2024 Istari Challenge - Hero Tournament

[sarma72]

Dear all,

After the successful testing of the new Middle-Earth (https://play.meccg.com) platform in the past months, the Organised Play committee of the Council of Elrond (CoE) have the pleasure to run the first CoE-sponsored tournament on such a platform.

This event will be a standard Swiss system format tournament following standard Council of Lorien rules (https://meccg.com/rules/tournament-policy/), but will be restricted only to the Hero alignment in order to facilitate the participation also of new or returning players. Standard CoE rulings also apply (see https://meccg.com/rules for rulings digest and collected ruling file).

- Format: The tournament will consist of 5 rounds of standard 2-deck games, with each round lasting two weeks. A schedule for the overall event is provided below.

- Deck Construction: Standard 12 hazard creature limit and 30 card sideboard size will apply. Deck integrity will be enforced automatically by the platform once you use your deck on round 1.

- Round and Game duration: Round will last two weeks, during which players will have to agree on a time to play their games. Players are free to play as long as they need to, but if time is of essence a minimum time limit of 3h should be used.

- Communications: All communication during the tournaments with and between players (pairing, reminders, clarifications etc) will take place both on discord and whatsapp, using dedicated threads and groups.

- Registration: Players will be able to register directly on the https://play.meccg.com platform, and in the process will have to provide either their discord nickname or their telephone number (or both). The link for registering is

https://play.meccg.com/tournaments/2024 ... -challenge

- Deck Choice and Locking: Once registered, players will need to select any of their decks on the play.meccg.com platform for this tournament, doing so before the registration deadline. You can update your deck any time before this deadline, but after that chosen decks will be locked for the rest of the tournament.

- Tutorials: The CoE Organised Play committee will offer tutorials for playing on play.meccg.com. Just contact the tournament organiser at sarma72@gmail.com or on discord.

= Schedule

04 March - 01 April : Registration and Deck selection (directly on https://play.meccg.com)
02 April - 14 April : Round 1
15 April - 28 April : Round 2
29 April - 12 May : Round 3
13 May - 26 May : Round 4
27 May - 9 June: Round 5

[Smaug]

Hi, just to be sure that I understand it right, no kind of card limitation, all cards existing are allowed including all promos?! Cheers Heiner

[sarma72]

Hi Heiner,

yes all cards from all MECCG sets including promos. But I'd not includes German Promos, as usual.

[Baduila]

Hi,

Ive registered, how do i submit my deck ??

[sarma72]

Hi Baduila (my fav character name!),

you can register you deck in https://play.meccg.com/tournaments/2024 ... ge#results

the rounds and results section

[sarma72]

Dear all, if you have registered for the Istari tournament, please remember to upload your deck before the registration deadline, next Thu the 28th. To do this just go to the round & results section of the tournament page (https://play.meccg.com/tournaments/2024 ... ge#results)

[sarma72]

And to be extra-clear, you can update your deck any time before the registration deadline, but after that the chosen decks will be locked for the rest of the tournament.

[sarma72]

Dear all, just a gentle reminder that the deadline for registering for this tournament AND uploading your deck is now a bit more than 24h away. Also please add your conctact information (e.g. phone for whatsapp or discord nick) when registering.

Furthermore, please note that due to large numbers we are now going to have 5 round, with tournament ending in mid June.

[sarma72]

Dear all,

Thanks a lot again for registering to our Istari Challenge tournament. We now have a record of 46 participants, who have all duly uploaded their decks for this tournament! You should have all received a message from me putting you in touch with your opponent for the first round of our tournament, which will start tomorrow and will end on Sun 14. You can find such pairing also on https://play.meccg.com/tournaments/202 ... -challenge under rounds & results, round 1.

To randomly pair you, I have sorted alphabetically the list of participants and then drawn 46 indices from 1 to 46 using this online generator and using today's date as a seed. I'm attaching a PDF showing the final result, which has then been implemented on https://play.meccg.com.

Besides direct e-mail, you can also use Discord and Whatsapp to reach each other during the tournament if you have provided either a discord nickname or mobile number. In this case, you should have already been informed accordingly on the Istari Challenge Discord thread or on the corresponding new Whatsapp group. A spreadsheet showing where to find each other is also attached (courtesy of Alvaro).

As a final note, some cards may require you to randomly reveal cards from different piles. While Kodi may eventually implement an automatic way to use these, for now the best procedure is to ask your opponent to give you a number for such cards, and for you to put them aside in reverse order, then to reveal the aside pile. For instance, with Aware of Their Ways you ask your opponent to reveal 4 cards from their discard pile. You can see there are 23 cards there, so just say or write in the char "reveal cards 2, 3, 15 and 21". Then your opponent should put the 21st, 15th, 3rd and 2nd card aside, then simply reveal it.

I hope this helps. Now, go on and have fun!

Marc

[sarma72]

Dear all, one important thing I forgot to write in my last message. When you play your next game on play.meccg.com with your next opponent - as opposed to anyone else on the platform - you should be prompted with the option to confirm that you are actually playing your tournament game. If that is the case, you should obviously click on it!