Development Update - Playtester interaction simulator

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archidekt avatararchidekt
{"ops":[{"insert":"Hi, all!"},{"attributes":{"header":3},"insert":"\n"},{"insert":"\nWe're excited to announce the release of a Commander interaction simulator to the playtester! \n\nWith the simulator toggled on, at the end of your turns, there will be a chance that a hypothetical opponent does something that influences your board, hand, library or life total. This may come in the form of attacks, removal spells, counterspells, etc. The odds of different types of interaction occurring are extremely customizable.\n\nThe interaction simulator is not meant to replicate a real game, but should provide a sense of the real pushback you get from opponents when playing. This should help you identify points of weakness in your deck in a way that regular goldfishing cannot.\n\nYou can turn on the interaction simulator directly from the new game/mulligan screen in the playtester or via the \"Game menu\" dropdown in the playtester itself. From interaction settings, you can turn on an interaction widget, control what turn interaction starts on, how many instances of interaction can occur per turn, and how likely different forms of interaction are to occur. A handful of archetype presets will get you started if you're looking for practice against a specific type of opponent. \n\nAfter whichever turn you have set to begin interaction on, the \"Next turn\" button (or pressing N on desktop) will pull up your interaction log. Sometimes no interaction occurs, but other times, you'll be told to resolve something like a specific removal spell before advancing to your turn. Other than telling you what interaction has rolled, the playtester does nothing automatically. It's on you, for instance, to decide what a reasonable target for your opponent's [[Beast Within]] would be. \n\nWith the default settings, we've done our best to make the interaction simulator feel \"fair\" while still informing on how your deck would perform in a real game. What feels right to us though may be wildly far off from how games tend to go with your playgroup! If you find that to be the case, we strongly encourage you to play around with the various interaction settings until it feels right to you. \n\nEven so, we'd love to hear from you if things feel \"off\". We have a lot of dials we can turn if the general consensus is that something needs re-balancing but we think we've landed on something pretty good here. Whatever your experience with the interaction simulator is, we'd love to hear about it below.\n\nThanks for reading!\nThe Archidekt Team"},{"attributes":{"header":3},"insert":"\n"},{"insert":"\n"},{"insert":{"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/topdekt-user/article_images/playtester_interaction/interaction1.png"}},{"insert":"\n\n"},{"insert":{"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/topdekt-user/article_images/playtester_interaction/interaction2.png "}},{"insert":"\n\n"},{"insert":{"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/topdekt-user/article_images/playtester_interaction/interaction3.png "}},{"insert":"\n\n"},{"insert":{"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/topdekt-user/article_images/playtester_interaction/interaction4.png "}},{"insert":"\n\n"},{"insert":{"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/topdekt-user/article_images/playtester_interaction/interaction5.png "}},{"insert":"\n\n"},{"insert":{"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/topdekt-user/article_images/playtester_interaction/interaction6.png "}},{"insert":"\n"}]}
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{"ops":[{"insert":"This feature is absolutely amazing, thank you for adding it! I've been using it to test many of my decks and it has helped greatly in the fine tuning. I do like how the creatures and spells that could happen in each category are fully random, though it would be nice to see some attacks from effect creatures where the attack, if let through, adds additional consequences (or boons depending!) to add a little more realisticness to the test than just tokens. Not sure how to go about doing it, but I bring it up as it once generated the dragon token from"},{"insert":{"card-link":"Wake the Dragon"}},{"insert":" which made me rethink how I would/if I would want to block. Likewise with trample creatures or death touch creatures. Not a big deal on my end if it wouldn't work out well, as said in the article, it's to improve deck testing, not be an exact replica!\n"}]}
