Dribble. Dribble. Clink. Bounce.
I watched as yet another basketball fell from the rim of the basket onto the ground of the gym floor, and clasped my clean, young hands in frustration. I was twelve years old and at a summer day camp for basketball, and had been trying to improve at shooting free throws by standing behind the line and heaving balls at the basket for what seemed like hours. No matter how many times I forced myself to fire balls at the basket, I still only made a handful of them. My face began to redden, and I let the ball slowly bounce to a rolling stop on the ground.
My coach walked over to the basket I was practicing on and let the ball’s slow, rolling path knock gently into her foot. She bent down to pick the ball up, and carried it over to where I was standing. “Try holding it like this,” she said, as she put the ball into my reluctant hands, “and shooting like this,” as she bounced on her heels and moved her half-clasped hands toward the basket.
I took a breath in, vowing to take a few more shots, and dribbled the ball.
Fwoosh. Fwoosh. Fwoosh. Three in a row.
I looked up at her, wondering what kind of coaching magic she had just performed. “It’s not blind practice that makes perfect,” she said. “If you’re practicing poorly, you’re going to keep playing poorly. It’s perfect practice that makes perfect.”
…
The mantra of “perfect practice makes perfect” is one of the most important lessons I have ever been taught, and I have applied it to everything I try and do throughout my life. It’s simple, really: the output often ends up matching the quality of input; or, in other words, what you put into a task is proportional to the result you achieve. Why is it, then, that I find people consistently put in a poor job practicing and still expect to achieve stellar results? Several studies have been done that directly correlate practice with performance. Saying that may seem like common sense, but, in addition to amount of practice, quality of practice was also correlated with performance. Blind practice and playtesting will not get you nearly as far as quality practice and playtesting.
One of the most common mistakes I see in playtesting is having the wrong mindset. To playtest to the best of your ability, you should still hold a mindset of seriousness and intensity. Now, this is not often the kind of behavior seen in playtesting. There are four or six people around a table, playing games at a lightning pace to maximize the amount of games they get in, goofing around, eating out of a big bowl of chips, with some sport on the television speakers in the background. How many items on that list are around in a tournament? Hopefully zero. So why are they there in playtesting?
Comfort?
Relaxation?
A way to help pass the time?
Because having them there doesn’t matter anyway?
No. Playing in such a distracting environment can severely alter both your mindset and your results by preparing you for something other than what you’re ready for. Turn off the TV, put away the chips, focus, and play as you normally would.
Now, I’m not trying to be some boot camp instructor and lay down some kind of Bohemian playtesting rules. I’m not saying fun is outlawed. It is a game you’re playing with friends, after all, you should be able to have fun. You can still do that. But you also can’t expect to playtest for a serious event in an environment devoid of seriousness.
The most productive and most useful playtesting sessions I’ve ever been to have been with only a few other people with no distractions around, playing games and taking our time just as we would in a tournament. Maybe we don’t get through 50 games of a matchup in one night. That’s okay. I would rather have 25 games where players played as carefully they would be in a tournament than 50 that were rushed through in half the time.
Let me put what I mean in another way. What is the premier way to test for Magic events?
Magic Online.
What’s different about testing on Magic Online? Think about it. There’s a reason Magic Online breeds the world’s best, and playing pickup games against random people on Magic Workstation doesn’t. Magic Online isn’t anything like traditional testing. Instead of having a few people playing tons of games in an insular environment and trying to reach results as fast as possible, data is accumulated through tournaments. Now, this is beneficial for a number of reasons, but for this point think about what happens when you pay to play in a tournament with some amount of prize on the line.
Guess what? You care about winning. You have paid a cost to play instead of just playing yet another game with your friends, and you are given a motive to succeed (prizes) other than “let’s collect data.” This fact is huge.
What happens when you play in a tournament and now have a motive for winning? Your play tightens up. You don’t want to lose your entry fee, and you want to win whatever it is first place gets. You might still be playtesting at heart, but you’ve changed the dynamic to one that is much more serious.
Got all of that still in mind? Okay. Now think about how many great players have grown out of Magic Online, and how many top professionals use Magic Online as their primary testing tool. Even though they might not clock 50 games of a matchup in one night, they playtest with seriousness and can translate the same intensity to when they play a major tournament in real life. You can’t say the same of most in-house playtesting sessions.
Of course, there’s something to be said for playing with actual cards in an actual deck that can actually fit in your actual hand. Playtesting in person with a group of people is still useful if done correctly of course, but a highly underused tool is the mock tournament. A mock tournament is a tournament with some arbitrary prize, that has proxies allowed for ease of playtesting and so that a higher number of people can play. Mock tournaments can be run in stores or even just at someone’s house if you have enough friends to come over. They can even be run over a program like Magic Workstation. Mock tournaments works on the same principle that Magic Online testing does: give people a reason to care about winning, and they will try to win. They’re especially useful for testing upcoming formats with cards that aren’t legal to play with in tournaments yet. Mock tournaments are one avenue a lot of people don’t try, but are very useful because they allow you to play in a realistic tournament setting.
