Various players swear by different tests, ranging from just dealing out several hands and checking to see whether you'd be able to cast any spells the first turn, to playing a duel against yourself using one of your other decks. Well, your pet can't really play Magic, but with a bit of imagination, it can inspire some good ways to test out a new deck. If only you could teach your pet to play. But you're home alone, and it's too late to call a friend. Now you want to test it out, and do some tuning before you take it up against the tournament-level decks tomorrow. You've picked out some spells that should work well together, and added a reasonable number of lands. It's Magic day at your game club tomorrow, and you have a new deck idea you want to try out. Have fun playing your pet, and be sure to come back next Monday for the start of Scars of Mirrodin previews! Plague Rats? Relentless Rats! Phantom Monster? Assault Griffin! And still others use old cards but are easily updated with current cards. Others use cards that are still around today, like Serra Angel, Lightning Bolt, and Craw Wurm.

This article was written a long time ago, so some of the examples below involve things like Psychic Venom and Scryb Sprites, and may not still be relevant. Real opponents seldom sit obligingly still while you pound on them (and Magic wouldn't be very interesting for either of you if they did!), and the rest of the 'pet tests' do a nice job of simulating various deck types and testing your deck against them. The other solitaire variants didn't catch on the way 'goldfishing' did, but in many ways they're more interesting. This article featured multiple solitaire Magic formats, including the do-nothing 'goldfish'-still a common term for testing against a defenseless opponent almost fifteen years later. In one of my Serious Fun articles, I mentioned an old article in The Duelist called 'Playing Your Pet' (though I incorrectly attributed it to Duelist #8, when in fact it was in Duelist #7).

Mtg goldfish standard deck