Better Testing for Better Results — Getting the Most Out of Your Playtesting

Testing is a topic that I see very little discussion on despite its critical level of importance to success. While there are certainly instances of untested players picking up a deck and winning an event, the far more common case is a player that has put in a large number of games with a deck taking that high finish. While testing may seem as simple as picking up a deck and playing it against another one, there are certain practices that will get you better, more relevant results than others. For that reason, I’ll be breaking down playtesting, offering general tips as well as several different methods you can use to improve your takeaway from each session.

The Importance of Testing

I absolutely cannot overstate how important playtesting is if your goal is to succeed in the Pokemon TCG. This is especially true if you’re trying to improve as a player or better your tournament performances. There are a few steps that I see nearly every player go through when they’re learning the game or just beginning to improve:

The first of these steps is to play the game. In this initial stage, you should worry less about who your opponent is and more about playing as much as you can. It can also help to play with a variety of decks, especially popular ones, to get a good understanding for how they function and what lines of play will work best against them.

Once you start to feel as though your progress is slowing, you should begin to explore other methods of improvement. This can include any combination of watching YouTube videos, reading articles on sites like PokeBeach, watching streams and asking questions, getting coaching, and adding to or changing your testing methods. Regardless of which methods you decide to include in your testing regimen, playing the game will always be important to exercise what you’ve learned and keep yourself fresh on the simpler processes of playing the game. Having taken long breaks from the game in the past, I can personally attest to how easy it can be to go from a competent player to someone making basic errors given a long enough hiatus. This is even true for people who read articles and watch videos in this time; these kinds of mediums don’t lend themselves to the basic elements of play. They discuss the finer points, to be sure, but their goal is not to explain the fundamentals.

From here, there are several changes you should aim to make to your testing to get the best results possible out of it.

Testing Tips

These are tips that you can apply to your testing indefinitely. If you turn these into habits, they will better the effectiveness of your testing throughout your entire “career” as a Pokemon TCG player and pave the way for you to succeed in tournaments of all sizes.

