Tournament Report - New Tournament System

Heya Splinterlanders :)

It's been really a while since the last tournament report was published. And finally, we have some occasion to do this, due to new tournament system that was introduced recently. So let's check what it looks like and check some battles from my first tournament with new rules.

So what are the changes? You can read all the information about The Massive Tournament Overhaul Post here.
In short: the cost is practically free :), there are CP and SPS requirements, which were unfied and standardized. The format is another interesting thing, we have modern, wild, and two different random sets (which will be in rotation). The last, but maybe the most important is prize structure, it's much more steep, and only the best players can get any rewards now
Let's check the example:

As you can see, just 64 top players will get any rewards, and almost 500 people signed up for that tournament. It will be through tournament :)

Here are the current results:

When I was writing that article only 5 matches were resolved, and my score wasn't bad. Of course, with that many players to get any rewards you can probably lose only 2-3 games overall. Another aspect of that format, it's the randomness of the opponent. Sometimes you will have to face the top 5 players, sometimes you can just get bye, because the opponent will not even put the team. I will talk more about it in summary section.

Of course, I will present some battles from those tournaments, I haven't faced any of top players in the first round, but still, it will be not easy to reach the second round. The battles were quite interesting, but still I need to wait for more results.

First battle :

The battle was quite close, we had some lucky moments and some important misses :). Moxian Rebel is so a strong card, I see it in many battles, but here I think it wasnt the best choice, at least at that position and that setup. We had quite a big damage advantage, and speed as well. I like Corsair Bosun card, very high damage, and Reflection Shield is very useful, as you can see opponent had a similar feeling. I wonder what if Chaos Dragon's position was more deeper, what is your opinion ?

Second battle :

Another battle with reverse speed, this time Little League ruleset limits our mana drastically :). As you can see on the screenshot, we had another lucky hit, which was quite significant in eliminating the most damage-dealing monster :).
Both players had similar setups, my opponent used a double tank, whereas the second monster just sit and wait for its turn. I'm not a big fan of that strategy. I used just Magic Monster instead and went full damage :). It was just more efficient strategy for this battle :).

Third battle :

The last battle for today and the opponent brought Yodin to the table. Of course, now is not the time when Yodin was almost unbeatable. We have some good tools like Reflection Shield ability, and some other anti-range cards like Ilthain for example :). Of course, you cannot just underestimate that card, and the battle was still close.
Dumacke Orc is an amazing card for Equalizer Ruleset and was one reason for winning that battle. I'm not sure why Mantoid was so close to the tank position. If you look carefully, one of its attacks does a lot of damage to our three units. But fortunately we manage to kill all units before it and later it was just waiting for death :).

My last question from the tournament report post was:

"Where we can see anything new for tournament scene ? Any guesses ?"

And actually, it took a while, but finally, we have some changes. Maybe it's not a perfect solution, but it's a good beginning.

So far we can see some positive aspects: more players in the tournament, all players can play any league tournament, so that will be more variety of people playing, so more diversity and more fun :)

It's still not perfect, the most annoying thing is the lack of a proper format that guarantees a fairer distribution of players based on the score and skill in a specific tournament. It's not easy to find a good solution when the battle is resolved in "offline" mode. Maybe we need just more "online" tournaments with the swiss system?
Or maybe you can find a solution to that problem?

I hope you like this kind of battle and strategy presentation. More strategy analysis, discussion, and prediction games you can find on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. You can check the schedule here

If you have any comments, please do not hesitate. Do you think I could improve anything just tell me :)