Thursday, June 10, 2010

Nephelokokkygia

In the last weeks I was reading a bit about the two largest Magic: the Gathering tournaments in the history of that game.

  • 2,227 players were playing on February 27th - 28th, 2010 in Madrid, Spain, and
  • 1,931 players were playing on May 22nd - 23rd, 2010 in Washington, D.C.
And I was wondering how this number of player would affect the way VtES tournament would be run if (and that's the big if) VtES tournaments would be that large. Aside from the fact, that at VtES tournaments usually the organizers wait for any late attendants, that decklists are not mandatory, etc.

Of course, the whole tournament structure must be changed, you just cannot play 3 rounds + final, because for entering the final you would need something like 3 GW and 14 to 15 VPs, and even then the finalist's seating at the final table would be determined almost all the time by a coin flip. So making tiered, multi-day tournament would be mandatory. But with 2,000 players, you cannot cut down the field of players with just one cut-off, because going down from 2,000 players to let's say 100 (=5%) would also easily require some 3 GW. So my proposal (totally fictional of course) would be to make such a large tournament a 3-day event. First day would be a tournament with 3 to 4 rounds (no final) in order to cut down the number of players to 400 (20%). Then on the second day play another 3 to 4 rounds to reduce the number to 80 (20%). The last day of such a tournament would be the final tournament with 3 rounds + finals, almost as normal ..

On second thought, a Swiss-system tournament style (as bad as it may be for multiplayer game like VtES) over two days, followed by regular tournament with, let's say 40-60 players would also be possible, I guess.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

you say fictional i say visionary :P

sure would be a sight to behold

Rhavas said...

I don't know that there are 2000 VTES tourney players in existence...

Joscha said...

Nice title for this article :o). Make you using your mind. IMHO that's rare in these times.

Honestly I hope we never will see such a huge attendance at our Championships. But if we did cutting down numbers by pretournaments would be the only way to go for sure. Alas I doubt that this would be fun to experience.

Anonymous said...

I can just imagine thousands upon thousands of counters on the table. Players from various countries making table deals like international peace negotiations.

Oh my God if this actually happens it's gonna be epic!

xcver said...

Just think of how many Ashur Tablets, Deep Songs etc. etc. would need to be on the market for that?!?