3.8 Testing groups
”The difference between good and top players, mostly, is the decision and will to become a top player, and doing that with other people. Because as much as this looks like a solo sport, it’s a team one. – TamiJo
You may have a testing buddy or a sparring partner or two now: people that you play with on a regular basis. If you are invested enough in the game, that can easily lead to long conversations about your misplays, your decks, maybe about the state of the current meta. If that’s the case, you’re already halfway through the process of forming a testing group.
A testing group is a collective of players who team up in order to test and practice together, both to get better as individuals and to come up with powerful decks. They often end up being “teams” of players who will go to the same tournament together with identical or very similar decks, something that leads to a strong sense of community and camaraderie. At the time of writing, examples of prominent testing groups are NWE, Unband, the process, Snare Bears, QtM, and The Future Perfect.
It’s not necessary to be in a testing group to become a strong player, though in my opinion you really need at least someone that you consistently practice with in a shared dedicated attempt to get better. However, a group of people who share that goal can be a very effective way to elevate your play, and people frequently overestimate how difficult it can be to put a group together.
Starting out
If you want to form a testing group, the best way to go about it is to just formalize your habits with people that you’re already playing with frequently. If you have a sparring partner or two, and they have a sparring partner or two, all you might be missing from being a testing group is the decision to be one. You don’t need many participants in order for this to work: multiple successful groups started as just four players, and then grew bigger at the pace they felt was correct. You also don’t need to be particularly good at the game, or to have very close skill levels among you: wanting to work on gameplay and deckbuilding together is all that it takes.
Maybe you all live close and have the opportunity to play in paper most of the time, but it’s very unlikely that that’s going to be all you do, so you need some sort of instant messaging software to communicate online. “Workspace” solutions like Discord and Slack are obvious choices because of how they allow you to keep multiple conversations going at the same time and thread discussions of specific decklists and the like.
How to schedule and sync up for online practice is a tricky matter. Often people aren’t around for strictly scheduled practice at clear intervals (like “we meet every Tuesday at this time”); but at the same time, just having people ping everyone when “I have free time and would like to test something rn” usually doesn’t work out, and usually when it does, someone is in kind of a rush and there is little time for more involved play and replay analysis. A middle-of-the-road solution is to warn other people with a few days of advance, like “I will be around for 4 hours Tuesday evening, who would be around to test Anarch decks then? Are we enough to 2v2?”, which works a fair amount of the time and often leads to very engaging and productive practice and testing. On a related note, if your group is geographically divided and has members from all over the world, you might want to think about time zone distribution a little bit. If you only have one or two members from a certain region, chances are they might end up not testing and participating in active discussion with the rest of the group much, and that sucks.
Different people have very different approaches to deckbuilding. The most obvious difference is that between players who want to tune decks that are already quite proven and players who like to experiment with weirder stuff. These two kinds of players can often misunderstand each other and disagree on what is worth spending testing time on, but ultimately their different types of work complement each other very well: I’m very much the former, and I often take out-there ideas that other players come up with and optimize them to actually turn them into efficient, working decks. It’s very good to try and have both “optimizers” and “brainstormers” in your group! These roles don’t have to be formalized, but understanding where everyone stands in terms of approaches to deckbuilding can be helpful.
If you build decks that you expect to take to tournaments where you will take everyone by surprise, you probably need to have some conversations about the level of secrecy you want those decks to be tested under. A spicy combo brew that you think people are unlikely to foresee can win a couple extra games if it will actually surprise people. However, keeping secrets can make it more difficult to test because it means you have to actually only test those decks behind closed doors, and that can sometimes make it difficult to reach an adequate volume of testing games. Considerations will have to be based on both how powerful you think your brew is, and whether it’s something strange enough that the surprise factor will really catch people off their guard.
Growing bigger
At some point, you might have your eyes on someone who you think is a good fit for your group, or maybe a friend is really interested in joining, or maybe you just think if you had a couple more people you would be able to get more games in. How to recruit new members is a difficult topic: my understanding is that different groups do it in very different ways and at a different pace. Whatever your preference is, try to be conscious about what process you follow and be explicit about how it works. Lots of people want to invite their friends, and it can suck for some if it doesn’t feel like the way new members are accepted isn’t fair or understandable. Be wary about inviting too many people at the same time: there is a limited size after which a group starts losing testing coherence, meaning that there are too many members for them to communicate well and have clear shared goals (and once you mistakenly cross this threshold, you’re not going to just kick people just to solve this problem!). This gets particularly tricky if too many people join at once, because you have to teach everyone all of the social conventions you had developed that make practice and discussion work, and that takes a lot of effort and sometimes some of the progress you had made gets lost in the process.
As your group gets bigger than just a handful of people, you start being a small online community, and that means you actually need to invest some energy into community moderation. If someone among you already has experience with that and is happy to put in some work and provide advice, let them help! Keeping communication within your community healthy is very important and easy to underrate the importance of.
Instant messaging software like Discord is great for synchronous discussion but it’s quite bad for managing information and keeping it up to date: you end up having to do very messy stuff with forum threads, pinned masterposts and such. There are better alternatives, depending on how much effort you are willing to spend on this. Shared text files on something like Etherpad or Google Docs or Cryptpad is great; spreadsheets do a lot of work for you (and if you’re not experienced, it’s probably worth it to take some time to understand how to make the information in them look pretty and easy to understand). Something like a shared wiki or knowledge management software (Obsidin, Notion, Gollum) is the high-end solution if you want to be very well organized, but it probably complicates things a fair bit, introducing considerations of pricing or possibly self-hosting. My testing group is still trying to figure this one out, because we often run into issues with managing information on Discord, and it looks like the benefits are likely worth the effort but it’s not an obvious one to crack.
Most people from established testing groups are happy to share practices what they have discovered to work. While different groups have different goals and so what works for others might not work for you, I’ve always found it productive to message members of other testing groups to chat about how they do recruitment or practice or deckbuilding, or how they manage secrecy. As is often the case in the Netrunner community, people tend to be nice and open about their discoveries.