and sleeving up the final or revised version.

This article breaks down 3 ways to playtest your MTG deck, in no particular order. Although this guide is focused on EDH decks, it applies to most other MTG formats as well.

1. Goldfishing

Test MTG Deck Moxfield

Goldfishing is not a specific tool or app, but an expression that describes playing your deck on your own, without any opponents. All the known deck building websites (Goldfish, Moxfield, Tappedout) have a built-in tool that lets you test your MTG deck in your browser. Just import your deck and you should get the option to test out your deck.

Upsides

Because Goldfishing allows you to quickly draw opening hands and skip through turns, you will be able to see a very large percentage of your deck. Speed is the big advantage of Goldfishing. It quickly enables you to test out if the general plan of the deck works. You can check if you hit all your land drops, are ramping at the right moment and around the 5th or 6th turn if your board state developed as intended.

Downsides

Of course the lack of interaction is the downside here. You won’t be able to see how your deck responds to removal or how your deck takes out your opponents’ threads. Pro tip: you can open multiple browser tabs and manually Goldfish your decks against each other, this makes up for the lack of interaction on the one side, but it significantly slows down testing speed on the other.

2. Forge

Test MTG Deck Forge

Forge is a free open source MTG application for desktop and Android with an MTG rules engine built in. It supports many MTG formats, including Commander. Check out our step by step guide to setup Forge for Commander in Windows.

Upsides

Forge’s biggest upside for testing an MTG deck is the ability to play against AI opponents. It allows you to test out how your deck performs against real threads. Playing against an AI is much faster then playing a real game with your playgroup, which makes it very suitable for playtesting. You can pick your opponent’s deck from a large list of preconstructed decks, or you can let the AI play with a custom deck.

Downsides

Sometimes concerns are raised about the AI being bad, I have played hundreds of games with Forge and can say that it is absolutely sufficient for playtesting your deck. Needless to say, playtesting in Forge does not give you every aspect of a real EDH game like politics for example.

3. Proxies

Test MTG Deck procies

If you want to test your MTG deck in a real commander game without buying the cards yet, proxies are the way to go. Proxies are homemade substitutes of real magic cards. It’s advisable to discuss if your playgroup is okay with using proxies beforehand.

There are different options for acquiring proxies, but I would advise using one of these free option:

You paste in your deck list and the site generates a printable PDF with all the cards you need. Just print them out, cut them out and sleeve up.

A second option is to use a payed service like mpcfill, they can supply you with fancy proxies that feel like real cards.

Upsides

Using a proxy deck trumps all other playtest options in terms of the test conditions. You face opponents that make real decisions and have real interactions and politics.

Downsides

It takes effort to obtain proxies, especially if you intend to test a full 100 card Commander deck. An even bigger downside compared to other methods is that playtesting in real games simply takes a lot of time. Thirdly, since your deck is already printed out you won’t be able to quickly make adjustments on the spot.

Conclusion

All 3 methods have their place in the deck building process, but generally speaking Goldfishing and using Forge should be used in earlier/mid stages of deck building. When you are 95% certain of your deck list I would consider play testing it with proxies.

Needless to say this is not a conclusive list on how to test your MTG deck, but hopefully these examples gave you some inspiration. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any comments or ideas!