Deck Tester
Goldfish your deck
Draw opening hands, check your land drops, and play out full turns without an opponent — test how consistent your deck really is before you shuffle up for real.
Tip: put your commander on the first line — the first legendary card is treated as the commander.
Playtest MTG Decks Online — The Free Goldfish Simulator Built for Commander
Every Commander player knows the feeling: a deck that looked perfect in the builder falls apart at the table. The mana comes out wrong, the curve stalls on turn three, the commander never sticks. The EDHcheck Deck Tester exists to catch all of that before game night. Import any decklist — a Moxfield, Archidekt, or TappedOut link, or a pasted list — and goldfish it right in your browser: draw opening hands, make land drops, cast spells, and play out entire turns against an imaginary opponent, exactly the way you would with sleeves and a kitchen table, minus the shuffling.
Start With Opening Hands, Not Full Games
Most deck problems are visible in the first seven cards. The Deck Tester opens with a dedicated opening-hand screen: deal a hand, glance at it, deal another — each deal is one click, and a running average lands per opening handupdates as you go. A 37-land Commander deck should settle around 2.6 lands per hand; if your average drifts lower after a couple dozen deals, you have a mana problem that no amount of optimism will fix. Because dealing hands is so fast, you can run a sample of twenty-five or fifty hands in the time it takes to shuffle a physical deck twice, and get an answer that's statistical rather than anecdotal. When a hand looks worth playing out, one press of the Playtest button carries it — hand, library, and commander — onto the full board.
A Playtest Board That Works Like a Real Table
The board itself is a free-form playmat, not a grid of fixed zones. Drag cards anywhere, group lands however you like, tuck your attackers forward — the layout is yours, the same way it is on a real table. Click a card to tap it; right-click for everything else: turn it face down, transform a double-faced card to its actual back face, mark it as not untapping, set power and toughness, add or set counters, toggle ability statuses like flying, deathtouch, hexproof, and indestructible (shown with the official MTG ability symbols), create token copies, or move it to any zone. The library, graveyard, exile, and command zone all accept drag and drop in both directions, and a searchable library browser slides out when you need to find a specific card. Mana pool, life total, poison, energy, and commander damage are all tracked on screen — and the whole board runs on keyboard shortcuts once your hands learn them: T to tap, F to flip, G for graveyard, H for hand, D to draw, S to shuffle, N for next turn.
Playing out wide board states is just as fast: drag a selection box around any group of cards to tap an entire attack step at once, flip a batch of morphs, or sweep everything to the graveyard after a board wipe. Every action a single card supports works on a selection too.
Why Goldfishing Makes Your Deck Better
Goldfishing gets dismissed as playing pretend, but it answers real questions with real numbers. What turn does your commander reliably come down? How often do you hold a hand of nothing but four-drops? Does your token engine actually produce tokens before turn six, or does it just look like it should? Ten goldfish games will tell you which cards you never want to draw — the ones that are always the discard, always the awkward cast — and those are exactly the cuts that make room for the deck you meant to build. It's also the honest way to check a deck's speed before assigning it a Commander bracket: a deck that goldfishes a win on turn six plays very differently from one that needs eleven, whatever their lists suggest on paper.
Connected to Every Deck on EDHcheck
The Deck Tester isn't a standalone toy — it's wired into the rest of the site. Run a deck through the deck analyzer and a Playtest button sits right next to your bracket and power score. Browse community decks in Explore and goldfish someone else's brew before you copy it. Build from scratch in the Deck Builder and test each revision without re-importing anything. And when goldfishing exposes a mana problem, the Mana Base Analysis tool will tell you exactly which lands to fix and the Land Database will show you every option at your budget — which you can check against real prices in the Price Checker.
How to Get the Most Out of a Goldfish Session
Treat it like practice, not a demo. Play at least five full games and keep loose notes: the turn you first missed a land drop, the turn your commander landed, the turn your board actually threatened something. Mulligan honestly — if you'd ship the hand in a real game, deal another one here. Use the token drawer to represent your engine output faithfully instead of hand-waving it, and use counters and statuses so the board state stays true after a few turns of triggers. If three games in a row stall on the same card, that card is the problem, not your luck. Goldfishing won't tell you how a deck handles a counterspell, but it will tell you — faster than anything else — whether the deck does what you built it to do.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does 'goldfishing' mean in Magic: The Gathering?+
Goldfishing is playtesting a deck against an imaginary opponent who does nothing — like playing against a goldfish. You draw hands, make land drops, and cast your spells turn by turn to see how fast and how consistently the deck executes its game plan with no interaction in the way. It's the quickest way to find mana problems, clunky curves, and dead cards before a real game.
Is the EDHcheck Deck Tester free?+
Yes — completely free, no account required. Import a deck and start drawing hands immediately. Nothing is paywalled and there's no limit on how many hands you deal or turns you play.
How do I import my deck?+
Paste a Moxfield, Archidekt, or TappedOut deck URL, or paste a raw decklist directly. You can also press the Playtest button on any EDHcheck deck analysis, public deck page, or Deck Builder deck to carry it over in one click — commander included.
Does my commander start in the command zone?+
Yes. The Deck Tester detects your commander (and partner or background, if you run one) and places it in the command zone, never shuffled into the library. Click or drag it onto the battlefield to cast it, and send it back to the command zone from the right-click menu when it would die.
What keyboard shortcuts does the playtest board support?+
T taps or untaps the hovered card, F flips or transforms it, G sends it to the graveyard, H returns it to hand. D draws a card, S shuffles the library, V opens the library browser, and N passes to the next turn (untap all, draw one). All card shortcuts also work on a multi-card selection.
Can I act on several cards at once?+
Yes — drag a selection box around any cards on the battlefield to highlight them. You can then drag the group together, click to tap them all, or right-click for group actions: flip, counters, power/toughness, ability statuses, token copies, and moves to hand, library, graveyard, or exile.
Do double-faced cards and tokens work?+
Double-faced cards transform to their real back face when flipped, not a generic card back. The token drawer lists every token your deck can actually create (pulled from Scryfall data) plus a search across all Magic tokens, and any battlefield card can produce a token copy of itself from the right-click menu.
What is a good average number of lands in an opening hand?+
For a typical Commander deck running 36–38 lands, expect an average around 2.5–2.7 lands per 7-card hand. If your running average sits below 2.3 after ten or more hands, you're likely to miss early land drops in real games — consider adding lands or cheap ramp. The opening-hand screen tracks this average automatically as you deal.
How many opening hands should I test?+
Ten hands gives you a first impression; twenty-five or more gives you a meaningful picture of your mana consistency. Since dealing a new hand is one click, running a large sample takes under a minute — watch the average-lands stat stabilize and note how many hands you'd actually keep.
Does the Deck Tester save my game?+
Playtest sessions are intentionally throwaway — closing the page ends the game. Your decks themselves live in the Deck Builder, where saving, sharing, and analysis history are handled.
Can I playtest against another player?+
Not yet — the Deck Tester is a solo goldfishing tool, which is what it's built to be best at. For evaluating how a deck performs against real opposition, pair goldfish data with the bracket and power analysis from the deck analyzer.
How is this different from the EDHcheck deck analyzer?+
The analyzer reads your list and scores it — bracket, power level, combos, tutors, mana base math. The Deck Tester puts the same list in your hands so you can feel it: how often you curve out, when your commander hits, whether that cute package ever comes together. They're two views of the same deck, and every analysis page links straight into a playtest.
Related: Pack simulator·Random commander·Price checker·Pod checker·Precon decks·How we score