A few of us were talking about trying to have an experimental team tournament at worlds, probably on Friday. The idea is to open up the floor to more alternative deck ideas or force creativity in deck building while still keeping things competitive. That being said, the rules would be as follows:
*Three Persons to a team.
*Each round consists of three individual matches, between predetermined, corresponding players A, B, and C.
*Each player on a team must be playing a different faction. This means one corp will be the only non-represented faction on each team.
*Each team may play no more than six copies of any given card, including neutral cards.
*Open communication is permitted and encouraged.
*Prestige is still recorded as 2pts per win, 0 per loss, etc. meaning there are twelve points on offer per round.
So Niles (hhooo) and I were discussing how many cards should be allowed per team. The original number was 6 because back when we first conceived of this, there was no possible way to do it with less. Now that the card pool is larger, it was suggested that a max of 6 might not change all that much from the current single player format we have going on, whereas a max of 3 would definitely blow the field wide open to all sorts of crazy deck designs. While I would love to play around with that format, just now we decided 6 would probably be better this time around since this is such short notice and a lot of people might be short teammates. A max of 6 makes it a lot easier to add that 3rd person who who wasn’t in on the team deck building process.
Let us know what you think and, if you are coming to worlds, please let us know if you’d be interested in playing. We want to see if we can get a decent number of people involved. If you would like to play but don’t have enough people to form a team, this seems like a good place to find some like minded allies.
The idea behind semi-unified deck construction, is to open things up and take people outside comfort zones. How are you going to build a runner deck with no Sure Gambles and make it work? How about a corp without Jackson? These are things to think about.
Yeah, that could be fine too, just to try out the team format. I really want to try the three card limit at some point since that would really open the door to new stuff. Unfortunately I think that would require a lot more advanced notice since that requires some serious deck building maneuvers and I sort of doubt people will be bringing their entire collections to worlds.
Six is a compromise to give the creative decks something of a boost while not totally screwing over pick up groups.
We did a similar format at Dragoncon this year, two person tag team style. One player plays runner and the other plays corp for a round and swaps the next which made for a quickly run event compared to a standard tournament with a lot of people playing. I’m down for this provided the time is available or I don’t get into the winter tournament on Friday.
I’ve been interested in running one of these for awhile here in Portland, but figured you would need quite a few people to make it work well. Team Constructed is a really fun format in MTG, should be fairly awesome in NR too. Card Pool is an issue but It would be interesting to see it play out.
