Innistrad: How to Already Start Brewing & Playtesting Prior to Release

The new expansion set Innistrad may not be officially released yet, but that shouldn’t stop you. Various third-party deckbuilding sites and tools have already updated their card sets with Innistrad. Let us tell you two of the most viable sites to go to for deckbuilding and playtesting new Standard.

Why would you wait until Innistrad officially hits the stores or, much much later, Modo, when you could already be brewing, deckbuilding, yes! even drafting Innistrad, right now?

WizardsFamiliar.com is our preferred site for deckbuilding and playtesting (the latter in one-man solitaire mode). It’s great strength lies in its visual presentation and ease of use. Cards are displayed in high-resolution, and you can resize the whole deckbuilding and playtesting space however you like. The card images will scale most smoothly. Regarding usability, adding (left-mouse click) and removing cards (ALT + left-mouse click) is quickly done and requires no effort. A great plus are surely Familiar’s share features. You can share your deck with your friends by providing them with a simple web link to your Familiar deck or you can copy and paste whole deck lists into Wizard’s Familiar. The site will recognize each card including sideboard cards and build the deck automatically.

Wizard's Familiar is now proud holder of Leonard's new Boros deck list. You can access his deck under http://tinyurl.com/3nzydfz

Cockatrice is an open-source deckbuilding software. In many ways it’s the spiritual successor to Magic Workstation or GCCG. Not only does it already work better in its early stage than those tools, but it’s also much easier to use and find players to battle against. Granted, the deck editor in Cockatrice isn’t the most satisfying experience since it’s basically just a list of your cards, which makes it really difficult to figure out the mana base of your creation, but that’s what Wizard’s Familiar is there for. And, in fact, we would recommend you to make use of both tools in parallel. Once you have carried over your deck from Wizard’s Familiar (through copying and pasting from the clipboard), you can start getting real playing against real people online on Cockatrice. Alternately, you may also go playtest offline in Cockatrice’s local-game mode where you can match up your new creation with a (current) top-tier deck, for instance, if that makes sense.

A local match on Cockatrice: How is the match up for new Boros against Yuuya Watanabe's now-obsolete Caw-Blade list? Leonard will surely know soon...

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