Hi NGA community!
Cards on the table - as a long time casual and ftp player of the various iterations of digital magic: DOTP, Magic Duels, MTG Arena and being part of the community as far back as the Mother Ship as it is affectionately referred to with changes that had been happening to MTG Arena and impact on many formats I took a break and stopped playing altogether.
I wanted to keep in touch however with the community and mainly via the NGA discord channel.
I decided to return with the release of NEO set. I had decent gold / wildcards in main account (for reference I have 3 MTGA accounts with one now mainly owned and played by my son Magic Master. The third a new account created with the Strixhaven release and hype where I created a quick series of new user experience you tube videos).
The main account clearly is my SquiderDragon account that was started in beta. As probably an atypical casual player I usually was in the top 95% for gold earned so as a consequence of the large number of hours played daily I acquired a very healthy historic collection. I had for example gold purchased one of the later anthologies packs (full sets) as I liked the cards.
So here’s where I am currently at.
Still love the game but long for the play experience that I used to enjoy in the earlier pre Arena days. In particular with Magic Duels where there were great players, a great community and the start of the digital content providers that were inspired and encouraged with the likes of organised tournaments by Kryder and Hakeem. And yes Hakeem we will miss you brother and what you inspired in other NGA alumni to go on and achieve in the digital content space. Remember that creating content was mandatory in those times. There was a good and valid reason for that, arguably a noble one at that.
The tournament part of that was key to establish the vehicle with which to show case the game.
Tournaments were also great to organise matches between players, win or lose taking part added to the experience of playing digital MtG and I was part of that at the time with the organised IOS tournaments. This was because playing digital magic for me aside from Xbox 360 for DOTP I became a PlayStation PS4 player at the time where PlayStation lost the latest magic releases and presumably a lot of Plsystation players at the same time.
The active tournaments of the day for top players were on PC and XBONE.
For me my interest has finally been re-ignited for the joy of playing. For now the best format for me is the historic brawl format. There a variety of reasons for that:-
The historic brawl format mandates a 100 card Decklist. So decent access to a wider variety of cards and answers to opponents decks.
Longer and more strategic matches.
Deck building opportunities to explore cards from earlier sets
A return to the nostalgic cards and strategies.
Less impact from some of the changes that impacted standard historic
So for those reasons I would like to organise an ongoing historic brawl tournament
Clearly this will only potentially suit NGA players that have been engaging for a while and have a decent historic collection they would like to explore.
The format will be casual and best of one.
The idea is a competition between commanders rather than players - what this means that players interested can field more than one deck with different commanders to explore differences across colours E.g 2 or 3 commanders.
The format is all play all - simple 1 point for a win. You only match the once with each enemy commander
Suggest a 3 month period so there is no pressure to play or match.
At the point when all matches played based on win results the commander list is divided into 2 brackets upper and lower based on win rate.
Second round matches are eliminations - matchups based on win rate
The final matchups are based on winners from upper and lower brackets and elimination matches to decide the overall winning commander.
Players interested can sign up later but for the 3 month period we can track a participants join date so we can have a cutoff for the elimination matches but ongoing 1 on 1 matchups for the newer players - ie perpetual play.
Sign up does not need Decklists - just the player and commander (s) submitted. Between each match any changes can be made. The only thing that must remain the same is the actual commander.
Hopefully there is an interest. I will organise a Google sheets tracker for signups posted on suitable NGA thread either this post or a dedicated one.
Finally personally I would also like to stipulate for at least 3 colours for a commander or more. The main reason is to provide a better one v one match akin to chess with an opening, middle and end game phase for each match. Clearly there can be much more aggro strategies going one or two colour commanders but typically the better tournament matches for fun and playability favour mid range and control decks.
There has been interest from the discord channel but they want it to be an NGA Tournament which I totally support hence this post here.
If you are interested just reply with a simple response here and I will gauge if enough interest to start to create a more formal post for the agree format rules, timings, etc.
SquiderDragon
. SquiderDragon
It was just a suggestion - the idea is to see a wider variety of cards in the matchup. So yes any Commander. In particular as I am polling for interest so however players prefer to play and build is perfectly fine.