Greetings all,
As my focus is people that are not invested in the Magic world, I figured I should do a post on what the heck happens at Magic tournaments, for people that have never been at one.
This is part one of two, the second is going to be “What do Judges do at tournaments?” – this is “What do players do at tournaments?”, and hopefully should give you some idea of what people go to tournaments to do, and what they get out of it.
Pre-tournament
We are going to start the day at a local Pro Tour Qualifier – you may hear people call these “PTQs” – the winner is going to get an invitation to a Pro Tour and a plane ticket to fly there, and the top finishers will get booster packs in varying amounts. (I’ll talk more about prizes later.) This event is going to be very small for a Pro Tour Qualifier (to make math easier), with only 40 people showing up. (My local Pro Tour Qualifiers usually have 160+ players, but the math works the same and is easier with less players.)
People start filtering in to the store or other venue at about 9am. This is an average start time for players for a large number of events – smaller ones start later, because they have to run less rounds to get an undefeated player. Event registration opens at 9am, but people generally show up as close to the end of registration as they feel they can. If the event is scheduled to actually start at 10am, registration will close at 9:45am, so the big line forms at about 9:30am.
When you get in line to register, you need two things – your DCI number and your entry. Entry to my local Pro Tour Qualifiers (PTQs) is usually $30 for constructed and $40 for limited.
Terminology note: “constructed” means you bring your own deck that you built at home, and “limited” means you open some product on the spot and build a deck from the cards you open on site; your options for building a deck are more limited – I’ll mention a few differences related to them as we go on, so this is something a lot of players pay attention to. The big difference to note right now is price, which is because the people playing limited are getting six booster packs, which have a MSRP of $3.99 each.
The DCI number is your unique tournament identifier – “DCI” used to mean “Duelists Convocation International” but the actual meaning has been dropped at this point, and it is just some alphabet soup for the group that regulates how tournaments run.
Once you give your money and DCI number to the person running the event, you hold on until everyone gets entered.
Tournament Start
At this point is when things diverge a bit.
If you are in a Constructed event, you will need to have a decklist filled out before round 1. This has the contents of the deck you are playing, your name and DCI number, and gets handed to a Judge when you sit down for the first round of play. Some larger events have a separate player meeting, where you sit alphabetically first – this is to save time sorting decklists later, and make sure all the players are there before they sit to play the first round.
If you are in a Limited event, you start the day by getting some unopened Magic product. Almost always this is six booster packs. Then you open these, and record every card in them on a checklist sheet made specifically for this purpose. You then swap these to someone else, and they become the cards they will build a deck from. This is to prevent people from adding whatever cards they want to a Limited tournament. The six boosters worth of cards you end up with is called your “limited pool” by players. You will likewise get a pool someone else registered and build a deck from that, and check off what cards you are playing on the checklist you get handed along with the pool. You turn this list in to a Judge, who will hold onto it for the rest of the day.
Round 1
Now it’s time for round 1. Pairings are put up on sheets of paper, sorted alphabetically, and you go to them and find your name. The sheet has two pieces of information in addition to your name – your table number and your opponent. The room has numbers on every table, and you play at a different numbered table every round. You play one person, and you play best 2 out of 3 games. A Judge will come by and place a slip of paper on your table that has the name of you and your opponent, assuming you are at the correct table.
Terminology note: a “round” is all the people playing at once. Each pair of players plays a “match” consisting of 2-3 games. Think of it like a tennis match – the two people playing are trying to win just against each other, and this determines their standing relative to the whole tournament.
You fill out the result slip when done with your match, turn it in at the main event stage where someone is handling pairings on a computer, and wait until the other matches in the round are done. There is a clock running publicly that shows you how much time is left in the round – rounds run for 50 minutes of play at most events. The amount of time rounds run for generally determines how long the day is going to be. Rounds of 50 minutes usually take about an hour (sometimes a bit more) to finish and have pairings up for the next round, which gives a pretty solid prediction of how long the day will go.
If you happen to go to time and can’t finish the game you are in, that game is a draw. This could leave the match in a draw, if it is the third game. Draws are an acceptable outcome from a tournament perspective, but are not great for the players – a draw counts as a third of a win when figuring out your standing, so they are better than a loss, but not by much.
Aside on pairings and records: You play people with the same record whenever possible. If it is not possible (for instance if there are an odd number of people with the same record as you), someone with your record is going to play a person with a similar record (usually one loss more or less, sometimes someone with one loss more or less and also a draw). This is usually invisible to you, but it can end up creating tournament impact. Eventually when we need to get your standing for prizes, there will be people with the same record that need that tie broken – the first (and usually only meaningful) tiebreaker is “strength of record”, ie the records of your opponents, including the matches after you played them. If you have to play someone with one more loss than you, your record will likely be worse. Likewise, if you played someone who had one more win, your record will likely be better.
So, you play rounds. How many? There is a formula, but it is basically one more round than the power of two you just went over at local events, and a more complicated formula at bigger events. (So a 40 person event is above 32 and less than 64, so you play 6 rounds.) Grand Prix events play 9 rounds their first day and 6 their second.
