Tournament Format Speculation
Posted by Rob Herman at September 24th, 2006
I don’t play Magic any more, but I have a new style of match I would like to see. I thought of the idea when thinking of Magic, but I think it would work for any quick-playing game, collectible or otherwise, where each player brings their own deck or equivalent to the game. Noncollectible examples might include Button Men or Brawl.
The way it works is this: You bring five decks/buttons/whatever to the match. Beforehand, you specify the order that the decks will play in, first through fifth. (This order is considered an integral part of your lineup and, if this were a tournament, you could not change it any more than you could change the composition of your decks.) In the first game, each player uses their first deck. For the next game, the loser puts the first deck aside and moves onto the second deck, while the winner stays on the same one. This proceeds until one player wins 5 games, eliminating all of the opponent’s decks.
(This does make the match best 5 of 9, which might be a lot; 4 of 7 or 3 of 5 would also work.)
I like this because it encourages players to have a good idea of what is going on in the environment. You need to carefully select your deck order, with a good idea of the strengths and weaknesses of every deck. Two adjacent decks shouldn’t have the same weakness! Preferably, Deck 2 should be strong against the decks Deck 1 is weak against, and so on. Still, of course, you’d like every deck to be strong enough in its own right to beat any old other deck.
Depending on the environment, it might or might not benefit from a rule that indicates that you can’t duplicate decks. In Button Men, this is easy (you can’t use the same button twice); in Magic you would need a rule like “no two of your decks may have in common more than 8 non-land cards.” I’m not worried about a player taking 5 identical decks; I’m worried about 2 identical decks, played ABABA. Depending on the depth of the environment, two strong decks played in this way could be a solid strategy. I would much rather have an environment deep enough that ABABA doesn’t work very well than just legislate against it in the tournament rules.
Hmmm … a Magic tournament of such a configuration really would only be viable for sane individuals in a limited tournament format. I say this because the cost of a top tier Type II deck is at the top range of what most sane players would want to play, and if every one who went to these kind of events did not have truck loads money to spend on the game this would not be a problem but there will always be some one who takes a large amount of money and builds the top five net decks in the enviroment and will probably win barring R&D mistakes that lead to a single deck that beat everything like skullclamp/ravanger/affinity. A way to remedy this is to play on a team of three to five. With each player playing a different deck. This requires a little bit of planing with your friends before to get the kind of optimal minimization of risk that Rob refered to earlier in the article (I think that would be part of the fun) However the downside to this modification would be that while two players are playing at least four (2 on each team) are standing on the side lines not doing anything and on a team the same two people would be sitting out at the start of every match and the last person in the order might not play at all.
Rob, actually MTG has something kinda similar they introduced last year called Team Standard. It’s a constructed format, with teams of three facing off against each other. The teams are prevented from playing multiple copies of the same deck because the deck construction rules are applied to all three decks combined. That is, no more than 4 copies of any non-basic card between all the decks. Communication between team members is allowed, so it’s an interesting play and deck constructing experience.
Having it cost more money? Feature, not bug!
The tournament form Fuleng describes sounds neat. I also hear John’s idea for a team format (and complaint that it would go too slowly) and thought about playing all the matches ahead of time. Unfortunately, that ends up being a little too much like an ordinary team round-robin…