On January 14, 2024, 22 players battled during 5 Swiss rounds and 3 playoff rounds to become the winner of the first “Technomonstrual”, a Premodern event that will take place once a month in Gremio de Dragones, a store in Valencia, Spain, where the Technoliga is played every Saturday.
In this tournament, we tried the Spanish Tournament System, so the player that ended first after the Swiss phase got a bye for the playoff. Therefore, 7 players qualified for that phase instead of 8.
This system achieves two things:
- It prevents players from intentionally drawing in some situations in which they would under the typical tournament structure. Especially, it encourages the most important Swiss games to be played, those among the undefeated players in the last rounds.
- It properly rewards the players that do better in the Swiss phase, by giving them a bigger margin of error, a bye, instead of considering both phases as almost separate tournaments.
There was some scepticism about trying this system, so I “bribed” the players to try it, by adding some sealed booster packs to the prize pool.
Bribes were properly kept in a not-so-discreet suitcase. At the end of each Swiss round, a pack was given to a randomly selected winner.
So did the Spanish Tournament System theory hold or what happened in practice? These were the standings after 4 rounds:
If this were a regular tournament with top 8, we would expect all of the 6 first players to intentionally draw as there’s not enough incentive to play. But, thanks to using STS, the first two players were encouraged to play, as the winner wouldn’t just qualify for the playoff but would get a bye, therefore skipping the quarterfinals.
In a slightly bigger event, in which more players had 9 points at the end of the fourth round, STS would be even better as it would have forced the 9-point players to play the last round too.
So what happened in practice? First of all, we had lunch:
When we came back, Luis’ 4-colour Stasis punished me for making some terrible plays. Before losing that round, I won 2-1 against Survirock, 2-1 against Thresgeddon, 1-0 against a similar deck and 2-0 against Storm. These were the final Swiss standings:
In the quarterfinals, I lost with Oathclysm against Juan’s Storm deck.
Edu’s Fluctuator lost against Markus’ Black Power.
And Pepsi, the tournament organizer, won against Vicente in a Burn mirror.
In the semifinals, Luis won against Pepsi.
Juan Vilar won against Markus.
In the finals, Luis won 2-0, ending the tournament with a perfect record.
Top 7 Decks
