# Card Wars 1997 - Report

by Andrew Davidson
May 15, 1997

Below is a repost of the report I wrote for the Sealed Deck tournament at Card Wars 97. Based on this experience the next Sealed Deck tournament will have the following format:
* Swiss or round-robin (i.e. no elimination)
* 3- player games (4-player games tend to stalemate)
* The players will start with a sealed deck.
There will be a booster exchange after each game - open a booster of the winner's choice which forms an initial draft pool. Players may then exchange cards with the pool (1 for 1) in rotation from the winner until there is a round of passes. You can only discard a site if you are drafting a site. After each draft, the unwanted cards are taken out of the game.

Card Wars is an annual CCG and games event held in London, UK. The second of these was held recently and a Shadowfist sealed deck tournament was run again. Attendance seemed to be a bit down on last year and most of this was to play Magic: the Gathering - this is still the game that pulls in most of the players. Shadowfist still put up a reasonable show with about 20 players in the sealed deck event. Of the other CCG, only Galactic Empires seemed to have any significant presence - there was a small tournament for that running too. The other games that were played last year - INWO and OnTE - were now absent. I also saw some trading of METW cards and that was about it for the other CCG.

The sealed deck rules were similar to last year but refined somewhat. Each player started with a Limited Edition starter which was used to build their deck for the first of a series of 4-player games. Starter deck games with experienced players tend to stalemate and so, after an hour of play, any unfinished game went into a 15 minute period of Sudden Death overtime. During this, each player rolled D10 on a chart at the end of his turn:
0 - no event
1 - Positive Chi
2 - Bull Market
3 - Netherworld Return
4 - Political Lock
5 - Thunder on Thunder
6 - Burn, Baby, Burn
7 - Final Brawl
8 - Killing Rain
9+ - Neutron Bomb

These events and edges were deliberately sequenced - the Good, the Bad and The Ugly. Before the die roll, any players could spend power to modify the roll - each power spent providing a +1/-1 modifier as the player wished. Players could keep bidding until there was a round of passes and then the die was cast. This led to some interesting bidding wars as players with much power but few characters tried to swing the roll to get a Neutron Bomb.
The results of this system were somewhat random but provided much amusement and it did produce winners. Overall, I judge it to have been better than last year's complex tie-break system.
If a game was still unresolved after 75 minutes then time was called. The game was then split between the leaders by Feng Shui site count, with burnt-for-victory sites counting double. Tournament points were 5 points for a regular win inside the distance, otherwise 4 points were split amongst the tie-break leaders. Fractions were dropped so that a 2-way split meant 2 points while a 3 or 4 way split meant just 1 point.

When each game was completed, there was a booster draft amongst the players. If the game finished inside the distance, the winner could choose the type of booster - Limited, Netherworld or Flashpoint. Drafting started with the winner - he would often have a tough choice between a cool but unplayable rare (e.g. Kar Fai) or a useful common or uncommon (e.g. Final Brawl).
If the game went to the time limit then the players were forced to take a Flashpoint booster - these contain the sort of cards needed to break stalemates. In addition to the booster, each player added 2 cards from their stock to the draft pool. 8 cards had to be left in the pool and these were taken out of the tournament. This new clause was intended to stop the same lousy cards from being recycled as happened last year. While this worked to some extent, it was not tough enough - see the separate article which analyses the cards discarded in this way.
The idea of the discard/draft is to encourage the players to discard useful cards - a form of limited trading. Next time, I plan to forbid discarding of sites and require players to discard a card for each card drawn from the draft pool. This will keep the pool at a constant size, and players may continue to exchange cards with the pool until there is a round of passes. This may, at last, result in fairly well-tuned decks as the tournament progresses. Besides the choice of booster, another incentive for an early result was that, if players could squeeze in an extra game, they got an extra Flashpoint booster to draft. These extra games did not score tournament points though.

Despite these booster drafts, players still had to make the most of their starters. This led to many cards being used that do not normally see action - the Dragon Fighter and Hopping Vampire were big cards for several players. One amusing sight was One Hundred Names packed into a Speedboat - "boat people!", someone quipped. If a game did not see much action then deck size became important. One game stalemated quickly and the players then started accumulating vast amounts of power - about 40 each. Even the sudden death rules couldn't break up the deadlock in this game because most of the players were down to the last cards in their deck. This game finished in a 4-way tie.
Some of the games were run with three players and these always produced a result fairly quickly. I think that this is the best size for a sealed deck tournament and I favour making this the standard in future. This will mean more games with more wins inside the distance and this should make the tournament score-board more exciting.

There was a physical score-board (with a Marked for Death card for the leader). At the end of the tournament it read:

    John Davis        20
    Arthur Howlin     12
    Alex Wargacki     10
    Dave Martin       9
    Daniel Vandenberg 9
    Andy Holt         8
    Stephen Biggs     6
    Ron Wheelhouse    6
    Tom Kassel        5
    Neil Penfold      5
    Michael Rogers    4
    Bill Dawbarn      2
    Robert Lee        2
    Andrew Merton     2
    Alex Thorn        1
    Alan G?           1
    Yuit Sum Vong     1
    Andrew Trickett   0
    Eugene McFadden   0

The final game was a 3-player showdown between John, Alex and Arthur. Arthur had been leading throughout the tournament and, as I watched the final, I could see why. As he developed his position, it played like a pre-built cop deck - cop foundation characters, Undercover Cop and a Police Station. Alex was playing with cops too and soon made a powerful attack with John's help to seize the Police Station. John had been beaten down earlier but this key battle allowed John to restore his position and, with his own powerful cards, like the Tranquil Persuader, he was soon able to make a winning attack. See the accompanying article for the details of John's winning deck. With 4 victories inside the distance, John was clearly a worthy winner. The prizes for this success were the makings of an Omni deck, a Ting Ting power counter and a White Ninja. John now joins the ranks of major Shadowfist tournament winners - well done.

Daniel Vandenberg deserves a mention as most promising rookie. He missed the first two rounds in order to play in a Settlers tournament. But as soon as he joined us, he racked up two quick victories with the aid of his MVP - the Queen of the Darkness Pagoda and so nearly made the final. He is exactly the sort of young player that this tournament was designed to encourage and I hope we see more of him in future.

Last modified: January 23, 1998.
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