Hi everyone!
I wanted to thank everyone who participated in the last Stimhack Online Cache Refresh tournament (SOCR8). I’m excited for SOCR9, and I wanted to talk about plans for it:
Firstly, the card pool. Some of this is already decided, but some of this I want some feedback:
I’m excited that we will have Downfall, the first half of the first ever NISEI cycle, out soon. According to this schedule, we’ll know the full card pool of Downfall on March 13th. Downfall will be an important part of the card pool for SOCR9, and I think it should be a really interesting way to explore the new cards. Registration for the tournament will be pretty soon after that.
We will also be using the new System Core 19. I’ve talked about this some with people who played in SOCR8, and while I really love the thoughtful consideration around card qualities in System Core, it seems like the pretty popular opinion is we play with 3x Core. This is pretty close to decided, but if you are a hyperpartisan for 1x Core, please try and sway these monsters who are insisting on access to 3x Lamprey, because I certainly can’t.
(I do think 3x Core is going to be a lower barrier to entry, because planning around the card quantities can sometimes be awkward)
We will go along with Terminal Directive being rotated. Reign and Reverie will take its place as a special box that everyone gets access too.
Besides that, we’ll have Kitara and the four faction specific big boxes: Creation and Control, Honor and Profit, Order and Chaos, and Data and Destiny.
The two big questions are:
What we do about the Champ cards from Magnum Opus. On one hand, they offer some powerful options to most factions, and a lot of them are very fun to play. On the other hand, excluding them might allow different cards to shine and help distinguish the format from standard play.
What should we do with the MWL? One option is the standard MWL. Another is developing our own one. The latter is probably a little hard given that we won’t know Downfall cards until March 13th. I am highly inclined to follow standard MWL, but I would be interested to hear other options, or specific cards that might just need extra consideration.
Please let me know any thoughts you have, either here, through Slack, or whatever other way you might think it good to reach me.
Second topic, the schedule:
Registration for the tournament will start as soon as the full card pool is released, so March 13th. I’ll post links wherever I can think of!
Finalizing the card pool will be done March 24th, if not sooner.
The tournament will start April 7th. That’s a Sunday. The tournament will last 4-6 rounds, depending on participation, with each round lasting a week. I don’t think our experiment of starting rounds on a weekday actually helped getting games in, so we are switching back to Sunday.
Thirdly, prize support:
I’m pretty behind on my own commissions so unfortunately I am not going to offer an IOU for a commission for this tournament! I really enjoy doing those so I’m sorry that’s not in the mix. I think the logistics of mailing out cards to a bunch of people was more of a burden than I wanted, so I think for this tournament I am going to scale back on that too.
I’ll figure out more details on what we will do for prize support this tournament, but I just wanted to thank everyone who contributed to us having such a wonderful prize support pool last tournament, and I’m sorry we might not do as much this time.
Look forward to hearing your thoughts. We are also talking about this on slack in #future-socr and #cache_refresh_tourney.
