Goldfishing & Testing

And how to try new cards!

What is Goldfishing?

Goldfishing is the process of trying out your deck by yourself to learn how it plays and how new cards work in the deck. Now why would you play a multiplayer game by yourself at home? It comes down to complexity. Mark Rosewater mentions in a podcast that players have to manage a boardstate with tons of permanents and stacked effects and each additional permanent adds to the board complexity. Goldfishing is essentially just boardstate practice to be able to handle that additional complexity. You may now know what your opponents are playing, but you can at least lighten the load by having a very firm grasp of your own cards and how they interact. Knowing how your cards interact together helps speed games along too by being able to properly explain and keep track of the board in a clear and succinct way.

How to Goldfish?

Just shuffle up and play like you were at a table! Go through your phases and play normally. Between your turns, make pretend your opponents are taking normal game actions (drawing their cards, casting a spell a turn, making a land drop per turn, etc…) What I like to do to gauge the speed of the deck is track my turns and see how many turns it takes for my deck to cause 120 points of damage. (40 to each of your opponents.) For my one Voltron deck, I check how many turns it takes my commander to deal 63 damage (21 commander damage specifically).

To add a little more realism to the test experience, I keep two twenty-sided dice close by. One is to keep track of what turn I’m on in my test. And the other is rolled during each of my first main phases. If the number rolled is within one number away from than the number of the turn it is, I remove what I think is the largest threat on my board. If the rolled number comes out equal to the number of turns, I count it as a board wipe. This simulates having 3 opponents targeting what could be a threatening boardstate. To make use of the removal and interaction spells in my hand, I cast them to skip having to roll for that turn.

Assuming that nothing ever goes perfectly to plan, I like to make sure that I can meet those mentioned damage thresholds around turn 10 in hopes of being able to do it by turns 12 - 15 in a real game setting. I can’t recommend goldfishing enough as it teaches you about your own deck and some of the incredible synergies it can attain if you and your deck are left unchecked.

Individual Card testing

Beast Whisperer

Ghalta, Primal Hunger

Another great use for goldfishing is testing individual cards. If you have a brand new card you want to test in your deck, it could be ages by the time you get to play the deck and see the card in play. This is some of the math as to how unlikely it is to draw the one specific card you want to test at a game night:

• Out of a 99 card deck you’ll see about 22 - 25 cards.

  • 7 for an opening hand (7)

  • 1 draw phase per turn and we’ll assume a 10 turn game (10)

  • And we’ll assume you cast some card draw spells or some scrying spells to clean up draws (5 - 8)

This comes out to roughly 25% that you’ll see the card. A lot of folks reading this may only get to play once a week at a game night where they can fit three games in. Three tries at 25% comes out to a 57% chance that you’ll see the card you are looking for once. And it may not even be a good test given the boardstate at that time you see it! It could be weeks until you see your card in action and actually gauge if it’s a good fit! So now that you know how to goldfish a deck, use these steps to effectively try out new cards before your next game night:

• Pick some cards that you’d like to replace in your deck. (Test cards = Beast Whisperer)

• Find some cards that you’ll test removing in place of the new card. (Old card = Ghalta, Primal Hunger)

• On a separate piece of paper note the names of both the Test card and Old card and make the pairing clear “1 Beast Whisperer in for 1 Ghalta, Primal Hunger out”

• Goldfish your deck as mentioned above and when you come across one of your Test cards, judge the boardstate and see if you’d rather have drawn the Test card or the Old card. “Do I wish that I drew a Ghalta, Primal Hunger or am I happy that I drew a Beast Whisperer instead?”

• If you’re just trying to test one new card, you can shuffle up again and try again once you run into the Test card.

The above example is good for checking some cards in your deck with the randomness of when you’d find them. There are some other variations that also help try out the card in other situations. Variation 1 tests the feel of the new card on curve. Start by keeping the Test card next to your commander, and take note of the mana value. Goldfish as normal and when you get to the turn equal to the mana value of that card, draw the Test/old card instead of something off the top of your library and judge your boardstate to see if you can make use out of that card on that given boardstate. This test is to see how your deck likes the new card when on a curve. Do this again with the old card and compare how impactful both cards felt when played on curve. (How does it feel when I draw a Beast Whisperer on turn 4 or drawing a Ghalta on the turn I have enough power on board to cast it.)

The next variation tests how the card feels in your opening hand. Simply shuffle up, draw 6 cards and place the Test card or the new Old card in your opening hand. Proceed to goldfish as normal and compare how it feels having the Test or Old card in your hand. This is easier to do in rapid succession as you can just draw 6, test the feel, and just reshuffle if you don’t want to goldfish from there.

A quick note on if a basic land is the Old card in these tests. To make sure you’re analyzing the right card swap, turn the card upside down in the sleeve to know that it is the comparison card. To test the Old card (the basic land) goldfish a ton normally and take note of how many lands you get in your opening hand each time.

These are great tests to make sure that the card going in is a good card to include, and also that you are making the right choice in which card to replace it with! If it doesn’t work out, you can always switch the replacement card and see what happens in some more tests.

Quick Goldfishing

If time is of the essence and you want to sneak in a quick test, get a lot of quick tests in, or you're stuck waiting on hold for over 4 hours with the New Jersey DMV for something that can be addressed and handled in 4 minutes and you need something to keep your hands busy, you can try quick goldfishing! While disregarding the specificity of the last example, follow these steps to quickly test how your spells and permanents work together:

• Pull out all of your lands from your deck

• Shuffle all of your nonland cards together

• Assume you have infinite mana

• Play one card off the top and follow the rules as much as you can.

• Continue to keep track over all of your upkeeps and triggers

• Play until the board becomes a messy disaster, until you lose track of triggers, or until the DMV finally takes you off of hold.

Quick goldfishing is great for understanding the complexity but without dealing with mana costs and choices of what to cast. While it does mean you have to remove your lands, it does make for a lot of fun if you have a deck with too many interacting permanents and offers up a fun play experience similar to playing Dandan (See Rhystic Studies cool video on the history of playing Dandan.)

Physical Cards vs Digital Service

If you have a lot of time on your hands, you can set up your deck and play against some online decks. On Moxfield.com, it is very easy to pull up a deck (yours or not) and click on the Playtest button. You can open 3 Moxfield windows and play against 3 different versions of yourself! There are two difficult things to do that can make for a much more realistic play experience. First is that you should always use proper judgment when assessing threats at the digital table. If one of your Moxfield tabs has a [[Beast Within]], and you have a giant creature with a pile of counters, don’t avoid targeting that big creature just because it’s a feels-bad moment for you. The second is that you shouldn’t metagame, meaning playing around the threats that you know your digital opponents have. Keeping these two things in mind makes for a more fun and more accurate play experience with things to use your interaction on too.

Conclusion

With all of this information it should be much easier to test cards, test your decks, and also find fun with your cards at home. I hope you have found this useful! Thank you for reading articles at PreCon Playground and remember…

Play Nice and No Shoving.