I have an idea for a future tournament but I cannot tell how popular it would be.
I want to include some homebrewed specs in an experimental tournament, in a way that is fun and doesnt lead to someone finding a totally unbalanced interaction and winning every game in 4 turns.
I’d suggest random decks for each round (guaranteed number of homebrew specs > 0 in total matchup or per player) to do this but open to suggestions.
Equally open to suggestions on how to select/how many specs to include, I can find about 3 factions and 6 or more miscellaneous specs around the forums at the moment.
I’m not yet suggesting this for the next tournament, I think there’s more testing to be done before even I would want to play with all the homebrew stuff made, but I wanted to poll interest before I invested time into doing said testing.
Questions I think this thread should discuss/provide an answer to:
How many people would take part in a tournament similar to that described above?
What specific shape would you like to see that tournament take?
How much testing/how balanced would you want a particular spec to be before you’d consider playing with it?
Are there any volunteers to take part with selecting/testing specs?
Obviously interested - I think there is some design space left in codex cards, which we tryied to explore a bit with grey and which it would be fun to see in other homebrew specs and in the hands of more players!
I might suggest, in lieu of / before trying a tournament, organizing an effort similar to MMM. Get a spreadsheet together with some matchups (maybe put MonoRed, MonoBlack, Miracle Grow in there as control opponents?) and try farming out some matchups to players for playtesting an X game series.
Yeah that’d be good. I’d be interested to know why people were less interested in the tournament; the reasons I can guess at is that they didn’t like the risk of really unbalanced matchups and/or didn’t want to invest the time in learning the new cards but please fill me in.
However your idea would offer some validation for how balanced the cards are and let people take part while only having learn a maximum of one faction of cards.
I think this could give good info on which specs and which cards in them are the least balanced at the moment so we’d know where to focus any changes and of course would get some people playing with the fanmade stuff which is ofc the point of this anyway!
I’ll see to setting something up once the current tourney is done.
Personally, I would want the inclusion of homebrew specs to be the entire gimmick for the tournament. I wouldn’t also want random decks or whatever other gimmick, even if the purpose is to avoid players overwhelmingly choosing the homebrew specs (I would probably choose only non-homebrew specs if other players were primarily choosing to play the homebrew, and would be disappointed if I didn’t have the opportunity to engineer an anti-homebrew deck because of random assignment). Also, I would want any homebrew specs involved to be generally recognized as balanced (at least, about as well as the standard specs are) by the community prior to the organization of the tournament.