Playtest & Rooms

Playtest

Playtest gives your decks a table. It moves cards, tracks the numbers, and keeps the board in step between everyone playing. Dragging is never refused, so whatever the table doesn't handle for you, you can always do by hand.

Both modes start from Play in the sidebar. They need a computer: the table is the size of a desk and a lot of it happens on hover, so on a phone or tablet Play is something else, the table tracker.

Solo

Pick a deck and go. Pick several of your own and you pilot every side, which is how you test a matchup where you own both halves. The table turns to face whoever is acting, so the player to move is always at the bottom.

Play with Friends

Open a room and the table waits for everyone before it starts. The waiting card shows the room code big enough to read out, and three ways to get people in: Copy invite link (opening it drops them straight into the next open seat), the code itself, or Invite friends to send one from here. Each seat says where it's at: open, choosing a deck, or seated with what they're playing. Up to four seats.

If someone opens your link while they're logged out, they log in and land in the room. The link doesn't get lost on the way.

Whoever joins picks their own deck and gets their opening hand dealt on the spot. The host can start without an empty seat, and the turn just goes past it until somebody sits down. Turn one doesn't start until everybody has kept their hand. The helper says who's still deciding, and pressing again starts without them, so nobody can hold the table by wandering off.

Tab away and the tab's title tells you when the table needs you: your turn, your blocks, a spell waiting on your answer, or your opening hand.

Everyone sees the same board. Hands and libraries stay private: your cards never leave your browser in a readable form, and the board the server stores has every hand stripped out of it. Drawing tells the table that a card moved, not which card.

Only the player whose turn it is can move the turn along, so nobody walks your turn into combat while you're still thinking. When the host ends a room it closes for everyone and the code goes back into circulation.

The Rules Engine

There's a rules engine underneath that tries to guide you through what you're doing: paying for things, asking the questions a card asks, moving the turn along, noticing triggers, and pointing out when something on the board looks off. It's there to help, not to referee, so anything it says can be waved away. It's switched on and off with autopilot, the fast-forward icon in the toolbar. In a room the host owns that switch, because everyone's board has to agree on it.

Moving Cards

Select several cards first and the action applies to all of them.

With something selected, + and − give it +1/+1 or −1/−1 until end of turn. Hold Shift for counters instead. Press ? at the table for the rest of the keys.

Casting

Double click a card in your hand (or press S with it selected) to cast it. When the card has something to decide first, like how much to pay or which extras to add, Cast asks before it pays. Cards you could cast right now glow in your hand.

Every cast and activation of yours shows for a few seconds just above your hand ("Cast Grizzly Bears (tapped 2)") with an Undo button. That takes the whole thing back, card and taps together.

Resolving

Resolve a spell or ability from the stack and the table does what it says when it can. Anything that targets opens a picker of what it can be aimed at. The stack strip tells you what Resolve is about to do before you press it, and when the table can't do it, the strip says "You do this one" and leaves the text in a note by your life total until you press Done.

Abilities

Open the card menu on something of yours on the battlefield and its abilities are listed at the top with an Activate button, which pays the cost and puts the ability on the stack (or just does it, for mana).

The Card Menu

The buttons across the top depend on what the card is. A card in hand leads with Cast, a land or a mana rock with Tap for mana, a creature with tap, attack and block. Everything the board can represent is here: tap, counters of any name, power and toughness, attach, annotate, face down with a mechanic, copies, reveal, control. There's a filter box at the top, so typing "stun" beats reading the list.

Keywords opens all 885 keywords Magic has printed, searchable, with an explanation on hover.

Tokens

Create a token searches real printed tokens by name, so a Soldier arrives with its own art and stats. Presets cover the usual suspects. The custom fields cover anything never printed.

Board Effects

Right click bare felt for anthems and lords of your own: "creatures you control get +1/+1", "all creatures have flying". Scope it to your seat or the whole table, and it reaches creatures that arrive later. If the effect comes from a card, make it with Board effect from this in the card menu instead, and it ends on its own when that card leaves.

Moving Through the Turn

The game starts with your opening hand. The turn helper lists every hand you're playing, with Keep and Mulligan beside each one.

There's one button for moving on: Next in the turn helper. Space does the same thing, and Shift+Space ends your turn. Clicking a phase on the track jumps ahead to it. With autopilot on, Next skips the steps where nothing's going to happen and stops where something might. Every hop is one undo and one line in the log.

Stops are for everything else. Right click a phase on the track (long press on touch) and tick the steps you want the turn to wait at, on your turn or on other people's. A dot under the phase means you've got a stop there.

You can jump in at any point by clicking the priority pill, even when it isn't your turn.

Triggers

When one of your cards triggers, it shows up as a chip in the turn helper with the card's name, and it's asked about in the middle of the table one at a time. Apply does it straight away when there's nothing to choose. Stack puts it on the stack so everyone can respond first. The cross is for one that didn't really happen, or one you've already handled. In a room you only see your own triggers.

The Board

The commonest keywords are visible from across the table. Fliers hover. Tramplers bounce. Vigilance glows. Haste throws off speed lines. Menace takes up more room and watches you. Everything else gets an icon down the card's edge. Anything the board thinks looks wrong shows as a warning you can wave away for the turn. A red one that won't go away means the board contradicts itself, which is a bug, not a rules question.

Drag across empty felt to draw a box, and everything in it is selected (hold Ctrl, or Cmd on a Mac, to add to what you've already got). To move the table itself, hold Shift and drag. The mouse wheel zooms, and the crosshair button in the toolbar puts everything back where it started.

Battlefields

The table can be more than a dark felt. The mountain button next to the music picks where you're playing: MTG Codex is the clean one in your profile's colours, and then there's a Tavern with a fire going in the hearth, a desk by the window in a Rainy City (with a couple's names carved into it), an Enchanted Grove whose runes glow, one of them brighter now and then, a Hellish floor of dark cobblestone with embers under it and an old pentagram dried into it that glows red now and then, under smoke, with ash settling and lightning now and then, and a Cyberpunk table of carbon and light, with a stream of light jumping between portals behind it. The room goes all the way round, so wherever you move the table to, there's something behind it. Where your cards sit, though, the surface goes quiet, because the cards are what you came to look at. Things move around the edges (fire, rain, fireflies, ash, traffic), but not if your system is set to reduce motion. If it's set to increase contrast, the middle of the table goes plain.

Each battlefield comes with its own playlist, and the music follows it unless you switch that off at the bottom of the same menu. Then the music menu gets its genre picker back and the two are separate. MTG Codex plays everything, shuffled. Your battlefield is yours alone: in a room, everyone sits at whichever one they picked.

Sound

Cards landing, draws, shuffles, taps, life changes, the turn passing. In a room you hear other players act, which is the only cue that something happened while you were looking elsewhere. Mute it from the toolbar and it stays muted.

There's music too. Play and pause sit in the top bar, and the music button next to them has the rest: skip, volume, and either the genre or which battlefield it's following. Reset, Concede and End live together under Game, top right, and each one asks before it does anything. And if you die, you'll know.

Your Player Bar

Life is the big number, with a minus and plus either side (hold one to keep counting). Everything else only shows up once it's true: poison, energy, experience and the rest of the counters, floating mana, the monarch and the initiative. The + button adds any of them, and right click on one takes it back down.

Saving

Solo games live in your browser. Clear your site data and they're gone. Room games live on the server, so you can reload, or pick up on another device, and the board is where you left it.