Tournament Report - YGG Internal Tournament Cycle

Heya Splinterlanders :)

Tournaments have been quite a hot topic recently, at least around the community and in the circle of people I hang out with. We had a nice conversation during my Thursday Splinerlands.tv stream, similar topics were discussed on @roguepatton stream as well. Even at our internal streamer's meeting, there is a quite big group of streamers who are strongly interested in the development of this aspect of the game. Some of them regularly run tournaments every week. And there is even an idea to run the tournament among all splinterlands.tv streamer. I love that idea.

BUT, unfortunately, the tournament options are very limited now, we actually have only 2 types of modes: anytime (usually 24 hours) and single elimination live tournament. Both of them are not so interesting, and to have more fun usually, you need to use some 3rd party tools (for example to have some Swiss tournament experience), and it is still so far from an ideal solution.

Fortunately, sometimes there is some alternative :). Yield Guild Games with e-sport committee decided to run some tournaments with more complex structures. I will not go deeper into this, if you are interested you can read more here.

For sure it will be not an easy task to qualify for the finals, my chances are not so big. But still, it is a lot of fun to compete with so great players. I will present some interesting battles from the second qualifier for the wild silver tournament. I had some luck and manage to get top 4.

First battle :

Let's start from the loss :). The battle was quite interesting, a new strategy that seems much stronger with Lily even in the silver league, but here it still worked very well. Kralus is a beast with that setup with the option to get buff from martyr. I used quite a standard setup, which is much better with Immortalis, unfortunately, here we got Silent Summoner ruleset. Healing, and high speed with enrage were enough to dominate that battle.

Second battle :

You know me guys, I'm so a big fan of Immortalis. In my opinion now for the lower league meta is one of the best summoners in the whole game. Immortalis is the king, but still beatable. Here we have an example, the opponent tried to utilize a lower-speed earth monster in the reverse speed rulesets. The setup is nice, I'm not a big fan to use Spirit of the Forest here. It's a great card but with so much speed it could be difficult to use it efficiently. It was a very close fight, I think if the opponent will use any card with Protect ability and got some armor for his monsters, I would get much more problems.

Third battle :

This battle is the perfect example, that newer set cards are enough powerful to beat some older powerful cards :). The opponent brought a nice collection of legendary cards. For our side I concentrate on magic damage monsters, and of course best option for snipe target Venari Marksrat. Even with a blast ruleset, it is in my opinion very viable option. Runemancer Kye is along with Ilthain the best card in RiftWatcher Set. Even with receiving earthquake damage, our team was just too powerful, and the opponent didn't stand a chance.

Tournaments for me is always one of the best option to have fun in every game. I like to compete, I like to play for some stakes. In Splinterlands this aspect of the game is treated with neglect, I have mentioned several times about that problem, and we got some ideas to solve it. You can read some of them in my previous article. I don't want to repeat myself. For sure we need more options, Swiss structure, limited (draft, sealed) tournaments, and more Open/Ghost cards tournaments (for new players to get better experience). Now as Rougepatton mentioned that if you want to comment live tournaments, the only option is single elimination, which is so bad for players. You join, have no luck, and lost the first match, and the whole tournament is finished for you.

Another topic is prize structure, now usually there is no chance to lose anything when you sign up for the tournament. With no big effort, you can usually get twice SPS you paid for entrance. In normal circumstances, players should pay the entry fee, and only the best one should have the option to get some rewards, and most of the rewards should be covered by that fees.

I really hope that after Lands dev team will pay more attention to that topic. As I observed more and more people who still stayed in Splinterlands Ecosystem are more interested in serious e-sport development.

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 :)