Once the normal rounds are done, there is a “cut”. Everyone but some number of people are dropped from the event, and it moves to single elimination matches. At the huge majority of events, the cut removes all but the 8 players with the best record, which are then referred to as the “top 8”.
Aside on the tournament structure: If you are familiar with chess at all, this is going to seem pretty similar to a chess tournament, and for good reason. The general tournament structure is lifted wholesale from a standard way of running chess events, called the Swiss tournament structure. In it you run parallel matches, and get paired based on tournament standing, aiming to have one undefeated player after the Swiss rounds are done. Magic adds the top 8, which makes the format something called “modified Swiss”. In general the structure means you have to get no more than two losses to make the top 8 elimination rounds (and no more than one person with two losses makes the top 8 at most events), then win three more rounds to actually win.
If you make top 8, there is another divergence between Limited and Constructed – the top 8 of a Limited event will hold a draft (drafting is an entire article in and of itself, I’ll talk about it later), and play with their new draft decks. This adds about another hour to draft and build draft decks.
How long does this take?
The general goal is to have each round take an hour. The length of the whole tournament thus depends on the number of players. I mentioned before that you play rounds roughly based on the power of 2 less than your number of players, so that determines the base time for the tournament. The deck registration portion of a limited event is a bit more than an hour as well, which makes limited events run a little longer.
That local tournament we are using with 40 players will thus be 6 hours of everyone playing, and up to three more post top 8 cut, plus an extra hour at start of day and another extra hour during top 8 if you are playing limited. Rounds can take a bit longer than an hour in some circumstances, so this is going to be an all-day event if you are there for the finals.
Math says (and experience agrees) that this local event would be 9-12 hours for a player doing well, depending on the event – you can drop at any time, so it could be shorter if you lose a lot early and decide to go eat ice cream instead of playing after you can’t make top 8 any longer.
A Grand Prix runs two days, and day 1 always has 9 rounds of swiss, so you are looking at 10-12 hours of play on the first day of most Grand Prix events. This is a long time to be playing Magic, and a lot of people are exhausted at the end of it. Then if you are winning you come back the next day for 6 rounds of swiss, then a top 8. There are more complicated things going on in day 2 of a Grand Prix (multiple drafts for limited events), so let’s just use 9 hours as the minimum time for day 2 of the event, and it can go up from there.
Sweet, we are done playing! Now what?
Most events give out prizes starting once the Swiss rounds are done. My local events give out prizes based on your record after the Swiss rounds, and more prizes above and beyond that to the players that make top 8. Prizes are either static and pre-announced, or scale based on attendance – if they are the latter, you usually find out the prizes during round 2 or 3, once the event staff has the time to do the math for prizes, and print and post prize payouts. At my local events, we give out 2+ boosters per player into the prize pool, and divide that down so people with positive records are getting prize – we would probably give out something like a total of 90-100 boosters to people that have 4+ wins at this local tournament, but the actual amounts would vary. In addition, some bonus packs wait to get given out until someone loses in the top 8 and their final place is determined. In the Pro Tour Qualifier example we are using, the person that wins the top 8 also gets an invitation to the Pro Tour, and a plane ticket to get there.
The big draw of most events is a big prize to first, and reasonable prizes going down some amount of places – payouts based on record usually come out to a similar thing as paying down to top 16 or 32 players.
What happens if you lose?
So what happens if you lose right away? Is your day blown? Nope. First of all, you can play all the Swiss rounds, even if you lose all of them. Some people do, because Magic is fun. Other people drop from the event after they lose two or three matches, because that eliminates them from top 8 contention.
Most events run something called “side events” – smaller events that you can get into if you lose the main event, or show up too late to play, or just want to play something smaller and faster than a hulking 12 hour day.
Side events are a major part of some tournaments, Grand Prix events have side events that are as big as some main events – the Super Sunday Series events that run on Sundays at Grand Prix will break 200 players at many Grand Prix, and there are two Super Sunday events at each Grand Prix, both of which run all day.
There are also 8-player events, where 8 players pay a small amount of money, sit down and either play constructed or limited for up to three single elimination rounds, and come get prizes based on their number of wins. These are very popular at most events, and you can count on dozens of 8-player events to happen over the course of a day at a Grand Prix.
Other stuff to note about our player day
There is no lunch break scheduled at most events – you will have to bring a packed lunch, or finish a round early and go grab food. (Or go without, but if you plan to do well getting lunch is vital.)
Some events, notably Grand Prix events, have “byes” for players that have some quality going into the event – usually this is based on either winning a special event that grants them, or having some amount of tournament success in the last year. These give you free wins for a number of rounds equal to your number of byes at the start of the day. Byes are a huge advantage for a long tournament, so if you hear someone say they had two or three byes at a Grand Prix, they are starting out ahead of most of the field.
Some multi-day events are mixed format, with both limited and constructed play either on the same day, or split across days – notably Pro Tours are multi-day and also multi-format.
Hopefully this gives you an idea of what players do over the course of an event day – look for “What do Judges do at tournaments?” coming up soon!