Be Prepared - Playtesting

With both worlds and Stahleck quickly approaching I thought I would adapt an article that was originally written by Andrew Ornatov for use in Legend of the five rings and apply it to game of thrones.

1. Goldfishing - The term itself comes from the concept of of playing against a goldfish, which is the same as playing against no opponent (unless you have the goldfish from american dad). Goldfishing should be the first thing that one does to a potential tournament deck simply repeating the first 2-3 turns of a deck, without accounting for opponents disruptions, to see if things like the economy works, if the spread of your hand ( characters, attachments, events, locations) is working and these sort of things.

-Do not shuffle your deck after each gold fish draw and keep going through your deck until it is depleted. This gives you a much better representation of how your deck will function in a tournament (its possible to hit that 6/7 card set up a couple of times in a row if you re-shuffle), this will also give you a better approximation of how often you will see your duplicates of your uniques during a tournament.

- Keep track how often you are either short on gold/economy or have spare gold as this will help to trim/expand your resource curve to the deck.

- Keep in mind different types of deck you may play against, can you weather a rush deck, will choke have your economy go from tight to non-existent.

- Keep in mind traits/crests that your cards require and keep track of how many times you were unable to use effects/use cards due to this. These cards may be powerful, amazing even but if your unable to use them more often than not they become dead weight in games.

- Always remember goldfishing is not an exact science but more an initial assessment of whether or not the deck is worthy of getting some actual games with.

2. The Gauntlet - The gauntlet is a is a collection of playtest decks which are fairly well tuned STANDARD decks. Its pointless testing against your friends Stark Kotth Deck or other crazy ideas as you need to get a feel of how your deck will perform against tried and tested decks, you may feel good about winning but will feel equally bad when Stark standard MDK wipes the floor with you.

These rules apply when playing against gauntlet decks

- Gauntlet decks never get resource screwed, character screwed, event screwed anything screwed. In non Kotth decks they are allowed to mulligan 5 or 6 times to get a good set up (or go as far as allowing them to pick their set up form their deck). if they need a particular character/location/attachment to make the deck work they may at any time in the the game search the deck put it to one side and draw it whenever they would be able to draw card ( framework or through actions). This again represents reasonable draws from gauntlet decks.
The gauntlet deck gets to choose its plot from out of play before plots are revealed

- Gauntlet decks get to take back mistakes, your deck does not.

- The gauntlet deck should have 3 decks minimum one each of control, rush and aggro.

3. Deciding which cards to put in/ take out - The point of play testing is not to fully design a deck, the majority of of design happens in ones head and during goldfishing. The point of play testing is turning a deck that goes 3-3 and misses the cut into a 4-2 that makes the top cut (I'm generalising here but you get the idea)

- When play testing always think "is there a card that better serve me here and if so what is it"

- If you find yourself unable to decide between two cards for a slot, write on a piece of paper the other card pop it in the card sleeve and take note (usually keep a small set of ticks) how many times the other card would have served you better vs the sleeved card during play testing, whichever has the most ticks gets the spot.

- If you're playing ANY meta cards, think long and hard about cards that would do the approximate same thing against decks your meta-ing against , but would be also useful against other decks. Meta is a necessary evil but at times can be avoided by clever card choices.

- Look at every card in your deck and ask yourself " Against commonly played decks am I ever unhappy about drawing this card". If a card is not useful against common decks there's bound to be something better.

4. Getting better - Play testing is ultimately useless if you get nothing from it. here are some ways to to make lessons learned during play testing stick.

- Get a D6. Start every game with the D6 which starts at 1 at the beginning of each game and goes up by one for each misplay and when the die hits 6 you give your play testing buddy a pre-determined amount of money and re-set the die. You have to be honest with this method or it will not work. Once you stop making 5 mistakes per game don'r reset the dice between games, the score is carried over into the next game.The amount of money should not have you re-mortgaging the house but should not be trivial either, each 6 on the die should sting.

- A more "Hardcore" method on the above and one I would highly recommend is when attending local tournaments bring the D6 with you and does not reset between games.If it ever hits 6 you immediately concede the game you are playing (but carry on playing) and reset the dice. Again this requires honesty or it will not work.

- Whenever there's a question about what you should do, talk to your play testing buddy. Tell him what you think the correct play is, then show him your hand ( you don't get to see his). see what he thinks, discuss what the play should be, and what each variant would lead to. if your play testing buddy convinces you your original idea was wrong turn the die up one and smile.

This is not an exhaustive list of play testing but If it at least helps one person improve their game I'll be thrilled.

- Nate