#6 - Playtesting

I wrote in an earlier newsletter about how I dug out my old Magic: The Gathering cards (much to my wife's enjoyment, because she loves teasing me).

As I sorted through my old cards, I decided to tweak old decks, and come up with entirely new ones too. This meant starting from absolute zero, like when I start a story or a comic.

For one of my new decks, I wanted to focus on getting a large creature into play as fast, and easily, as possible. The creature, if you will forgive the following nerd-speak, was Lord of Tresserhorn from the expansion set Alliances. Lord of Tresserhorn is a 10/4 creature who can regenerate, which means he can dish out 10 points of damage and not necessary die in battle.

The problem with this creature is, his casting cost requires three different colors of mana (the points in Magic you use to cast spells, there are five different colors). Normally, I don't go beyond two colors for a deck, so Lord of Tresserhorn's cost took some experimenting.

I also had to lose two other creatures and two life points whenever I brought Lord of Tresserhorn into play (and my opponent could draw two cards). Again, not ideal, but manageable.

Over the course of a week, I tried different combinations to meet these requirements, and as I playtested and playtested, I found my strategy just wasn't working. I would either draw Lord of Tresserhorn too early and see him sit in my hand for a long time or get him too late to save me.

So, I tweaked and tweaked some more.

Then, I eventually decided to just forget about Lord of Tresserhorn completely, and took the deck in a different route.

Instead of trying to get a big creature into play, I scaled the deck back to two colors (black and blue) and built around the strategy of limiting what my opponent could do and running them out of cards (if you have to draw cards on your turn, and cannot, you lose).

I went from one idea to another, and this time it worked. There's still some things I wish to improve upon, but the deck I ended up with is worlds better than the one I originally visioned—and totally different.

It reminded me of writing stories or when I draw comics. I might have one idea at the start, but it ends up not working (the whole “it was funny in my head” thing). I change something, like a character or when the story actually starts, and that's when everything begins to fall into place.

If your story, or Magic deck, just isn't working the way you want, make changes, even drastic changes, and see what happens.

Daniel J. Hogan is often a few cards short of a full deck. This newsletter contains affiliate links, unless it doesn't.
 

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