• When you’re several weeks out from your next event, play a variety of decks. An added note here is to make sure all of the projected top decks are in this pool. Testing rogues is great, but you can do this later, after you understand how each of the top decks works. Playing a variety of decks serves several purposes. The first is that it will give you a much better understanding of the decks you’re playing against. This can be crucial to developing strategies to beat top decks and will give you greater knowledge on how to play each matchup. It can give you a better understanding of the format you’re playing as well, widening your deckbuilding lens and bettering your ability to make an effective rogue or add a game-changing tech. The final (and likely most obvious) benefit to this is that it will help give you a better idea of what deck you want to play. If you only play one or two decks in testing, you may never discover that a third suits you or performs against the meta much better.
• When you’re a week or two away from your next event, narrow your testing pool. At this point, you’ll have played most, if not all, of the top decks and rogue ideas you’ve had. Back-to-back League Cup weekends can be an exception to this, but you should still aim to narrow your testing pool based on what you think will best suit your local metagame. Barring this circumstance, once you know how the format interacts, you should select between one and three decks that you’re most likely to play for your event. The fewer the better, but it can often be impossible to narrow your selection down to a single deck. From here, you should aim to test whichever matchups you’re least confident in as well as the closest ones. Popularity of decks should also factor in to what opponents you select here. If you’re struggling to find players who are playing what you need to test into, a strategy that has been historically successful for me is to offer to play what your testing partner wants to test into for half the session. If you’re struggling to find strong testing partners even then, I would suggest searching online or even finding a coach. Going into an event without having tested against [card name=”Buzzwole” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”77″ c=”name”][/card] / [card name=”Lycanroc-GX” set=”Guardians Rising” no=”74″ c=”name”][/card] because your locals want to test [card name=”Vikavolt” set=”Sun and Moon” no=”52″ c=”name”][/card] / [card name=”Tapu Bulu-GX” set=”Sun and Moon Black Star Promos” no=”SM32″ c=”name”][/card] does not bode well for your tournament finish.[premium]
• Test with the best players you can. This does not mean to abandon your locals and friends for people you don’t know or like, but it can mean reducing the amount of time you spend testing against lower-skilled players at least slightly. Ultimately, each player is responsible for his or her own success, and sometimes this can mean skipping a night testing at the local card shop in favor of testing online with a coach or otherwise strong player. The amount you can learn from a high-ranking player, especially in person, is incredible, with the potential to learn new lines of play, strengthen fundamentals, and see innovative techs that you may not have considered. In addition to these benefits, it exposes you to new ideas that may lead to your own innovations.
• Test with multiple different circles. This one is less important if your testing circle is wide or opinions are diverse in a smaller circle, but it can be extremely important if everyone in your testing circle shares the same opinions. I’ve seen absolutely terrible deck decisions as a result of an echo chamber circulating a bad idea, and I’ve seen players learn detrimental habits or have highly questionable lists as a result of repeatedly being exposed to them. The need for this can also be mitigated by watching videos and reading articles with an open mind and testing a wide variety of decks yourself. Coaches, as with other areas I’ve covered, can be of great assistance here as well. The caveat here is to understand when to stand by an idea when it’s legitimately powerful and have confidence in your decisions. There’s a fine line between disagreeing with someone’s opinion because you have solid results or evidence to back it up and disagreeing with someone’s opinion because it’s not what your theorymon says.
• [cardimg name=”Giratina” set=”XY Black Star Promos” no=”XY184″ align=”right” c=”none”][/cardimg]Test against the most recently successful lists. If your opponents are playing heavily teched or off-meta lists, keep in mind the effect they’re having on your results. This is an understated but important point. An example of this is the St. Louis metagame. Our Cups are notoriously dominated by off-meta and heavily-teched decks which leads people to make skewed decisions on the metagame. I’ve seen people tech for VikaBulu when it was a nonexistent meta force, play triple [card name=”Lost Remover” set=”Call of Legends” no=”80″ c=”name”][/card] to beat [card name=”Klinklang” set=”Black and White” no=”76″ c=”name”][/card], and all sorts of strange card choices to account for the local metagame. Some players fail to differentiate the national or regional metagame from the local one, and this can lead to taking an unknowingly poor list into an event. Your VikaBulu techs will commonly be useless against BuzzRoc, for example, and this can cause a player to take multiple losses to the most common metagame decks at an event. On the flip side, if you continually test your established archetype into a field of local players teching for it, this can make your deck seem far worse than it would normally be at a big event — which may make you shy away from a potentially strong deck decision.
• Know what you’re testing for. Whether this be a local event or Regional event, a best-of-one or best-of-three environment, or even if you’re trying to simulate being on stream. If you’re testing for a Regional, play best-of-three and time your matches to 50 minutes. If you’re testing a specific matchup, let the game go as long as possible and allow take-backs to ensure that you get the most accurate depiction of the matchup possible. Small things like this can go a long way by the time you make it to your event.
• Practice good habits. Check your Prizes, pay attention to your sequencing, and generally play to the best of your ability. This will not only reinforce these habits to improve your foundation as a player, it will also give your opponents more accurate and reliable results. You want good results, so it’s important to extend this to your opponents. If you improve together, it will better your testing experience overall and give you strong, reliable long-term testing partners.

Testing Methods

While testing can be as simple as “sit down at a table and play Pokemon”, there are a few additions to this formula that I’ve found to be particularly helpful over the years. Here, I’ll go over some of my favorite and most successful testing methods, giving benefits and drawbacks to each followed by a recommendation on how each should be used. On some methods, I’ll give modifications that you can make to change or improve their effectiveness.

The “Sit and Play”

The most common type of testing that just involves sitting down with a friend and playing Pokemon. No restraints on what decks either of you play, no timer, just getting games in. For this method, I always recommend not cutting (provided the game is between friends) and alternating between who goes first instead of flipping. This saves a ton of time and gives both players the opportunity to go first. Optionally, you can also deny mulligans, though I only tend to recommend this if you are testing a specific matchup.

