Play and Play Test Better.

Hopefully your EDH pod is like mine, we all play for the love of the game and don’t care where the cards come from. A few years ago, I got back into MTG through arena, the idea of owning physical cards seemed a bit underwhelming when I could just convert any rarity of wildcard into whatever I wanted regardless of the paper price. A while after that a friend invited me to try out EDH with them. 

I played for a few weeks with whatever spare decks they had lying around, but I’m a brewer at heart, and even a win with someone else’s deck feels hollow to me. I had liquidated my collection from years ago, and I later found I had sold a ton of EDH staples with it. I desperately wanted to build a new EDH deck, but the near thousand dollar price tag to make a solid EDH deck was a huge turn off for the format. 

I asked my pod if they were cool letting me use MTG proxy, and lo and behold, a few of them already were running some MTG Proxies. I found mtgproxy.com through a reddit post I believe, and I got to work. My first EDH deck was the best kind of jank, total random 5 color curses.

It played alright, sometimes becoming a brutal stax deck, but mostly making whoever received the curses angry and ruining my chance at table politics. I knew I could do better and brew more fun decks.

Flash forward to now, and I have made decks that are entirely MTG proxy. I usually order over 100 cards at once for each deck to try out different combos. Finding what works, what’s lacking, and most importantly what’s fun. Playing a deck in your head is one thing, but seeing how it actually works with three other players is a different beast entirely. With MTG proxy, I’m able to play test as many decks as I want, easily adding or removing cards from the quite sizable MTG proxy collection I have built up now. 

Try Out New Mtg Proxy Cards

When making a new EDH deck, I think about what would be the most fun interaction at the table now, instead of the paper price of the card. MTG proxy are the best way to try out cards period. You have complete control of every card in your deck, all the way down to even adding custom or unique art.

With MTG proxy, you can try out so many different styles of play, and different power levels for your EDH deck. If you run a combo that is too strong, or if you need just a little boost to get to the level of everyone at the table, even a handful of MTG proxywill set you right.

I don’t even know if I would have ever really got into EDH without MTG proxy. Part of the big appeal of EDH is finding out creative and fun ways to play the game. EDH is all about having those huge plays where everyone at the table stares in disbelief. Plays like that require interesting and sometimes very rare cards to pull off. 

I pick up quite a few of the official precons now, but I would never have been able to brew my own decks with my own spin on jank without MTG proxy. I’ve even got to the point to make some loaner decks to get new people into the game with MTG proxyIt’s liberating getting back into the game I love without having to worry about the price of cards on the secondary market. I do miss the rush of cracking a fresh pack though…

Playtesting with MTG proxy goes one step further when your playgroup decides that custom commanders are fine. A few of us now have built totally new and custom commanders based on our own ideas or someone else’s. The only way to truly find out how a custom card will do is to try it out at the table. 

With a MTG proxy, you can easily make a version and give it a go. If it’s way too strong or a little underwhelming, you can always get a version 2.0 to test out the next time you play. The limitless potential of ‘proxying’ out your deck is totally freeing; you can enjoy the game however you and your playgroup want to.

Basically, if your EDH group is feeling stale, or your deck is, try tossing in a few of those cards you have always had your eye on. Brew freely, make the jank dream come alive. Test and test again until your heart’s content. Use some great looking cards instead of a sharpie on a basic land. Above all though, play for the love of the game again with your mind and not your wallet.