Ya, it's slow right now. I think some sort of big reboot might want to occur.

Yeah, maybe starting a season three and posting it in Magic General would help.

I've said that since round 25...

I mean, I don't get what's that hard to understand that how bigger a thread becomes, how smaller the chance that players (dare to) jump in.
No season ever went past 30 afaik (I know mine didn't).

January is just a very busy time for me (more so this year than usual, as I'm preparing to move to South Africa [long story]), which is why I've fallen out of the loop. Will probably not have brain power enough to build a deck this week, but I'll try.

Hey, everybody! I've officially decided to start a new season this weekend! And that means I need feedback. A new season is the best time to change how things are done, and I want Season 3 to be better than ever, so please feel free to post any and all suggestions you might have. In fact, there are a few questions I'm particularly interested in:

1) Should we start with vanilla or an alternate format?
2) Is the current vanilla-to-alternate ratio good? Is the upside/downside separation working?
3) Should we reset the vanilla banlist or continue where we left off? Or should we just crown thatmarkguy 3CM King and let him decide the entire banlist?
4) Is there anything you didn't like about how this season was run?
5) Is there anything you want next season to have that this season didn't?

Oh, and while I'm here...

Round 42 Spreadsheet!

Hm, I win most match-ups because Chronomaton is the best threat by far in the field, but I have absolutely no idea how the Bitterblossom match goes. I can counter the first, but the second creates a bunch of chump blockers, but then he loses life in the mean time. How many ticks to I take up my chrono, how many tokens does he store up?

I might figure it out some other time.

1) Vanilla
2) Sure. I think that's fine.
3) Reset. If you want new players, a fresh start is best.
4) It was too long.
5) Players sticking around

Vanilla scares off new participants less, which is a shame because in reality vanilla is where the vets have a decisive edge from meta familiarity, and alts are where the newbies can really catch the vets off-guard. But in the interest of drawing new players, I'd not only start at Vanilla, but probably go a solid 3 rounds of vanilla before introducing alts. Or if an early alt is introduced, make it something really broad like modern (or even just no-lotus), and not some convoluted thing that can really be abused if you remember that one card that really takes advantage of this ruleset...




I believe it's good as an eventual steady-state, but not as a launching point.



My starting banlist would likely be the current alt banlist. The troublesome 1-discards, the Strip Mine variants, Channex, Force of Will, and those too-easy combo enablers like Lab Maniac.



I think it ran too long, and I think that was borne of not establishing an 'endpoint' from early on. If when the season begins it's known to be of a specific (and not overly long!) duration, people may be inclined to watch near the end of a season with plans to join when the new season begins.



I like how MTGS just does, basically, 4-week seasons. Clear entry points for new players are aplenty.

The decision tree in 5v6 is a veritable forest.

Really Bitterblossom should be banned for being really difficult to grade.

I definitely approve of the idea of defining the length of a season. (And making it much shorter than this one.)
How do four-week seasons work on MTGS, though? That's not really enough time to develop a banlist into something interesting. Do they carry over the banlist? If so, what does a new season actually signify?

That makes me realize we have two things we should figure out:
1) How often should the vanilla banlist be reset?
2) What are some good ways to mark the beginning of a new season, besides resetting the banlist?

It might even be possible to do pseudo-resets, where each season's banlist is affected slightly by the previous season's banlist.

Their four-week tournaments are all-alts. They've been doing this for over a decade, I think they've collectively abandoned vanilla. Obviously not the situation we're in.
Their first three rounds this season:
Modern NOEL: 4 card modern, deck must contain one card starting with each letter N, O, E, and L.
No untap: 3 cards (plus one basic land per turn can be played from nowhere), players skip untap step.
Backdraft: 5 cards, your opponent plays your deck; there are basic minimum decks the deck must be able to beat.

Their basic rules are a little different in a few ways too - most prominently, where we use "No deck that can win before opponent has completed first turn" they use "No deck that can win before opponent has begun second turn". And where we use "No deck that can cause opponent hand reduction of more than one in a single turn", they use "No deck that can cause opponent hand reduction before opponent has begun second turn". They also score all match draws as 2 points, even if they're 3-3 draws. Not that we need or should adopt any of this, just trying to paint the MTGS scene.



It's a set of four weeks of alt matches, at the end of which the highest cumulative scorer (normalized to players in the round) is named champion and a new season begins.

I would suggest that banlists not mutate in a small way every round, but that a new banlist be defined at the start of each 'season' (with the right to define that as a prize for the champion(s) in the preceding season). The eventual steady state could be two vanillas, one upside alt, and one downside alt in a month - both vanillas having the exact same banlist (so the second v-round will be a strictly reactive meta to the first - the decks that had success in the first will likely not be viable because those decks will be the ones everyone's ready to cope with).

Interesting. Thanks for the info.

I like your suggestion of how a four-week structure could work. I'm a little skeptical about how well it would work doing the same vanilla round twice in a row, but I like the idea of doing something like vanilla-upside-vanilla-downside and then starting a new season. (My first thought was vanilla-vanilla-upside-downside, since it gives two whole weeks of a "simpler" format, but I'm sure there are some people like me out there who have better deck ideas when the format itself pushes you in a certain direction instead of being as wide open as vanilla.)

One downside of posting a new thread every month is that, at that point, I feel like we might be better off staying in the PBP section, so that we're not filling Magic General with too many 3CM threads.* And if we do stay in PBP, we'll want to put something in Magic General to help bring people down here. Bumping the primer every new season is one way to do that. Maybe we should make some sort of general portal for that purpose, that links to the primer and any other educational tools/guides we might create.

*Magic General currently has front-page threads that are a bit over a month old, so theoretically there could be a point where we'd have three 3CM threads on the front page at once if we posted them there.

I'm less interested the 4 week seasons, more interested in double vanilla rounds with the same banned list. Especially for new players, because it gives them a chance to see what is powerful and actually play with it before it goes away.

Seeing how we are a bit newer at this than MTGS, I think it's probably safer to go with vanillas still. I liked alternating, but you could do 2 vanilla, 2 alternates, 2 vanilla, etc. as well.

four week seasons sound interesting, and the double vanilla sounds interesting too, even if the vanillas occur at different points in the season. there will be a recent meta to look back on when the second vanilla occurs.

I'm a pretty big fan of the MTGS system, having played it for quite some time now.

The biggest change I'd like is for deadlines to be on a weekday rather than Friday/Saturday/Sunday. I've always found that people are more available for these kind of things midweek. Wednesday is obviously the best choice.

Hey, look! Season 3!