[Tournament] eXperimental Codex Asynchronous Fall ~~Swiss~~ Round Robin (XCAFS19)

Hey all!

Our poll tied for format between

Car, not Driver (you submit a deck, but don’t play it; you’re instead assigned one from the pool of other submitted decks. You get a point each round if you win your matchup, and another point if the deck you submitted wins)

and Random Map Card / Round.

I’m going to make an executive decision that Car, not Driver sounds more fun, and thus we’ll be doing that! Tourney will start around the last week of the month (exact date tbd)

The eXperimental Codex Asynchronous Fall Swiss Round Robin tournament for 2019 is in progress!

This will be a Round Robin tournament, one match per week, with a grace period if your match doesn’t finish on time. We’re doing Car, not Driver, a weird format where you submit a deck for other players to play, and are scored by their wins as a player as well as their deck’s wins.

First matches paired Wednesday, September 25th at 2pm CDT (UTC-5) in this thread! Please set the thread to “Watching” below to ensure you are notified of new pairings

Nit picky details of how pairings will work

General Rules / TLDR of How Things Work:

  • The player who goes first in each round will be pre-determined
  • If one player has gone first fewer times in the tournament (not counting BYEs), that player goes first, otherwise, the first player is decided randomly.
  • The first player is responsible for creating the game thread
  • Tag @FrozenStorm when a winner has been determined.
  • We’ll do round robin groups to separate the decks and players for ease of matchmaking. 7 Rounds then a cut to the top 4
  • Matches are 1 game.
  • The default will be to play all matches as play-by-post within the forum, but a match may be played in an alternate format (in person, on an alternate platform, via snail-mail, whatever) by mutual agreement, until the field is reduced to four or fewer players.
  • I am accepting volunteers to help Judge the event. You could be an authorized judge! @zhavier and @legion have been authorized
  • If any rulings are necessary, any single Judge who is not participating in that match may make a ruling.
  • Rulings are subject to appeal only if the judge making the ruling is wrong about the facts of the game (eg, forgetting that a Building Inspector is in play, or the Shrine of Forbidden Knowledge only makes Demons unstoppable by units) or the rules/FAQ as noted at sirlin.net/rules and/or the Rulings thread.
  • Please note the forum suggested post generation spreadsheet, or one of the other format suggestions (like this or this) such that it includes include hand, tech and worker decisions, either in a details + spoiler combo
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I’m very secret and hard for my opponent to see by accident

  • or in a linked source that I can get to. This helps with judgements, adjudication, as well as spectators. For games involving me, you can send a private link to a different judge if you so choose, but as with all PbF games, honor system is in place: don’t peek at your opponent’s spoilers, just as you wouldn’t grab cards out of your opponent’s hand / deck / discard / worker pile and look at them!

New pairings will be posted roughly every Wednesday. Matches that are not progressing may be given an adjudicated result.

I will endeavor to post new pairings every Wednesday, but the “tournament week” is considered to be from one round of pairings posted to the next (so possibly more or less than an actual calendar week).

List of players participating:

  1. James
  2. dwarddd
  3. bolyarich
  4. charnel_mouse
  5. EricF
  6. Nopethebard
  7. bomber678
  8. UrbanVelvet
  9. OffKilter
  10. CarpeGuitarrem
  11. Persephone
  12. Taz
  13. Zhavier
  14. frozenstorm
  15. NekoAtl
  16. Leaky
  17. codexnewb

You can find the current standings in the challonge player matchup and challonge deck matchup tracker

Sign up via a DM to me or replying to this thread with “I’m in”!

3 Likes

I’m in! 10 chars please Lars

1 Like

I’m in! gobbledegook

2 Likes

I’m in, though I don’t see why we couldn’t do Car not Driver and Random Maps at the same time (I didn’t even vote for Random Maps, I just like democracy).

The Maps would really need to be given the Smash Bros. treatment, though, in that all but a number you can count on one hand ought to be banned in competitive play.

1 Like

I’m in this tourney. Btw, Will there be a normal format tournament at some point?

Summer and winter are the locked in normals, spring and fall I make normal an option in the vote but also alternatives

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@Taz you’re not wrong on both counts, but as the tournament organizer I’ll already be doing some extra legwork to track the two sets of wins and I kinda feel like it’d be too crazy just for general gameplay… I’ve played all the maps and most of them are pretty degenerative gameplay

If there’s an overwhelming majority of players calling to do both AND a strong consensus of what maps should be allowed, I’m willing to be convinced otherwise

1 Like

Good to know. Thanks!

I’ll join!

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Do we go ahead and submit our Codexes?

In.

A Couple questions:

Are you going to also prevent each player from playing against their submitted deck?

Are the decks subject to the “three losses and out” rule / do they go away when their player gets three losses? (I think the second is a bad idea)

Speaking of which, perhaps this even could run without the must-drop part of must-drop-swiss: just run N rounds (or N+1 rounds) and maybe have a Finals or Top-4

2 Likes

This is going to be a wonky format and I’m open to feedback on details for the mechanics @EricF!

I hadn’t considered playing your own deck, but probably that would be a good idea, yea. Presents a conflict of interest.

Also for the inevitable possibility that the same deck be submitted by multiple people, I’ll be assigning each instance of it to different players (e.g. Zhav’s Miracle Grow vs. CodexNewb’s Miracle Grow will each be assignable but each one belongs to that individual, and the deck isn’t tallied collectively as just “Miracle Grow”.

This would mean you may be assigned your submitted deck (in structure), but the win for that deck will belong to someone else who submitted it (e.g. Zhav gets a round of “CodexNewb’s Miracle Grow” where the deck win or loss belongs to CodexNewb).

I think cutting for deck losses is bad and also like the idea to do a fixed 5 or 6 runs + top 4 (or just finals and 3rd/4th matches if participation is 9 or fewer players)

3 Likes

Concerning the map card thing, I would actually love to do the map card variant.
I haven’t actually played any of them yet, but there are 4 that don’t immediately strike me as degenerate:
-Big Game Hunters
-Hard Times Mill
-Mystical Forest
-Vortoss Ruins
People who have played them, are these a good list for a map card tournament?

You know I’m in. This sounds silly.

1 Like

@Nopethebard I’ll refer anyone thinking about map cards to visit this thread (and the game series linked within that myself and @Youngbuck played).

Most of the maps just ended up seeming incredibly P1 tilted, but I would submit the following as the “most serious tournament viable”:

  • Mystical Forest (barely affected play)
  • Vortoss Ruins (also didn’t affect play much)
  • Flagstone Mines (super crazy but not completely tilted towards either player, one of the few that was little better for P2 iirc b/c building tech 2 quickly was easier)
  • Daggerfall Prison Camp (pretty random but at least fair-ish at game outset)
  • and maaaaybe Hard Times Mill (this one is pretty tough on P1 though iirc)

Generally speaking, though, I think if you’re doing a map tournament, it should be map card announced per round, then matchups draft and play, and P1 has some kind of handicap if you’re playing any of the other maps.

4 Likes

Those sound like a lot of fun.

Maps are crazy, but if there are one or more you’re itching to try, feel free to hit me up.

Btw I’ve chosen my deck submission. Present/Fire/Growth. Also are you given a codex at the beginning of the tournament and keep using it or do you rerandom each round?

rerandom each round is my thought

2 Likes

That works