Playtest board

The playtest board deals your deck and lets you play it out against nobody. Use it to find out whether the deck does what you built it to do: whether the mana works, whether the hands are keepable, whether the pieces show up together.

Open it from Playtest on the deck's control bar, or from Playtest under the sample hand on the Analytics tab. Playtesting changes nothing about a deck, so it is open to anyone who can open the deck: your own decks either way, and anyone else's while they are public.

Nothing is saved

Reloading the page deals a new game. There is no save, no resume, and no history beyond undo. If you build a board you want to keep, screenshot it before you leave the page.

Deal and mulligan

Opening the board shuffles and deals seven. Your commander starts in the command zone, and life starts at 40 with a commander and 20 without.

Mulligan takes the London mulligan, which is the one Commander uses:

1. Choose Mulligan. Your whole hand shuffles back and you draw a fresh seven.
2. Choose the cards to put on the bottom. You owe one for each mulligan taken, so a third mulligan means keeping four of the seven you are looking at.
3. They go to the bottom in the order you pick them.

The hand readout under your cards shows the land count, average mana value and colors for the hand you would keep, so the number you are deciding on is the number you see.

Move cards

Drag a card where you want it, or right-click it. The menu reaches every move that dragging does, plus the ones a drag cannot express, so nothing on the board is drag-only.

On the battlefield, click a card to tap it. Cards stay where you put them, and they hold their positions relative to the table rather than in pixels, so resizing the window moves the arrangement together instead of scattering it.

The library

Click the deck to draw. The rest is on its right-click menu:

A card dropped on the deck goes on top, so a card you put back is the next one you draw. Use the menu when you mean the bottom: it names both ends.

The deck also drags. Dragging off it moves the top card without drawing it. Use that to mill one, or to exile the top card and play it later. It never tells you which card that is.

Order the cards you keep

"Look at the top" is scry, surveil, Brainstorm and every other effect of that shape. Nothing is committed until you choose Done, and the numbered badges show draw order: the card marked 1 is the next one you draw.

Set aside

The tray on the right holds cards exiled to be played later. Foretell, suspend, plot, adventure and every impulse-draw effect put a card there.

This is not exile. Exile holds cards that were exiled to be gone. Filed together, the cards you are still owed get buried under the ones you are not. The tray stays collapsed until it holds something.

Each set-aside card takes a note, because the board tracks nothing on its own. Write the condition you are waiting on: "until end of next turn", "foretold", "three time counters".

Tokens and counters

The drawer on the left holds both. Hover it to open it, click the tab to pin it.

Tokens. Click one to put it on the battlefield. Right-click a token already out there to make more of it. The top group is what this deck's own text says it makes, read off the oracle text of the cards in it, and Custom token covers anything it did not catch.

That derivation is pattern matching, not a rules engine, so it misses some cards. Two examples from real decks: Chatterfang's "are created instead" is a replacement effect and produces nothing, and Academy Manufactor's comma list yields Clue and Treasure but not Food. A missed token is one trip to the custom form.

Counters. Drag one onto the card that gets it. The drawer offers +1/+1 and -1/-1 first, then the kinds this deck's text asks for, so a deck running Sagas offers lore and one running suspend offers time. Hovering a chip names the card it came from.

A counter on a card shows as a badge in the art window. Click the badge to add another. To remove one, or to add a kind the drawer does not list, use the card's menu.

Turns

The top rail carries the turn number, your life total, and commander tax, each with buttons to nudge it. Untap all and Next turn are there too, and next turn untaps, advances the counter and draws.

Nothing is enforced. You can play six lands, cast a spell with no mana, and put life below zero. The board keeps score and you play the game.

Undo

Undo and redo are in the rail, on Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z. Every action that changes the board goes through them, shuffles and dealing a new game included, so a new game dealt by mistake is one undo away.

Starting a new game still asks first whenever there is a board to lose, because the history is bounded and a long game can outrun it.

Keyboard

Space and P act on whichever card the board is watching: the one under your pointer, or the one with focus. It is the same card the zoom panel is showing.

Shortcuts stand aside while you are typing, so they do not fire into a token name or a set-aside note.

On a narrow screen

Below 768 pixels the layout changes. The zones become tabs instead of a rail, the turn actions move to their own row above them, and the two drawers are not rendered at all. Their contents stay reachable: tokens and counters from the card menu, set-aside cards from the Aside tab.