Playing in a tournament setting is crucial, and yet another reason why Magic Online makes for such a great testing tool. Are Grand Prix a simple battle of who can win a matchup more times than the other in a best of 50 unsideboarded series?* No. In a Grand Prix you will play against a wide variety of decks. No matter how popular any one deck is, people will always play other decks, each with their own take on them. You can test against your stock build of Faeries 50 times, but what happens when you sit down across from your opponent and he plays three Plumeveils maindeck? Learning to adapt to different versions of decks than what you expect is a skill you can’t just learn from playing against the same stock list over and over. Tournaments are the best way to play against deck variance, but even in playtesting you should be switching up lists and sideboarding strategies to see how a deck fares against each version of an opponent’s deck.
(I’ll only briefly mention this because it’s already been preached by several writers before me, but it’s very important to playtest games sideboarded. Tournaments force you to do this, which is another great advantage they have, but it’s often forgotten in group playtesting sessions. Keep in mind that half to two-thirds of each match is going to be played post-sideboard. When you consider that sideboards are designed for decks to be able to turn matchups in their favor, it’s rather silly to not playtest sideboarded games, don’t you think?)
Going back to the mechanics of playtesting, you might ask why eliminating distractions and maintaining a serious attitude matters. It all has to do with transposing your playtesting attitude to tournaments. If you playtest in a sloppy, unfocused environment, it is extremely easy to fall into the same habits — even if involuntarily and unconsciously so — when you go to play in a tournament. Sure, maybe not in the first round. Maybe not in the second. But eventually, you will begin to wear down. You see, tournaments are a matter of physical and mental stamina — stamina which is slowly depleted, whether by pure passage of time, not enough sleep, or not having enough to eat and drink. Just like anything else, as your stamina begins to wear down over the course of a day you are more likely to rely on what enters your mind first — your acquired habits.
Have you ever noticed how as a party drags onto into the night you’re more likely to say things you wouldn’t normally, or how as a game of basketball presses late into the fourth quarter you’re more inclined to shoot up baskets when you probably would have passed the ball earlier in the game? It’s because as the body wears down you begin to go on autopilot. You begin to lean on your habits. In Magic, this can be disastrous if you poorly playtest. You can begin to play as sloppily as you did when you were shooting games back and forth. On the other hand, if you playtest well, you can keep your focus up and continue to make strong plays. In doing so, you can prolong your time in the zone.
A lot of people talk about being “in the zone” like it’s some elusive spot you can only reach on the right day, when the right match comes up, and when you are in a moment of zen. In reality, the secret about the “zone” is that, after lengthy psychological research, it mainly has to do with focus and keeping your level of intensity high. In Magic, reaching the zone is a when you seem to make all the right plays automatically and have your full attention on the game. It’s an extraordinary and highly coveted ability to have during a tournament. As Cedric Phillips said in episode 146 of Evan Erwin The Magic Show, “…When I’m really focused and in the zone, it’s really hard for people to beat me. […] but sometimes I’m looking at games to my left sometimes, looking at games to my right… sometimes it’s just really hard to stay focused on Magic instead of having air run through your head.”
If you want to stay in the zone for as long as possible, you need to playtest in such a way that will put you in the right mindset when you enter the tournament, and keep you there when you begin to fall back on your habits from playtesting. If you put all of your focus forward in playtesting, and play with the same intensity you would in a tournament, you can both build up stamina and generate good habits. Local Magic player Andy Wilson played World of Warcraft TCG for over 10 hours a day when preparing for WoW Worlds last year. By the time he reached the tournament he had the stamina built up to cruise through the later rounds each day, and stay focused and in the zone while his opponents were flailing. While that’s an extreme approach, and not one everybody can devote the time into, it’s a way of consistently building up good habits and preparing for a tournament. Although it may not seem like it, what you do in playtesting impacts your tournament success, in every way, shape, and form.
If you want to play at your best, you need to practice at your best. Playing in Magic tournaments is far different from traditional playtesting methods, yet tournaments are what you are preparing for. If you want to avoid falling back on the mistakes you’ve made in playtesting, playtest at your best, and playtest in an environment more like a tournament than a data-collecting simulation. Remember, perfect practice makes perfect. Practice at your best, and you will be able to play at your best.
Let me know in the forums if there’s a part of this article you’d like me to elaborate on more, and I’d be happy to either write up a quick explanation or expand it into a future article. If you don’t have an account on the forums, feel free to e-mail me your comments at [email protected]. See you guys in the forums!
Gavin Verhey
Team Unknown Stars
Rabon on Magic Online, Lesurgo everywhere else