Hello ladies and gentlemen.

As we've all experienced - Commander is indeed a very popular format and despite being called casual there are many communities that play it in a very competitive spirit (meaning, playing to win).
Of course, the format is currently being played mostly in closed groups and between rounds on tournaments, in bars, etc. due to the casual nature of the majority. But soon enough many players will decide to tune their decks to the edge and will want to spar with others on a higher level and we can see many one-off EDH games for prizes at larger tournaments.
Now, let us suppose the former is true and we have to work out HOW to ensure a fair and objective way to create and run a free-for-all multiplayer tournament.

DISCLAIMER: THIS THREAD IS ABOUT DISCUSSING THE POSSIBILITY OF A TOURNAMENT MULTIPLAYER FORMAT. And a Free-for-all that is, I am not looking for existing options.


Things that come to mind that need attention:

- Size of player pods per-round: In my experience the smaller the pod, the better it works (time and competition wise) - suggesting 3 to 4 man pods (varying the size in the same tournament, eg. using 3x3 and 1x4 man pods) to accommodate any number of signed players.

- Type of round advancing: I have tested classic swiss with best-of-one, due to time constraints, which resulted in a very objective way to promote competitiveness but very few rounds (and time - 9 man tournament lasted for about 2-3 hours). Another way is to completely randomize pods every round for a fixed number of them - but that has issues with laddering the players by wins (could count opponent's wins, but that gets overly complicated - but very objective, since a pod with better/more difficult opponents bears greater weight).

- Collusion: A lot of people have issues (or fears) with this, but I personally find it an important part of the game - ingame collusion, of course (meaning: “Attack someone else, I have removal in hand.” and “tactical” concede seem okay to me - besides, in a competitive spirit a concede can never be tactical, usually just a bad decision). How to handle this, if necessary?

- Possible modification of current format rules: I currently have little ideas what to change except the thought that the uniformity of mulligan rule made the game much better.


Anyway, I hope to find some thoughts from you on this. I believe that such popular formats should all have some way of official tournament procedure, be it EDH or Type 1.

Regards.

Edited Primoz Vodnik (April 25, 2016 04:21:34 PM)

I sincerely hope you're wrong about your in-title premise for this thread.

Commander is not and was never intended to be a competitive, tournament format. I sincerely doubt that most players have a real sense of what it means to “tune their decks to the edge” as far as Commander allows them to do so. I have friends who take their truly Competitive CMDR decks to the pods at Grand Prix and regularly run the tables inside of fifteen minutes. That type of combo potential is literally the only viable thing to do in Competitive CMDR because you cannot contain three combo opponents with a Control deck, nor can you outrace them with an Aggro deck.

The bigger problem with that is the people who don't yet know that that is the case, who come to a Commander tournament with the best traditional deck they have and get utterly crushed by degeneracy that the format is not built to prevent. You can use a more extensive ban list than what is currently used, but how long do you haVe to make it? Certainly at least as long as the Legacy list, and possibly more, and then you're playing a very different format than what most people will expect from an advertised Commander tournament.

However, if you do want to engage in this endeavor…

I would agree that 3-4 player pods work best. 4 if you can is optimal, I think, and 5 has worked better than 3 for me in the past. You may need a time limit for 5 players (you should probably have one anyway, and it's rather doubtful that you'll need it with all the combo, but perhaps for round 1).

I had success in league with two 2-hour rounds, with the pod winners (or top 4 players if less than four pods) meeting in a winner's game in round two and everyone else being matched up by points. In a more tournament-style system, you would probably have a winners bracket and then randomly assign the other players. More complex than is probably more trouble than it's worth and may lead to weird results.

Handling in-game collusion without judging the tactical soundness of a player's decisions sounds very difficult and unlikely to lead to anyone feeling good about how things were handled. You could completely eliminate table talk, but that sounds like an event that's as little fun as possible. You also face the problem of out-of-game collusion (I.e. Two teammates agreeing beforehand to help each other win) that is only really policeable by manually pairing them so they're not together, which gets hairy if they both win their first pod.

As I mentioned earlier, this tournament is going to be a showcase of degeneracy without massive changes to the ban list. Other format rules probably work fine, but the more you change, the less accessible the event is as Commander, and the lower your attendance will be.

If this is something your regular players really want, it can certainly be done, but I'd seriously consider the ramifications before going forward. When presented with prizes, there are players who will stretch a format as far as needed to win, and breaking Commander is as easy as shattering stained glass church windows with a shotgun.

