What you need to know to run a card gaming tournament!
In case you didn’t know me, I’m Charles Butler—also known as TaxiCAB in the Level 99 Games online community. For the past 2 weeks, I’ve been running the largest Exceed tournament of all time, Matchup Madness, clocking in at 95 competitors! With the group phase of our tournament having just ended, I thought I would tune in and help some of the players at home looking to organize your own tournaments!
When running a tournament, the first thing I always ask myself is “What is the ultimate goal of this tournament?” For Matchup Madness, that goal was to bring the community together and to give newer community members the resources they need to grow and thrive.
The groups (or as we call them ‘pools’) phase of the tournament was designed to help introduce players to both veterans in the community and each other, letting them form connections and get advice from some of the more skilled players.
After being introduced, the bracket stage is a great follow-up as people cheer on their favorites and learn from the greatest as they throw down. But not every tournament should have this goal: sometimes you’ll want something quick and easy to run with friends and have fun on the weekend, maybe you want something like a spectator sport—designed to keep excitement running high and have things shakeup at any moment—or you might even want a ‘themed’ tournament that brings people out of their comfort zone!
Once you have a goal in mind, you’ll want to make sure you pick the style of bracket that best fits what you want to do. Most people know the common ones, but I’ll share my insight into the pros and cons of what styles I’ve come across.
Is the ideal competitive format. Every player gets to face each of their competitors, so no one can be put at a disadvantage by facing against the favorite to win round 1. Unfortunately, round-robin falters because of the amount of time it requires, especially in tournaments that have a sizable number of participants. With a tournament like Matchup Madness, doing round-robin would take approximately 9 and a half months, which means at our rate of 1 round every 3 days, we wouldn’t finish until early 2021—yikes. Even with a smaller group like 8 people, it would take you 7 rounds to finish, so make sure you know you’ll have the time if you want to run this format.
The most well-known format out there. It’s easy to run, gets to the point, and gives everyone just one shot to give it their all—making every match important and exciting. However, it often comes under a lot of criticism as a competitive format, just one mistake or misplay means that your run is over, which can create a lot of stress. Additionally, being placed into a match with a stronger player often means you don’t get a chance to show what you can do, and means you can’t play any more matches until the tournament is over. If you need something quick, single-elimination is great! Otherwise, consider one of the other formats as it will often give your players a better experience.
Extremely similar to Single-elimination, but gives each player one more chance before they are knocked out. When participants lose they are sent into a separate ‘losers bracket’ where they fight for their chance to have a shot against the champion. This means that not only do players get a second chance—but that second chance will be against someone in a similar situation, making it great for newer contenders to meet each other and find a practice buddy. Double-elimination does take a few more rounds than single and is complex to bracket correctly. So if you need it done quickly or don’t have access to an online bracket manager like Challonge (https://challonge.com/) you may want to consider something else.
Probably the most popular format for weekly events. and great for tournaments where you want to let people find new friends around their skill level. In the Swiss format, each player gets to play in every round and is matched against a player with the same win-loss record as them, so players who lose the first match will get paired with each other. As far as time goes, it’s an extremely flexible format as you can set the number of rounds to whatever fits in your schedule. What swiss doesn’t excel at, however, is determining a true ‘winner’. Often, in swiss, multiple competitors will end the tournament with the same record, so there is no single champion. If having that champion is important to you, consider one of the elimination formats instead.
A bit of a weird format that thrives on the spectator experience. Used by many TV game shows like Family Feud, and more casually by fighting game players, gauntlet runs only a single match at a time—letting the winner stay in, and the loser be rotated out. Prizing for this style of tournament often scales with your win-streak, or is decided by the last man standing. For a truly competitive event, this format is horrible, as coming in early puts you at an overwhelming disadvantage. As a spectator sport, or weekly streamed feature, this format can excel at creating exciting narratives and sowing chaos as players quickly rotate in and out.
Once you’ve decided on your style of bracket, it’s time to decide what ruleset you want to run for your group. The sky is the limit with themes and challenges you can come up with, so make your mark!
Allowing just a specific season is great for release events and giving players random characters can force them out of their comfort zone. Putting aesthetic themes like “Halloween”, “Wearing White”, or even “Final Destination, No items, Hats only” can also be great for exploring new matchups while still giving people some control over what they want to play, just make sure that everyone knows the rules before the event.
If you want to run a more competitive event, running with the standard “Bring 3, Pick 1” organized play format is a solid bet. In my local scene, we also added a ban into the mix so that players could be forced off their mains, and be encouraged to develop multiple characters.
In a similar vein, Matchup Madness is running a format called ‘Semi-Conquest’ which is a spinoff of Hearthstone’s Conquest format that requires you to only win with 2 of your decks instead of all 3—which forces players into playing a variety of matchups.
Running a tournament—especially a larger one—can quickly become an overwhelming ordeal. Luckily, TOs (Tournament Organizers) have a slew of tools at their disposal to help things run smoothly and make their job a little bit easier.
(https://challonge.com/) - The most popular, and completely free, bracket managing website out there. It is absolutely essential to any would-be TOs. The software allows you to create and run most types of brackets, trivializing the process of setting up Swiss or Double-Elimination tournaments. Unfortunately, Challonge isn’t great for communicating with players, so running the tournament off of a forum, or discord is your best bet to put up announcements and updates as your event progresses.
(https://drive.google.com) - Speaking of communication, Google Drive is also a fantastic way to communicate with your players, especially for longer announcements or rulesets that you want people to be easily able to reference back to, like this one: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n7ydfrl5YNvAfYv-xe2uQCMZamSNghWB7NA4CeQ6Rus/edit.
Google Sheets in specific is a powerful tool that lets you compile and analyze data from larger events.
For Matchup Madness, I’ve used it to record character win rates, let people see their fellow competitor’s roster, and keep a feed of every match as it's reported. You can check it out here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1A5W60hMQ8YMZcArc8pWY2XarqqWPR_ry97XQH9OEy2U/edit?usp=sharing.
(https://discordapp.com/) - Is my personal favorite way to quickly message and interact with my friends and community members. Its rise in popularity in the gaming sphere means that many of you already use it—but there are a few tricks you can do to make it work for you as a TO.
Every user has something called a ‘Real ID’ that lets you quickly find and tag them regardless of if they share the same username as someone else, have it in a different language, or even if they keep changing their tag. Mine is 163739706863910912. To access it, you first need to turn Developer Mode on in your settings, under the ‘Appearance’ tab. Then you can right-click any user to ‘Copy ID’ and get their ID string. Group DMs are another powerful way to put players in contact with each other, although you will need to make sure you add them to your friend list before you can put the message channel together.
I’m looking forward to seeing how Matchup Madness ends, and to starting up a more casual weekly event on the discord as we prepare for the next big one. So stay tuned and make sure to join the Level 99 Games community discord at https://discord.gg/KQtrkGc if you haven’t already! If you have any ideas for formats you would like to see run or want any advice for setting up a tournament with your friends, feel free to contact me on discord at TaxiCAB#6036. I don’t bite, and always love to help out!
Charles Butler (aka "TaxiCAB") is a College Student and Tournament Organizer enjoying the rain up in the Pacific NorthWest. Meet him in person on the Level 99 Games Community Discord!
