Community Playtest Has Landed!

How to best give Jasco the feedback they need

A cavalcade of food items have recently entered our lives masquerading around as wild new cards for us to try and judge, but we shouldn’t be overwhelmed by them! The first thing to note is that Jasco has selected 6 characters for us to focus on, so that is a great place to start, but people don’t need to keep forcing these 6 characters against each other over and over, that’s not the best way to learn about a character and their cards!

This is a great time to be able to test standard decks that you’ve been working on, too. Having a standard deck that you are fairly confident in go up against playtest decks will show more about the playtest characters than if the playtest foods only fought each other, because if the cards in your deck have all been printed, (and in theory aren’t worth banning) then it should be an excellent measuring stick. The characters that we have so far aren’t plentiful, so they probably aren’t from much more than a couple sets forward, so it is probably best to test your decks with cards from Cowboy Bebop and onward. Those cards should be legal for when these playtesting sets eventually come out, so make sure to mix and match cards from all over to help with your deck.

Because Cowboy Bebop should be used in building, that does of course mean that its box topper Bang is available as well, but I would like to, at least to a degree, discourage you from overly using it in matches when your opponent is trying to playtest a new character and/or their cards. This is ESPECIALLY an issue with the Peanut Butter & Jelly character, as he is essentially built around using his card that works similarly to Bang. While this is a fun character to play, I don’t think he should be played against playtest characters when your opponent is trying to get a gauge on them. You can’t really get a great grasp on a character’s performance if you don’t have access to that character for 4 consecutive turns, you know? This is another great reason to test characters against established, standard legal decks. The PBJ character may seem pretty cool, but can an Akuma2 that draws hot still rip him apart even without access to his character for most of the turn? 

Don’t forget that these characters’ attacks have traits and abilities, too. You can expand your deck building options by looking deeper than the character itself! Take Colonel KFC, for example. Each of his attacks has the Kick keyword, but none of them explicitly are looking for that, and he doesn’t have a Combo (Kick) anywhere, he just does some kicks. Expand your deck building by looking where you can for good cards and see how they fit into these characters. Usually (and hopefully) a given character isn’t broken by the cards in their own support, but by outside cards that seemed tame before, or maybe didn’t have a proper home. Seong Mi-na's Ultra Rare attack, Scarlet Meteor, is inherently a strong attack, but it wasn’t truly broken until it was introduced in the Retro format to Kaden's Blindfold, from Red Horizon set 2, a card that never really made a splash. It took several years after Tides of Vengeance was printed, but there was finally an attack with Powerful that also adds an asset to your staging area. Sometimes cards have great synergy with cards released years before it, so it’s absolutely worth checking out what you can, and discussing what you can with other players!

That brings me to my next point. There aren’t (and shouldn’t be) organized playtest events with prizes, this is just for the health of the game and the players’ enjoyment, so there should be absolutely no reason for people to hide their cool tech from others. People should be as open as possible so that players can brainstorm, so that a variety of viable types of builds for strong characters can be seen by many people. It is also important to try multiple routes for characters, so you can maybe uncover something. Nick Regan has two different builds for Keto Kombateer, a character with a very potent damage pump ability, one build to prove how oppressive he can be with lots of cheap throws, and a second build to see how different the character would be if his enhance ability did not work on throws. I think that this is a great method, especially if you really believe that a card is overly strong. Try multiple builds, and don’t just go for what seems like the ideal build every time.

It has already been a recurring theme of my articles that I want people to expand their deckbuilding horizons, and this is a great opportunity to try it out! Oh, and don’t be hesitant to try out a character just because you don’t have an affinity for the food on the face of it. Tajine was the last character that I even considered from the first batch because I don’t even know what that food is, and it doesn’t look appealing to me. I tried him out and found some pretty wild stuff in his support that I’m surprised that I missed, so don’t make my mistake!