Sent from my iPad

Originally posted by Justin Miyashiro:

I sincerely hope you're wrong about your in-title premise for this thread.

Commander is not and was never intended to be a competitive, tournament format. I sincerely doubt that most players have a real sense of what it means to “tune their decks to the edge” as far as Commander allows them to do so. I have friends who take their truly Competitive CMDR decks to the pods at Grand Prix and regularly run the tables inside of fifteen minutes. That type of combo potential is literally the only viable thing to do in Competitive CMDR because you cannot contain three combo opponents with a Control deck, nor can you outrace them with an Aggro deck.

The bigger problem with that is the people who don't yet know that that is the case, who come to a Commander tournament with the best traditional deck they have and get utterly crushed by degeneracy that the format is not built to prevent. You can use a more extensive ban list than what is currently used, but how long do you haVe to make it? Certainly at least as long as the Legacy list, and possibly more, and then you're playing a very different format than what most people will expect from an advertised Commander tournament.

However, if you do want to engage in this endeavor…

I would agree that 3-4 player pods work best. 4 if you can is optimal, I think, and 5 has worked better than 3 for me in the past. You may need a time limit for 5 players (you should probably have one anyway, and it's rather doubtful that you'll need it with all the combo, but perhaps for round 1).

I had success in league with two 2-hour rounds, with the pod winners (or top 4 players if less than four pods) meeting in a winner's game in round two and everyone else being matched up by points. In a more tournament-style system, you would probably have a winners bracket and then randomly assign the other players. More complex than is probably more trouble than it's worth and may lead to weird results.

Handling in-game collusion without judging the tactical soundness of a player's decisions sounds very difficult and unlikely to lead to anyone feeling good about how things were handled. You could completely eliminate table talk, but that sounds like an event that's as little fun as possible. You also face the problem of out-of-game collusion (I.e. Two teammates agreeing beforehand to help each other win) that is only really policeable by manually pairing them so they're not together, which gets hairy if they both win their first pod.

As I mentioned earlier, this tournament is going to be a showcase of degeneracy without massive changes to the ban list. Other format rules probably work fine, but the more you change, the less accessible the event is as Commander, and the lower your attendance will be.

If this is something your regular players really want, it can certainly be done, but I'd seriously consider the ramifications before going forward. When presented with prizes, there are players who will stretch a format as far as needed to win, and breaking Commander is as easy as shattering stained glass church windows with a shotgun.

Sent from my iPad

Don't expect everyone to play the game exactly the way you do.

Duel commander and other variants are obviously different than regular Commander, and my impression of what Primoz is trying to run is regular Commander, competitive style. If that's not accurate, then sure, much of my comments are off the mark. But Primoz's intent seemed fairly clear to me, so I think it best if we approach the questions from that perspective rather than moving the goalposts.

Running variant Commander tournaments could be fine, and many variants are more or less built to support such a thing. It is important to advertise clearly the difference between traditional commander and the variant you use, of course, but a variant could be a great way to go, if that's what your players are looking for.

Sent from my iPad

Maybe I'm just off here… but whats wrong with just running EDH tournaments at Regular? I mean my LGS has done that. 2HG CDR has put no less than 10 teams in each of the 4 events we've done. Which I understand is not a “lot” compared to others but…. I'm just saying that its still an effective tournament withOUT adjusting for Comp,…. right?

Duel (French) Commander is built specifically for this purpose, IIRC. I'd suggest just going with that.

The one point I'd like to make is concerning the players per pod, to which I believe that 2 is the optimal number.

1) In my experience, and perhaps this is my opinion and others have other opinions, pods of more than 4 players have board states that are too complex to process. In addition to making the game take longer due to more players taking actions and more turns taking place, there is additional time used to process the board state. Therefore, if you hope to have your rounds end in anywhere near a “reasonable” amount of time, I would discourage pods of more than 4 players.

2) Regarding pods of 3 players, you have an issue of collusion. If 2 players decide to team up, they can easily beat the 3rd player, and then concede or duel between them. It is very hard to play a game of 2-on-1, so that 3rd player basically will just lose and not have any fun getting the snot beaten out of him if he's the 3rd man at a 3-man table. This is bad for your tournament growth, if players leave saying “Well, I just paid to have the snot beaten out of me by these people colluding against me, I'm not going back ever again”.

