Last week, I showed you some basic steps to help you start up a playtest group (a group of fellow World of Warcraft TCG players with whom you can try out new decks, test out matchups, and practice outside of competitive tournaments). I went over scheduling, testing protocols, building gauntlets, and starting a group. This week, I want to give you some tips on how to keep things running smoothly.

I want to start by highlighting the most important factor of the bunch: communication.

Communicate and Stay Organized
 
While it might seem like the goal of a playtest group is to sit and grind through as many sets of games as you can, your real aim should be communication. If you play a set of ten games and make observations, either about how cards are played or your opponent¡¯s performance, you should share them, both with your testing partner for those particular games and with the rest of your group. That way your hard data and immediate observations can be interpreted by several people instead of just one or two, and you can benefit from a variety of perspectives.

Good communication before a testing session helps guide the direction of that session¡¯s games, too. It¡¯s exceedingly important to head into a testing session knowing what your group wants to achieve. Which decks and matchups should your group test? What tech should your group try? These types of questions can all be thought up and relayed before you actually sit down and start whipping out cards. Doing so will save time and keep the group focused on central goals. Not having a focal point for the playtesting session often results in everybody doing something different, with each playtester not understanding the thought processes of his or her partners. This can make for a frustrating experience that produces little to no results¡ªand a little communication beforehand can prevent all that!

Strong communication and organization during times outside testing sessions can also help your group adapt to extreme situations. If an emergency comes up that would threaten a testing session, advanced knowledge and discussion can result in smooth rescheduling. Possible changes to the structure of your testing sessions should also be discussed in advance (before they would actually take effect), so that when testing periods roll around, you don¡¯t have to waste precious time on things other than card flopping. In fact, I¡¯ll spend the rest of the article discussing those very changes to testing sessions.

Develop Testing Standards
 
When you start off with your shiny new testing group, your protocols for testing sessions are basically going to be shots in the dark. Sure, you can make an educated guess as to how many games should be played in a given matchup to learn something about it, but you¡¯ll probably find that your initial estimate doesn¡¯t match the ideal number of games for your group. The group¡¯s collective observation skills, tactical consistency, and ability to take to a new deck are all important variables, and they¡¯re going to change over time¡ªeither improving with experience or changing when a new member joins the group.

The number of games you¡¯ll need to play can also be determined by the information you¡¯re looking for, but you won¡¯t really learn about that until your group has been testing for a while. Playing a matchup to find win percentage may take ten, fifteen, or even twenty games, while seeing if a sudden, inspired tech pick will actually pan out could take considerably fewer. Deciding on tweaks to the deck, such as a fourth copy of a particularly useful ability or ally, might take five games or twenty-five. There¡¯s really no way to know right off the bat, because finding the perfect number of games for each task is a function of the team as a collective. It just takes time before your team dynamic is developed enough for you to deeply customize your protocols.

When that time comes, however, it¡¯s important that your group rises to the challenge. Recognizing that there¡¯s no need for extensive playtesting in certain situations saves time. Realizing which situations do require it saves you from strategic failure and half-baked conclusions. To effectively manage time and achieve the best results, it¡¯s important to constantly re-examine the standards by which your group is testing matchups and new ideas. Even before you reach this point with your group, everyone should be keeping a few mental notes on which activities could use more time and which don¡¯t need as much. Don¡¯t make decisions like this on the fly¡ªthat¡¯ll just make your group sloppy. Again, communication and organization are key.

Maintain Your Gauntlet
 
It might be a little difficult to see how important maintaining your testing standards and protocols can be, but this point is a lot more obvious. You need to be testing against the decks you expect to see, and since the WoW TCG is an ever-evolving game, those decks are going to change on a constant basis.

I personally think that deciding which decks to include in your gauntlet (and which ones to rotate out) is mostly a function of two factors. First, your decision should be partly based on what you¡¯re seeing at your local tournaments. If more people start playing one or two well-performing decks in particular, and those decks aren¡¯t in your group¡¯s gauntlet, they probably should be.

But what you¡¯re seeing there is only half the picture. What your group expects to see can be even more important. This is often far more integral when approaching a higher-level event. The less you factually know about the metagame you¡¯re walking into, the more important your metagame predictions and reads become. Sounds simple, right? For a local tournament where actual data can be collected each week, I¡¯d say the split of importance is relatively even. But as data is removed from the equation, predictions are all that can fill the void.

This can mean some long discussion sessions for your testing group, but it¡¯s important that the group makes those decisions when they arise. Otherwise you could be wasting plenty of hours testing matchups that won¡¯t matter in the end. Again, communication and taking advantage of the different perspectives in your testing group are highly important to your group¡¯s success. You need to keep your gauntlet tight for the sake of time efficiency, but if you narrow your scope too much, you¡¯ll miss out on important possibilities. Let that thought guide your group¡¯s decisions when you guys are updating the testing gauntlet.

Whatever you decide, be sure that whenever you take apart a deck, you keep the decklist you used to create it. Archive that stuff. It¡¯ll be useful if you decide to bring that particular strategy back into rotation weeks later. Even if you never do, you¡¯ll be able to look back and review the decks you were testing. If two months from now you wonder why the testing group¡¯s tournament performance took a downturn, you can go and look at the decks you were testing at the time¡ªperhaps they weren¡¯t the best builds. Better yet, if a deck smashes face in a big tournament like a Dream Machine Championship and you had an earlier build that made the same innovations, you¡¯ll be able to double-check and identify that fact as one that might have given you an edge. You can learn from those situations, and they¡¯ll help your group refine its deckbuilding process.

Maintaining a team really comes down to three factors: communication, developing testing standards, and keeping your gauntlet current. Keep these things in mind, and you¡¯ll achieve a huge amount of success with your playtesting group.

But of course, staying at a neutral position isn¡¯t always satisfying, and even if your group is still pretty new, then growing it might be on your mind. That¡¯ll be my topic next week. See you then!