{"id":110,"date":"2009-11-18T18:16:02","date_gmt":"2009-11-19T02:16:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/magic.kevinleung.com\/?p=110"},"modified":"2010-04-21T20:19:09","modified_gmt":"2010-04-22T03:19:09","slug":"tournament-follow-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/magic.kevinleung.com\/?p=110","title":{"rendered":"Tournament Follow-up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We ran the tournament last night that pretty much caps off the class. It was 4 rounds of swiss to form a top 8 that will play in about 2 weeks. All in all, it went pretty well.<\/p>\n<p>Having never run a tournament before, I was somewhat worried that things would go to crap. Problems I foresaw included:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>downtime between rounds. No one likes to stand around waiting for their next match<\/li>\n<li>issues with time. Since I wanted to get 4 rounds roughly in the 2 hour timeslot for the class, I told them that there would be 30 minute rounds. I&#8217;m sure that it rushed some of the students, but whatever. I foolishly got lenient to get some games to end, but it was pointed out to me that that&#8217;s not exactly fair<\/li>\n<li>bad pairings. I was doing it mostly manually with a spreadsheet and a program to shuffle the order of names, so I had to group people by points by hand and hope that there weren&#8217;t any repeat matchups. It only happened once in the last round, and a single switcheroo (not sure if that was fair) fixed it<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Overall, I think it went smoothly. 4 rounds in about 2 hours 45 minutes, so no major hiccups. Tom and I were playing a lot of Magic during rounds (for perspective, we, knowing our decks, got in 5 games in about 20 minutes, which was how long it took some people to play 1 game), and we only got maybe 5 judge calls the entire tournament.<\/p>\n<p>As far as the winners go, we had 1 person go 4-0, 3 go 3-1, 2 go 2-0-2, and 4 go 2-1-1. On tiebreakers, we got that sorted out for the top 8, with decklists posted <a href=\"http:\/\/magic.kevinleung.com\/files\/top8\/\">here<\/a>. A majority of the rest of the rest of the decklists are <a href=\"http:\/\/magic.kevinleung.com\/files\/decklists\/\">here<\/a>. Some observations about how decks did:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Mono-black decks were strong. We had 3 in the top 8, and 3 just outside, either at 2-1-1 or 2-2. I believe Reuben actually got into the top 8 over a mono-black control deck using aladdin&#8217;s ring when his opponent brought in cop:black and plains as his anti-black hate<\/li>\n<li>Mono-blue decks did not do well. Generally, decks running blue didn&#8217;t do well, which we could&#8217;ve expected given the lack of good strong control pieces. At the beginning of the quarter, the U fliers deck looked pretty good, but once the power level and aggro went up with Zendikar, horned turtle wasn&#8217;t able to hold back the tide so well<\/li>\n<li>Red was not popular and therefore wasn&#8217;t well-represented. Leland has R as part of Boros Bushwhacker, but across the board, the only red I really saw was splashed for some burn in green decks.<\/li>\n<li>Soldiers went down in popularity, but the two decks that were doing pure soldiers both ended up in the top 8. There are a lot of common elements (full armor\/swordsmiths, vanguards, brave the elements), but the differences are more interesting. Yi has an equipment sub-theme going on in there, but Steve has slighly more staying power with the serra angel and team pump<\/li>\n<li>Kotaro was the one who went 4-0 with his domain deck. Suprisingly consistent for 5 colors and not the best fixing around. It isn&#8217;t a &#8220;all the best stuff in the format&#8221; as much as it&#8217;s just playing off of domain. But who&#8217;s to complain for a 3\/3 for 3 that can become a 5\/5 in 2 turns?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I won&#8217;t go as far as to predict who&#8217;s going to win at this point to avoid biasing what happens here or showing favoritism, but I know that these are going to be good matchups. They have to keep the exact same decklists, sideboard and all, going into the top 8, so at this point, it&#8217;ll mostly be playtesting. Tom and I agreed that we would make similar decks to all of these so that people can practice. We are going into Thanksgiving break and then exams, so hopefully people don&#8217;t have TOO much time to be playtesting, but it would be good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We ran the tournament last night that pretty much caps off the class. It was 4 rounds of swiss to form a top 8 that will play in about 2 weeks. All in all, it went pretty well. Having never run a tournament before, I was somewhat worried that things would go to crap. Problems [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/magic.kevinleung.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/magic.kevinleung.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/magic.kevinleung.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/magic.kevinleung.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/magic.kevinleung.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/magic.kevinleung.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155,"href":"http:\/\/magic.kevinleung.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions\/155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/magic.kevinleung.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/magic.kevinleung.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/magic.kevinleung.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}