Therefore I would say the optimal number is either 2 or 4. The reason I say 2 is basically because, let's say you have a 4-player pod. Obviously 2 people working together is stronger than 2 people working independently. Therefore you will have 2 people who decide to team up (the problem is exacerbated if you have friends playing together in the same pod). Then the other 2 people must either team up as well and play essentially 2HG (in which case you're basically playing 1v1 except with more bodies), or one of the other 2 also teams up with the teamed-up pair and play 3v1, in which case you have the 3-man problem from above; the lone person gets eliminated and then you have a 3-man pod, which is undesirable for reasons as laid out above. So 4-man pods reduce to either 2HG duel, in which case you may as well just play Duel (1v1) anyway, or they reduce to 3-man chaos, which is undesirable. So I'd say duel (1v1) is probably the best idea.

I'm going to agree with Dan and others here, Duel Commander is what you're looking for. Trying to do pods competitively is mostly just an exercise in seeing how many players can get upset at each other.

If you want competitive Commander tourneys, which I wholeheartedly support, I think you'll find more success using the Duel Commander (French Rules) rules and banlist. With only 2 players per match, you don't have room for the politics and table talk that makes Commander more casual. You merely have 2 players trying to beat the other, just like every other MTG format.

In the US we have this facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/MTGDCUSA/1704463356473018/?notif_t=group_activity&notif_id=1461367099572061

I am sure other countries have something similar, with how much bigger DC is in Europe.

While the title is a little provocative, there may be some communities that do want competitive multi-player events, and there are many places already that are running pseudo-competitive leagues / events. Rather than dismissing this and having multiple people pointing to Duel Commander, which is a viable 1 on 1 commander style competitive event, it isn't multi-player.

I personally am not interested in a competitive format Commander, but let's keep the discussion on topic rather than 5 replies that are all focused on persuading the topic starter to look at something else.

Thanks Mark, I indeed am familliar with Duel commander, but this is not the reason of this topic. I am not solely looking to take my EDH to a tournament - the issue is elsewhere. We are going to have another Conspiracy release as well, and this will have to be handled.

Anyhow, I am running my 4th multiplayer EDH tournament this Friday and the three I had before were all handled differently.
First had an “achievement” system, which proved a big failure because it turned the games to something that is not a Magic game, so we abandoned that.
Second one had a point system, where winner got some points then each player would award a point to another for whatever reason they wanted (solving difficult board states, handling combos, being nice…), but that just promotes out-of-game collusion and that was abolished as well.
Last one had simple winner-advances-to-winner-bracket and losers were randomly re-rolled into loser brackets. The 2-round tournament went very smoothly, only the prizes had to be given out - most to 1st, equally to 2nd and 3rd and then a bit less (but equally as well) to 4th and 5th and nothing from 6 to 9 (first won 2 rounds, 2nd and 3rd were defeated by him, so 1 round win each but better “tiebreakers” than 4th and 5th, who won their loser brackets).
We have also been running allnighters with 7 rounds of randomized pods after each round. This was the most popular way of running things but it takes enormous amounts of time (hence allnighters) and has issues with ranking people (you have 3 players with 3 wins, 3 with two and rest won nothing, etc).


Wall of text aside - winner bracket / loser bracket seems like the best system to go as far as my experience comes.

Next - collusion. Thinking a bit harder about it, I think there are very few cards that support it and even if, collusion is usually a bad tactical decision (unless it results in a player out) - example if you decide to draw your whole deck with Trade Secrets you will very likely lose since it's not your turn. This brings us to pod size.
My locals prefer smaller pods, due to handleability - if you have 3 people and two turn against one, he will have a chance to fight them off (although he'd have to expend many many resources for that) but if you add another player he will unlikely join the battle and will rather exploit the heat and evolve his position, intervening only if really necessary. Touching Justin's comment on combo being most dominant - it is very card effective so you can add a lot of consistency to your game plan. But there are several decks in my community which do not play a single infinite combo and still perform outstandingly (winning all games on a good day). Beatdown, lockdown etc can perform very well against very powerful and explosive combo decks and if there are less opponents to handle a combo deck will see more Counterspells and Murderous cuts flinged at them when they try to win. Another way to tune down combo is reducing starting life total (we have done this down to 30 and combo is still strong, but not as) but this is Rules Committee's area and I won't tell them what to do…

Anyhow, politics are part of multiplayer and I believe it should stay that way. When in tournament play, people start thinking differently, more objectively and I haven't seen much (if any) ingame collusion on my tournaments.
The real problem is out of game collusion - two friends agreeing to concede to another if they have everyone else eliminated from the game, but that needs some empirical testing.

