This is a cross post of a tournament report my tournament co-organizer left on reddit, but reformatted, Stimhack style.
Today we ran an experimental tournament format in Seattle: Custom IDs only. Here’s how it was structured:
1] Two weeks before the tournament, people submitted a single ID of any faction.
2] A one-week period for editing followed. IDs were discussed on the local area’s Netrunner Facebook group, one at a time, and creators made changes to adjust for balance, clarity, and fun.
3] In the week leading up to the tournament the IDs set in stone so people could deckbuild.
4] The tournament was 4 rounds of Swiss, then a secret ballot vote for “best designed” Corp and Runner, with the winning designers getting additional prizes - followed up by the top four double elimination rounds.
Since people could only submit a single design, everyone ended up playing at least one ID created by someone else.
The organizers could veto or edit IDs if it seemed like designers were acting in bad faith, but no vetoes occurred. There was a single directive to stay near the 45/15 range and to avoid Professor-like abilities, so that deck-building wasn’t a huge burden. Between everyone wanting to have a fun tournament, and not wanting to lose their shot at winning “best designed ID” by creating something egregiously overpowered, participants were incentivized to carefully power balance their IDs.
A local volunteer assembled card art for the various IDs and I printed out proxies for people to use at the tournament. You can peruse all the created IDs here: http://imgur.com/a/gNswg
The winners of the “Best Designed ID” vote were Shaper / Jonathan “The Quail” Douglas: Mnemonic Archivist and Weyland / Charybdis Acquisitions: Business Unbound.
The top 4 finishers played:
1] Shaper / Jonathan “The Quail” Douglas: Mnemonic Archivist and NBN / Freebee Collections - Privatized Net Police.
2] Also Jonathan “The Quail” Douglas: Mnemonic Archivist and Freebee Collections - Privatized Net Police.
3] Criminal / Hiro Protagonist: Net Samurai and HB / Neural Networks: Putting Your Mind to Work
4] Anarch / Loni Stryker: Meatspace Infiltrator and Jinteki / Awashima Think Tank: The Future of Security
No ID that was played went undefeated. All of the IDs that were played won at least 2 games. Everybody, to my knowledge, had a blast.
You should try it sometime ; ]