For me it was a easy choice, after Meeting everyone at Gen-con. And helping out there, It is a great chance to help out. I went out and bought a nice Brother Color Laser Printer from Best Buy for $150.00, and Some Card Stock (Boy that was hard to find everyone is out), and had my first Playtesting Session with my gameing Group. It went well, and I an eager to do more. I get to input and See thing as they progress, and I get to help out a Bunch of nice people bring great products to the world. It's a win-win in my eyes.
I printed mine out on paper and stuffed them into Magic decks that were sleeved. The different sleeves denoted which deck they were for and when playtest was done, the Magic decks were still together.
That's definitely a great overview of the positives and negatives of playtesting. I work in the gaming industry which has led to many opportunities to playtest games and sit down with Beta versions of unreleased stuff. At first, you couldn't imagine how excited I was to see some of my favorite games in their earliest stages and be able to get my hands on expansions and new material before anyone else. But novelty wore thin pretty quickly for me and it's mostly because, as mentioned, the magic tends to disappear.
There's a big difference between playing a board/card game chock full of wonderful artwork and flavor text that crafts an immersive experience, and playing with cards printed on plain white paper, in a broken state. And then be required to drill into the game to find the nitty gritty bugs and broken combinations that players could experience with the final product. And in the end, you don't get that same rush when getting your brand new copy and opening it up when it's finally released.
Playtesting is for the dedicated and for those who love a game so much that they desire to be a part of the development process. I think if you go into Playtesting thinking it's just going to be sitting around playing games all day, you'll be disappointed. You need to be willing to put your time on the line and really dive into an incomplete experience, your satisfaction coming from the fact that you're helping the game become whole. Playtesting is an awesome time and insanely important to the development of games; just be aware that some parts of it aren't as glamorous from the inside.