Pros

This is the most relaxing and fun method of testing. There’s not a lot of pressure to play by the clock, and you’re not always going to be playing into a stressful matchup.

Cons

Without modifications, this is the least helpful method of playtesting. The decks aren’t moderated, so you’re not testing a specific matchup, and the lack of a timer means you’re not testing tournament best-of-three either.

When to Use this Method

If you’re just playing Pokemon for fun or haven’t played the game in awhile, this method is perfect. If you’re trying to prepare for a tournament, I wouldn’t recommend doing this without some modifications. That said, this can be a valuable method when modified.

Modifications

Regulate one or both player’s decks. This will allow you to test for a specific matchup. Without a timer, each player can think as long as they need and figure out the best lines of play for each situation. With a timer, you get a good feel for how the match will really play in tournament, though I would advise adding a timer only after you’ve played at least a few games without one.

Time the match. What timer you use is dependent on what event you’re preparing for, but 50 minutes best-of-three with three extra turns is generally going to be your best bet. You can certainly test for best-of-one, but you’re far less likely to have issues with the timer in that case. Playing in time is difficult for some players, and this can allow them to learn how to play under the clock. If you notice that you tie a lot, this could be extremely helpful for you. If you want to get even more intense with it, you could even time each action, but I would only recommend this if one or both players has serious issues playing in time.

The “Online Grind”

This method involves sitting down and playing as many games on PTCGO as possible.

Pros

This method gets you far more games than any of the other testing methods as PTCGO automates so much of what makes playing in person time consuming. You test against a wide array of decks which can be helpful if you are testing a new or unfamiliar concept. You can also switch decks at any time, meaning you will have the widest breadth of personal testing this way as well. To top it off, this method can fit into even the busiest schedules and doesn’t require any kind of travel or arrangement with another party.

Cons

The quality of games here will be erratic. PTCGO’s pairing system gives you an opponent of roughly comparable skill, but what PTCGO considers to be roughly comparable is far less strict than ideal. In addition to this, this method of testing does not allow you to test specific matchups and will not help you play within a time limit.

When to Use this Method

This method is fantastic for people who want to get in a ton of games against a diverse field as well as anyone on a tight schedule. That said, I would recommend sitting down with a friend and testing specific matchups at least a couple times before a big event. However, this can be a solid testing method to use exclusively if you modify it.

Modifications

Play each deck a fixed number of games (10 or 25 are my recommendations) and record the games in a log. For the log, I recommend using Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, though you can use something as simple as Notepad if you’re fine with extra legwork. In this log, you should record what deck you played against and the result of the match. If you want, you can add more data such as who went first, a general synopsis of the match, and what changes you made to your deck list prior to or after each game.

I recommend making the Win/Loss row or column a 1 for win and a 0 for loss. This will help at the end of your sample when you average the results together to get your win rates. Sheets and Excel both have user-friendly formulas for averaging numbers, so analyzing your data at the end of each sample is quite easy. For your overall win rate, you can use the =AVERAGE function over all of your Win/Loss cells. Since you’ve recorded them as a 1 or 0, the decimal that comes back to you will be the decimal form of your win rate against all opponents with the deck. You can use the same formula to pick and choose games against specific opponents to let you know how each of your matchups stand, check all the games going first and second, and a ton of other things that you might be interested in. I used this method for Madison Regionals, and I ran 10 different averages on my BuzzRoc sample. There’s a ton of value to be gained from tracking your games, and it can all be catered to fit your needs.

From your initial sample with several decks, you can narrow down those with the highest win rates or those that you liked the best and continue playing more games with them, continuing to track your results and refining your data as much as you’d like. You can even use this method to decide on a deck and then transition to one of the other methods on this list if you want to test for a specific matchup or simulate a tournament environment.