As to those who are afraid that tournament/competitive EDH will kill its casuality, trust me, many people play T1.5 and modern VERY casually.

Edited Primoz Vodnik (April 25, 2016 04:26:51 PM)

There is a reason why most organizers are no longer holding commander side events at Grand Prix, simply because commander isn't suited for competitive play where there's prizes at stake.

I remember when they offered commander as a side event in GP pittsburgh. There were at least 3 pairs who came to the event just to grind boosters (both playing mono blue combo with trade secrets). There is nothing in the magic tournament rules that states that you're not allowed to make your friend win. Two weeks later Trade Secrets got banned, but there are plenty of other ways of colluding to make

Keep in mind that most magic rules are written with regards to a 1v1 or team v team (like 2HG) gameplay in mind. This makes them inherently incompatible with Commander as a format.

If you want competitive commander, the best way to go is with French or Tiny leaders as several people ahve already suggested.

Disregard this, I misread what OP wrote

Edited Michael He (April 25, 2016 10:01:48 PM)

I'm sorry, I should had said I want competitive MULTIPLAYER. I will put it as a disclaimer in original post. I am not interested in tiny leaders 1v1 or duel commander 1v1 but a multiplayer format that would be able to be used in a tournament.

EDIT: To comment on Michael's thought - Having rewards for winning just one game will of course result in such attrocities. But so would a 4 man draft, where 3 of us are friends. If you have a several round tournament, friends will be able to collude in one round, if they even get paired together. It's like me playing against my brother in a prerelease - either can concede to another but what good will it do to us, we still have several rounds to win.

Edited Primoz Vodnik (April 25, 2016 04:29:35 PM)

I don't have specific answers, but if you are wanting to run
multiplayer events with a compeditive flavour I'd recommend looking at
the rules that board game tournaments use. Particularly ones that are
used for games that have strong King Maker abilities, MTG has amazing
strong King Maker abilities.

I usually play with my mates in 3, 4 or 5 man multiplayers… in commander.

For 3 players: We make new rules: atack to damage the mid! like hydra omnyvore… when i want to atack, i choose if i atack to a PW or atack the mid.
If atack a PW, the controler can block with his/her creatures.
If i atack to mid, both players can block. If don´t block or tramble… the damage it´s done to both players, but like on 2hg, the triggers only works 1 time on only 1 players for fix abuses.
This way it´s hard to play in 2vs1 because if you don´t block you get damage too…

For 4 players we play 2hg commanders… i skip this…

For 5 players we play 2 modes: STAR and MERCENARIES

For STAR, every player have 2 mates (non-opponents players) and 2 opponents. The “mates” are the closed one from left and right. The oponents are the sit in front of you. (like the magics colors in the back of cards: ally colors, opponent colors).
Play in 1 man turns.
Have 0 or less lifes don´t remove you from the game (zombie rule).
When 2 opponents of 1 player have 0 or less lifes, or another lose condition, that one wins!
(If play something to win like mortal combat too win ofc)
If there are 3 players in zombie mode, wins the first player in turn order with “win condition”.
If all 5 players lose the game at same time, draw.
It´s funny to play, but long in time because allways someone can disrupt you when u have a chance to win…

For MERCENARIES: Take 10 basics lands (2 of each) and give 1 basic type land to every player. Shuffle the others 5 and every player get one in secret. THIS GUY IS YOUR TARGET.
You can atack any PW.
Only can block creatures attacking you or your PW. (but can terminate any creature ^_^)
You only can atack your target player.
If a card need check opponents, only players with their target was revealed (for an atack and show or for free show) works.
If a player have his/her own land, ITS A MERCENARY FREE to atack everyone.
When a player kills his target, get a new target (the target of the target)
If a mercenary kills a players, usually are linked to a new target. He/She gets the killed targets and give to the “owner of that target” his target land card…
Example: Arturo have plains as marked card and has a plains as target card (Its a free mercenary)
Evelin have a swap as marked card and an island as target card.
Jonhy have an island as marked card and a mountain as target card.
Arturo kills Jonhy.
Arturo give the plains target card to Evelin
Arturo take the mountain target card and now lose the FREE

If a player is killed for crossfire, count as his/her hunter kills him/her.
Wins the last man (or woman) alive!


This variants are funny and can make a topdeck tier gold decks useless… so play with carefull!!

