I’ve been playing magic semi-competitively for a few years now and this past year, I’ve mostly played on MTG: Arena. I am highly impressed by the system and its dedication to being a Free-to-Play platform. At the same time, I feel that the platform has immense potential for community-driven tournament organization. I myself have competed in two such tournaments, finishing in the top 8 of Alias V’s Super Spiffy Tournament II (I lost to tourney champion, David Buskirk in the quarters). One issue that I have with these tournaments is that they are typically very large, involving at least a hundred participants, but since they are community-based, the prize support is limited to top 8, sometimes even just top 4. In some tournaments, only the player in first place will get something notable. Such prize support is fine if you only have a few people competing, but if you have so many, it can be disheartening for those who make 9th-16th, and yes, even 2nd place when only 1st place actually receives a something that can be considered a true prize. This is the first part of my inspiration for coming up with this idea for a community invitational.
The second part of said inspiration comes from my involvement with the MTGA forums, in which I have been contributing since July of 2019. The forum is quite active and I enjoy posting there almost as much as I enjoy playing the game. That said, I believe it will be a nice, simple experiment to try a small invitational consisting only of forum members. By small, I mean exactly 8 players and by people’s choice invitational, I mean that participants would be voted in by forum members. Across the different threads in the forum, you can see so many clashing ideas and perspectives, so many people who like or dislike each other at varying degrees. Oh, we fight about magic all the time, alright. So I thought it would be fun if we fought with magic rather than about it for a change.
Tournament Mechanics and Prize
The mechanics are simple. It’s an 8-player, single elimination tournament. Initial pairings and brackets will be randomly determined. I thought it best for this tournament to be as short as possible in order to make the time investment from the invited players very small.
The format will be standard best of three (MTGA tournament mode). I am donating a whopping… $30 to the prize pool. The entire $30 goes to the tournament champion.
Invitation Mechanics
Any member of the MTGA forums who was registered on or before December 28, 2019 can nominate up to three members who have likewise registered on or before December 28, 2019 to join the tournament. A member can nominate himself/herself. Nominations are open from the time this is posted until 11pm Eastern Standard Time of January 3, 2020 (Friday). Nominations must be posted on the MTGA forum thread here.
At the end of the nomination period, the votes of each nominee will be announced. All nominees (not just the top 8), are requested to post whether or not they accept the nomination. They have until 11pm EST of January 4, 2020 (Saturday) to do this. By accepting the nomination, the nominee agrees to do the following:
1.)
Submit a decklist to me through Discord Direct
Message by 12 noon of January 5, 2020 (Sunday).
2.)
Join the discord channel I will set up for the
tournament so that we can all communicate
3.)
Play their matches
4.)
Stream their matches (it’s easy to do this. It
takes no more than 30 minutes to set it all up. You may set a 300-second delay to the stream so that either player will not be able to "snipe" the other)
5.)
Have a Paypal account to receive the prize money
(should they win)
The top 8 nominees who accept their nomination by 11pm EST of January 4, 2020 (Saturday) will become the official invitees.
The pairing brackets will be posted by 1:00PM EST of January 5, 2020 (Sunday).
At this point, all that is left would be for the players to play and stream their games. There is no set time on when they need to play. Since this is single elimination, each pair can decide when they want to do their match. Once they are done, they simply post the link to the Twitch video of the match on the forum thread. Winners advance to the next bracket and likewise coordinate when they are free. Once all the matches have been played, the tournament concludes and we have our champion.
May the shuffler be with you!
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