 | Common Sense Clan Forum |
      |
| BYOS Kick-Off I apologise that this is my first article for three rounds of the league. When I set out the season of eight rounds I imagined I would be able to keep up with the schedule of writing, but no. My free time has been squeezed by other things. Despite that the league is going from strength to strength with large turnouts and high participation. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to our success.
I'd like to tell you about a few changes I have planned. First of all I will be clearing out the prize pool by awarding a prize to every single player that registers and plays at least one match in our final event of the year, round 3.8, pauper extended format. After that we will know the identity of the Common Sense League Player of the 2010 (cough** Chris), and I will be awarding a large value prize to that person, and also awarding the Rookie of the year and Participation prizes.
The 2011 league season starts in January. There will be fewer full rounds than in 2010 as I feel 8 is too many. Between rounds I want to host some special one day tournaments in formats that don't lend themselves to league play. Commander and Draft are two. The tournaments will be free to enter and pay out league season points as prizes. I hope to have some league assistants by then, so I plan to run euro and usa friendly versions of these.You might wonder how pauper commander can work, and this is the outline plan so far. The idea of the league is primarily about fun, so I stole the idea of a fun commander scoring system from Armada Games' EDH league. In my commander event you will score points for various goals, and lose points for others, here are some (not all) of the ones I have thought of:
Discuss in the forums
Previous rounds As I said, I missed writing about a few rounds, so I'll take this opportunity to say a few words about what went down.
Round 5 - sealed This one was so close to being a hit. I wanted to expose the clan to limited play, and knowing that draft was going to be hard to coordinate I steered it down the route of sealed constructed. Except that I didn't control the power level of pools sufficiently, which led to a number of dissapointed recipients of weak pools. The eventual winner, Andymc1, had such a strong pool he only dropped a single match. In future I will try to balance the power level more fairly. One good suggestion was to replace the completely random card pool with a preselected pool of cards, say 400 carefully balanced cards from which random boosters are created.
In terms of headcount this round was a howling success, with 22 players, but participation was only around 40% of matches played, maybe due to the cardpool issues.
I hate to be critical, but I did feel that some people gave up too easily. Part of sealed is trying different builds, and some people did not do this. Your clan mates are also a great resource, you can ask notable deckbuilders for advice; in fact some of them don't even need to be asked to point out where you might be doing things better :p
For reference here is andymc1's winning pool from which I understand he made a mono red beatdown deck ... Andymc1 Sealed Pool Round 6 - standard format This round by contrast was a complete success. 80% of matches played with 15 players entered. As always I am humbled by my clan mates.
This was the chance of the unknown VictorBike to come out of nowhere and take the laurels. Imagine what the season might have looked like if he'd been there from January to duel with ChrisMH77.
VictorBike's deck: JM
VictorBike Standard Deck
Round 7 - bring your own standard format This round is almost done, and I'll discuss it more fully in my annual report after December. The one thing to note already is the low participation. Some players have been busy, but I feel this has suffered from the problem that many are not interested in this format. When I come to design next year's schedule I'll be sure to take note of unpopular formats from the past and avoid them.
Round 8 - extended format Please register for this round, it's an all new extended format since rotation, and there are prizes for all! I'm making an additional plea that you consider playing a beatdown or combo deck since many players have told me they are fed-up duelling control decks all the time.
|