^_^ Ivy

Originally posted by Primoz Vodnik:

I'm sorry, I should had said I want competitive MULTIPLAYER. I will put it as a disclaimer in original post. I am not interested in tiny leaders 1v1 or duel commander 1v1 but a multiplayer format that would be able to be used in a tournament.

EDIT: To comment on Michael's thought - Having rewards for winning just one game will of course result in such attrocities. But so would a 4 man draft, where 3 of us are friends. If you have a several round tournament, friends will be able to collude in one round, if they even get paired together. It's like me playing against my brother in a prerelease - either can concede to another but what good will it do to us, we still have several rounds to win.

Sorry, I misread your post. From what I understand now you want to develop a ruleset where we can use them to run competitive magic tournaments.

One issue is how you want players to advance. Only 1 person from each pod? 2 people from each pod? If only 1 person from each pod, there's going to be a very big loser's bracket (imagine 5 man pods, that would result in one player advancing and 4 players going to the “loser's pod”). This will result in a lot of players having 0 points even after 3 rounds.

Let me make an example for a tournament with 17 players. You seed them into pods of 3,3,3,4,4. Then you end up with 5 winners, how do you seed them into 3 or 4 man pods? Do you pick a random loser to make another set of 3,3,3,4,4? How do you do tiebreakers?

One of the stores I used to judge at before I moved actually had commander tournaments with 4 man pods where top 2 players would advance (16 people max tournament, with 3 rounds). This led to a lot of complaints when random pairing put them 2 friends and 2 other people in a pod, where three seperate combo decks had very selective kills (the store later banned combo decks to be played, which can cause other problems regarding inclusiveness). Also the example from GP pittsburgh that I gave earlier if prizes are based on results in the pod (which I think is a big reason why they stopped doing commander side events).

Another issue to consider is how you want results to be, what is required to get points in a pod? Winner gets 3 points and everyone else gets 0? Or do you give points based on the order they were eliminated? Or giving points when they eliminate another player? What happens if there's a unintentional draw due to time? What if an effect kills all players at the same time, do they draw or do you play a new game? The way you give out points will heavily affect what kind of collusion you can expect.

Speaking of time, would you set a time limit to the game? I've seen commander games last over 6 hours and you don't want that to happen in a tournament, especially where others have to wait for them for the next round. What is a good time limit to have in commander game?

Also, how do you record results? WER only allows for win or lose and 2 people pairings so you will have to use another kind of software to keep track of results and pairings or do them manually. Also, Wizards will have to update WER to allow for this if we want to sanction them as competitive tournaments.

Edited Michael He (April 25, 2016 10:48:31 PM)

As somebody who has a great love for Commander, I've tried to shoe-horn multiplayer commander into competitive shoes more than once, and I've largely come to the conclusion that it can't be done effectively and consistently at all.

All the methods I've tried have glaring flaws not even out in edge cases but just with the fundamentals of competitive play.

1/ “Achievement” points versus simple match record points

This is supposed to reward neat multiplayer play, by emphasizing particular goals and playstyles and not just giving the best reward to the last one standing. The problem is you either make your list public in advance, and clever players build decks to do nothing but game your points over and over, or you don't and some players may be locked out of even attempting some of them.

2/ Points based on in what order you died
If you give out 4/3/2/1 or 3/2/1/0 points based on order eliminated from the game, you either have to handle what to do when time runs out and multiple players are alive, or what to do if multiple players die simultaneously in one combat phase or one spell resolution. Virtually every version of resolving that is going to leave at least one player grumpy. it's worse when you also have 3-player pods to make numbers work. 3/2/1/0 and 3/2/1? 2/1/0? The winner of the 3-player pod almost certainly has an easier time of it, unless two players gang up on a third.

3/ Just inform people that it's competitive and hope for the best
When Path to Exile was the FNM promo, which was very high demand, I wanted to try and spread them out as much as possible among my players, so I did draft, standard, modern, and commander as my FNMs that month. For the Commander event I did pods of 4, with points based on elimination order. One player was basically playing ANT. He cleared his pods top to bottom in 5, 7 and 6 minutes respectively. The players who then had to wait around for over an hour per round for everybody else to finish were very upset.

There are other versions I've tried, and time after time, once there's prizing on the line, Commander just starts to burst at the seams. 1v1 is great, I played it competitively in Toronto for a while (And did abysmally) but it is actually built for serious competitive play and if you have Commander players who want to be competitive, it really is the best fix.

Edited Daniel Ruffolo (May 3, 2016 02:53:53 PM)