Tournament Creation Guide

We’ve all grown accustomed to the expansive quality-of-life features in Mythgard—in-game deck tracker, extensive replay system, the ability to play PvE even while queuing PvP—and the most exciting and impressive feature has been introduced recently: the in-game tournament client. While in many games you need to rely on external infrastructure through Battlefy, or even extensive protocols operated by the developers in the game client itself, the tournament client in Mythgard is largely self-contained. Like so many other features in Mythgard, the tournament client offers a vibrant array of features to the players as they organize their own tournaments—using their own in-game currency, Mythril or Coin, to seed the prize pool, organize payout structure, invite players, set game formats—while letting the robust Tournament system take care of the rest. Matching players in swiss, elimination tournament brackets, booster drafting, even prize payout is all handled automatically in the game’s Tournament system!

Setting Up Your Very Own Tournament

The first caveat we should keep in mind is that the tournament client is still being developed, so while it is very stable and runs well for hosting tournaments, there is not a system of refunds and some elements are bit finnicky, so be careful hosting as you may be out 5000 coins, the standard hosting fee, all of which seeds the tournament’s prize pool.

First Things First

The first thing to notice in the tournament client is in the lower right, that you have 1 hour to set up your tournament. This is generally plenty of time, but be sure you can sit down and have a sense of what you’re setting up when you plunk down your coin, as after this initial setup, many things cannot be adjusted. A nice feature of the Tournament client that is also relevant here is that the “Time” setting is always your local time so it will appear in your local time and players viewing your tournament will see it in their local time, so there can be minimal confusion (though be sure you include Time Zone when announcing on Discord!). The default number of public player slots is usually 64, but be sure you check that number when making your tournament. Alternately, if you want to establish and invite-only tournament, you can set this number 0, and only players you invite will be able to enter. You can also set the window for Signup, that is to say how long before the event happens someone can pay their entry fee and enter the tournament, as well as the window of time for final check-ins before the tournament starts. If you do not sign-in on time you will automatically be withdrawn from the tournament, and your entry fee will be lost!

Selecting the Format and its Features

One of the most important features that cannot be adjusted after you hit the “Create” button is format, and as someone who has tried many times to set up a casual booster draft and ended up with a Constructed event nobody was ready to play in, this can be very frustrating so be sure you have your format selected correctly!

For Constructed formats, you’ll see a familiar set of options for creating a simple Single Elimination bracket (NB: there is not currently a system of seeding so all matches will be paired randomly for the first round) all the way up to automatically generated and calculated rounds of Swiss with top cuts of your selection! Tiebreakers in Swiss are automatically calculated according to Opponent Win Percentage, Game Win Percentage, Opponent Game Win Percentage, and Time, all of which are displayed under the “Player” tab when right-clicking or holding down on each Player’s name. Just as there are tantalizing looks at future game modes like Sealed Deck, there will clearly be new round structures as well, like “Melee” (let us know if you have guesses as to what that will be!)

In addition to the different structures for organizing rounds and matchups, the shape of matches is also very flexible with single and multideck formats. Perhaps predictably, Conquest requires you to win with all of you decks, eliminating them from your choice after you win with them, and Last Deck Standing eliminates your deck after it loses, leaving only one deck at the end of a grueling matchup! Multideck formats require all of your decks exist in a shared cardpool, so you will only be able to run four of a common, three of an uncommon, etc. between all three decks. Similarly you can only have one instance of each Path and Power, but it will allow you to register deck which share Powers/Paths and will simply bump the Power/Path off one of the decks, which you may not notice until you are already playing in the tournament!

Another exciting feature is the ability to make tournaments specifically for newer or lower ranked players, simply by selecting the upper limit of participants by Ladder (Bronze, Silver, Gold, etc.). This restriction however is a bit unwieldy as it restricts players by the highest ladder a player has ever been on, so even if someone deranks from Mythril ladder to Silver ladder, they will not be able to participate in a tournament for Silver and lower players.

Rounds can be set at either Best of 1, Best of 3, or Best of 5, and the round timer can be set up or down from the default length of 1 hour.

Limits and Bans

In addition to Rank restrictions for players, you can also control the cards available in tournament, restricting cards by Rarity, unchecking the boxes for Commons, Uncommons, etc. but you can also set an essence limit on the tournament decks. You can also toggle on or off a Singleton requirement which predictably allows only one copy of each card in your deck. Editing the Sets available will, obviously, be a more useful function after the Rings of Immortality Expansion release, but this will also give flexibility for what card pools you can work with in Constructed formats, with parallel toggles for Booster Drafts, having some Expansion packs alongside Core Set packs.

Banning specific Cards, and even Paths and Powers, is a robust tool for seeking balance in Limited and Constructed Formats, and the “Import” button also doubles as a method for taking a cardlist you have created and using it to make a “Cube,” a draftable set of cards that is randomly selected from a carefully curated master list (which we will hopefully hear more about from community experts Xaliver and Tritros!).

The Prize Pool

The Prize Table works in “shares” so in the layout above there are 26 total shares (8 + 7 + 6 + 5) and first place will receive 8 of those 26, or 30.7%. If this seems a bit confusing, you can always just make sure your total number of shares adds up to 100 and then you have nice neat percentages! The box underneath allows you to seed the prize pool, alongside the entry fees participants chip in upon entry. You can invite individual players on your “Follow” list in the Social tab. In the same fashion, you can add commentators who can be given the option to have both hands revealed (the tournament organizer always has this option in spectating matches in their tournament), which can be perfect for streaming the tournament without any special permissions or protocols, just within the tournament client!

Conclusion

There are a few quirks that still exist in the tournament client, but many things can be altered even after you have hit the “Create” button, as you will still have access to the “Management” tab even after it is created. The best advice I can give generically is that you may need to alter the description text box to ensure that you have a “Submit” button at the bottom of the “Management” screen, but even better is to come to #tournaments in Discord to ask for help! I’m looking forward to seeing what the community comes up with as we get more and more excited for Rings of Immortality!