I'm trying to organize a playtesting gauntlet amongst my local Type One playing friends, mainly because I feel that a lot of Vintage players don't do enough real life testing (not counting Team Hadley, who play altogether too much Magic for it to be healthy
), which I believe to be far different from online testing. This is for a host of worthwhile reasons I believe in:
- Players need to know how to act, sort of like when playing poker
- Players need to be able to make the right decision in a situation, and it isn't the same online when you can ask about a rules question or the right play and have a response without your opponent ever knowing
- Players need to test vs. scrub aggro. Whenever I try to design something non-combo (alright, not very often.. but it happens) I always overlook "lower tier" decks and only test it vs the big 3, or what I consider to be the top contender of each category at the time. Not a good plan, obviously.
Now, I'm not going to collect a bunch of decklists on this thread as I'll most likely just use the ones that Kerzkid has compiled, which can be found at
http://www.themanadrain.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=9349 I'd rather discuss exactly
how to go about testing, how to record the information I gain from testing, and how to implement my testing knowledge to best turn it into wins. What we'll probably end up starting with is this:
-Playing 3 game matches, regardless of how the first 2 go, utilizing sideboards games 2 and 3.
-Recording starting hands, crucial turns/plays, and life totals to correspond with them.
-Keeping ongoing record(s) of how a given deck does against another archetype, and if a substantial change is made to the deck how that affected the win/loss ratio.
If you have anything to add I'd love to hear it, as we (or myself anyway) hope to get really serious about this. Also if you come to The Gathering (Cape Cod) often enough and want to get in on this, let me know.