The Tournament Simulation

[cardimg name=”Computer Search” set=”Boundaries Crossed” no=”137″ align=”right” c=”none”][/cardimg]

This is the method that I came up with most recently, and it ended up being more useful than I predicted. This method requires a full day of commitment from everyone involved, and ideally you have an even number of players so there aren’t any byes. You simulate a 10-round tournament with a 50-minute best-of-three timer. For the first five rounds, one side of the table plays the deck of their choice. Whether they can change it or not is up to the people running it. The other side of the table is playing a randomly selected meta deck based on the projected popularity percentages. You can do this with random.org‘s number generator in combination with a list agreed upon by the tournament participants of how well each of the decks will be represented. For the simulation that I ran, our table went like this:

• [card name=”Zoroark-GX” set=”Shining Legends” no=”53″ c=”name”][/card] / [card name=”Lycanroc-GX” set=”Guardians Rising” no=”74″ c=”name”][/card]: 1-15
• Zoroark-GX / [card name=”Golisopod-GX” set=”Burning Shadows” no=”17″ c=”name”][/card]: 16-25
• Zoroark-GX / [card name=”Garbodor” set=”Guardians Rising” no=”51″ c=”name”][/card]: 26-30
• [card name=”Buzzwole” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”77″ c=”name”][/card] / Lycanroc-GX: 31-55
• [card name=”Buzzwole-GX” set=”Crimson Invasion” no=”57″ c=”name”][/card] / [card name=”Garbodor” set=”BREAKpoint” no=”57″ c=”name”][/card]: 56-65
• Psychic [card name=”Malamar” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”51″ c=”name”][/card]: 66-80
• [card name=”Ultra Necrozma-GX” set=”Forbidden Light” no=”95″ c=”name”][/card] / Malamar: 81-95
• [card name=”Greninja BREAK” set=”BREAKpoint” no=”41″ c=”name”][/card]: 96-100

So you just roll a random number and the given player plays that deck. You can also determine pairings by assigning numbers to players, or you can “pick poison” by having each side pick one of four different colored Energy and playing the person who has the same color. Everyone sits down and sets up as they would in a tournament. Once everyone is ready, a player starts the timer and the players begin. You can track everyone’s records, but it’s not really needed.

Optionally, if the participants have two days to commit, one side of the table can play the full nine rounds on the first day with the same deck to the other side’s random deck, and then day two the two sides flip for another nine rounds. This simulates the mental strain of a full two-day tournament run and gives you games against a variety of decks and players under a time limit.

Pros

This method is great for simulating the tournament experience. It can prepare you for mental strain and give you an idea for how an event will actually go, which is not something any other method can give you. You will also have a wide variety of experience against different decks in a timed environment, showing which matchups may play quicker or slower.

Cons

This is by far the most rigid and time-consuming method. In addition to this, each player needs to bring two or three decks for the table to have enough selection to keep it random. This can be a deal-breaker in more casual circles or ones where players tend to only have one or two decks. In addition to this, if you don’t have enough decks to just pick one up and go, building decks between rounds can add to the amount of time each round takes, though generally with fewer players time is less of a concern than in an actual tournament.

When to Use this Method

I would recommend this if you have several players that want to get as close to a real nine-round tournament experience as possible. If you want to test a specific matchup or use your time as efficiently as possible, this method is not the best for you.

Modifications

Have two phones, tablets, or laptops set up with headsets with white noise and simulate a stream table. Playing on stream is a totally different beast compared to a regular set. You not only have to deal with the pressure of an audience, but you also have to deal with white noise and a headset over your ears. While some players deal with this just fine, I find it incredibly distracting and difficult to play well under. If you’re anything like me, or if you haven’t played on stream before, adding this to your tournament simulation (or testing in general) can be beneficial.

Conclusion

Each of these testing methods is useful in their own right. You’ll get the best results if you mix and match, and always keep in mind what event you’re preparing for. Practicing good habits in testing is the absolute best way to develop them for a tournament. It’s also one of the most surefire ways to improve as a player. I hope these methods have helped you explore some of the less-than-obvious options when it comes to testing, and I look forward to hearing from anyone who tries them.

As always, thank you for reading!

~Conner

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