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{"ops":[{"insert":"We tried it with all creatures for a bit (rather than using tokens) and the varience was ... It got a bit crazy 😅. Too often effects rely on context, other cards, etc. It ended up just feeling kinda off because you had to make logical leaps in ways that wasn't super intuitive. We're just using a tailored scryfall query to grab the subset of cards that can pop (depending on the action that takes place), so it's possible there's "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"something"},{"insert":" that we could do to dial it, but for now we'll probably keep it with just sending creature tokens to keep it more on the rails than not. \n"}]}
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Frogdor avatarFrogdor
{"ops":[{"insert":"Thanks, this is a cool new feature. I was playing around with this yesterday when I saw it show up and was thinking it would be nice if it had a \"This play doesn't make sense\" button to re-roll the interaction and possibly send feedback of the play to help refine the tool. For example, I was testing a toughness matters deck and only had a "},{"insert":{"card-link":"Kraken Hatchling"}},{"insert":" on the field when the interaction tool suggested "},{"insert":{"card-link":"Assassin's Trophy"}},{"insert":" which wouldn't really be a play that made sense for someone to do.\n"}]}
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Ectar avatarEctar
{"ops":[{"insert":"I could get behind that. \nI had the algorithm cast Imprison in the moon when all I had out was a bunch of forests and a food token. \n"}]}
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{"ops":[{"insert":"So awesome guys! Archidekt OP,\n"}]}
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{"ops":[{"insert":"Amazing feature! Tysm!! The archidekt playtester is by far the best one, I use it to playtest any deck extensively before I buy them and this just makes it even better! I used to use multiple tabs with different decks playing against each other lol\n"}]}
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{"ops":[{"insert":"Is it possible to program this function to use actual decklists (perhaps a setting we could put on our decks to allow them to be used by the bot)? I ran several tests using interaction, and it was mostly fine, but there were some strange interactions. For example, in one test, I ended up getting interacted with the second chapter of a saga, but the first was skipped despite the fact that it would have affected the whole table. I understand if it's too big an ask, but I just think it would be really cool if it could work.\n"}]}
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{"ops":[{"insert":"That wouldn't work super well unfortunately since there wouldn't be a way to reasonable know what cards do. This isn't actually playing a real deck in the background, it's just throwing obsticals in your path to simulate distruption, removal, boardwipes, etc.\n\nWhat interaction did you pull the saga from? We're still tuning the pool of cards that each interaction type can pull from, so it's possible that saga should just be filtered out outright.\n"}]}
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{"ops":[{"insert":"The interaction played two of the same counterspell ("},{"insert":{"card-link":"Amphibian Downpour"}},{"insert":" ). Do you have anything in it to make sure that a hypothesized deck can't have more than one of the same card? It could just be something like it can't use the same card more than once per game.\n"}]}
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{"ops":[{"insert":"Really cool feature, but I'm concerned this update went out with a bug. When I'm building a deck and looking at cards in the search, pressing the S and M hotkeys aren't sending cards to the sideboard and maybeboard respectively. The cards are going directly into my mainboard, and at least for me personally, that has "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"significantly"},{"insert":" debilitated my deckbuilding workflow. I also realized this when I tried to move them into the category manually (Move to category > Sideboard, for example). I think something's wrong with how the card search is interacting with the sideboard/maybeboard.\n"}]}
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{"ops":[{"attributes":{"strike":true},"insert":"I'll fix it tomorrow, thanks for the heads up. "},{"insert":"\n\nThis is fixed, appreciate the heads up!\n"}]}
Edited 9/4/2026, 3:10:37 PM
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{"ops":[{"insert":"Are you able to make this feature available for all playtesting? I mostly have \"Kitchen Table\" decks rather than ones for any particular format.\n"}]}
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Ectar avatarEctar
{"ops":[{"insert":"New feature is neat. \nIt'd be cool if the \"Wait! Resolve any interaction...\" and pop-up could be closed without going into our next turn. As a consummate blue mage, I often want to use instant speed draw effects on the end step before my turn. That's harder to do now, since I tend to stack my lands from top left to bottom left in online clients. \n"}]}
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