Pattern Recognition #329 - Slow Grow Points Proposal, Part 1

Features Pattern Recognition

berryjon

27 June 2024

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

And welcome back everyone! So for the past few months, I've been mulling a question that I promised I would look into and try to come up with an alternate solution to them. Well, today I'm presenting my first public draft of my conclusions! And you get to read them and hopefully provide feedback!

You see, I've been thinking about the Slow Grow Tournament and how to better build the points system to encourage more than just ... let's call it optimization of a deck to grind points, and then having the Judge try to apply patch after patch to keep the leaders from running away with things because they played the points, rather than the game.

To that end, I'm going to divide my proposal into two parts. The Constants and the Variables. The former are the things I am going to be going over today, while the other will be next time

The Constant Points

These are the core points to the tournament, and the ones that will be applied evenly and without fail across the whole of the contest. Their purpose is to provide a reliable and relatable baseline for getting points each week without needing to go too far into deck building and switching things out each week.

I'm going to be breaking these down one by one and explaining how they work, and why I'm adjusting them - or not - from the previous years.

Welcome! There are some Rule 0's regarding points that need to be made clear before we go any further! The first and most important is that if you are at a table with someone who is not in the tournament, then they cannot score points! However, you can score points on them. For example, if a non-Tournament player comes in second, then they do not take the second place points. The next Slow Grow player in order will take the second place points.

Second, if you have any questions, ASK THE JUDGE! He can clarify how these work. Don't assume anything!

Just clarifying an important aspect to the game, especially as players drop out in later weeks. There should be no punishing players for having their precon decks and being pitted against someone with a hyper-tuned deck of utter destruction.

Third, rounds will be organized not by points, but by the order in which tables are finished. The first table to hand in their paper will be seated with the first place player at table 1, the second place at table two, the third at 3 and the fourth at table 4. The second table will have their first place player at table five, and so on and so forth. Attempting to get creative with when you hand yours in will result in the Judge getting creative!

One of the major problems each year is that players wing up playing the same people over and over again. This is the fairest way I can think of to break up groups and tables and avoid repetitious repetition. And its faster for the Judge to allocate rather than have everyone wait for themto score points each and every round and table people that way.

RANKINGS!

 - 4 points for first place.
 - 3 points for second.
 - 2 points for third.
 - 1 point for fourth or fifth.

If you're at a table with six players, get the Judge to break you into two tables of three!

The basic points for the end results haven't changed, and shouldn't either. This is the score that every other point gain or loss will be measured against. I am clarifying that in a five person table, the player in last still gets a point, and if you have six, get it into two tables of three.

YOUR DECK!

These can only be scored once per week, and are awarded when you deck-check with the Judge. However, these cannot be scored on Week 1, only on Weeks 2 and later.
 - 1 point for using one of the Commanders from the Precon. While you can change your Commander between weeks, this point is awarded if you stick with one of the ones that comes in your precon.
 - 2 points for having an unmodified deck! Yes, that's right. If you don't change anything in your deck, you get two points for free!
 - 1 point if your deck contains no more than one of the following: Sol Ring, Arcane Signet, Mana Crypt, Lion's Eye Diamond, Gaea's Cradle or any other source of 'Fast Mana'. If there are any questions, ask the Judge! This list is not comprehensive, and they will be checking and updating as needed.

This is to reward players for sticking with their deck. I've noticed that a lot of top players over the years tend to switch out their Commander for something with a bit more... pizzazz, and I know I've been tempted to do the same as well. Please note that these points are additive, so if you bring your unmodified precon to week two or later, you score three points, straight up. This should help offset your probable lower rankings against 'better' decks.

I'm still tempted to replace that last two pointer with "+2 points: Make no changes since last week", but that would require a lot more record keeping and the Judge checking. Just a simple binary option is easier for them.

On the other hand, I'm also temped to make that scale with the week. That the longer you run with a straight precon, the more points you'll get. On the other other hand, the gripping hand, you might say if you're a fan of classic SciFi, going all six weeks with the default deck would net you an extra 15 points.

Would that matter? Or would it just be seen as pity points?

Lastly, as a way to discourage but not penalize stupidly powerful mana sources, players can earn a point each week by simply not having them. Or by running a deck that doesn't have them in the first place and thus don't need to cut them. You can still have one, but that's it.

GAME ACTIONS!

 - 1 point for scoring the first Combat Damage in the game.
 - 2 points for killing an opponent with Commander Damage. This is per opponent, not per game!
 - -1 point for each opponent killed past the first with Poison damage.

First up, some Combat points. The Commander Kill is a traditional one, as taking that and then coming in third (with the person you killed in fourth) gives you 4 points, or equal to that of coming first. Which isn't bad. Taking out a second player either requires you running away with the game, or you get very very lucky. I did this a couple years back, and had a very good run all the way to the top table, so I know it's possible.

However, the First Combat damage - the First Blood - rule is a weird one. People will take it if possible, but then not bother with any more combat for a while as they advance their game plan. It was a... prestige point. Almost like a checkbox that needed to be gotten before someone else did. And two years ago, someone took a deck that had a commander with a MV of 1 to they could always cast it on the first turn and get this point. They got it 13 out of 15 games, and both times they didn't, they were against me and my Cats deck. I want to leave it in, but I also am not sure of its purpose anymore. Does it actually add anything to the game or to encourage creative ideas? Or is it just a legacy point? I don't know.

Actually, what I would like to see is the correlation between people getting this point and their end result at the table.

And the new anti-poison point is because Blightsteel was just a monster when it hit the table, and was winning me games single-handedly. Let's put a damper on that, shall we? Sure, one kill is fine, but I want to stall that out for longer games.

 - 1 point to each player for finishing before time is called. This counts for all players, even ones already removed from the game, and will apply if the active player wins the game effective immediately on their turn when time is called.
 - -1 point if the Judge has called time, and then called time again. Hurry up! This applies to everyone still playing. Players out of the game are not penalized. The Judge can also decide not to apply this to every player if one player is the problem. THIS IS REPEATABLE.

These are the timing rules. Finish early? Great! Enjoy your bonus point for not wasting time and dithering. Take too long and you're holding up everyone else? Take a hit to encourage you to keep playing. Of note, because when time is called, each player still gets a turn, so for the penalty to be called, each remaining player needs to be taking their time. But if one player if holding everything up because they are just spinning wheels? Well, the Judge can reserve the punishment for just them. And if they keep going? The penalties stack.

This is also why I have the tables for each round be sorted as people report them. To avoid holdups like this. It annoys me when players take the rest of the tournament hostage to their poor play.

 - 2 points for casting your Commander 4 or more times in a game. However, if you sacrifice, self-bounce or otherwise remove your own commander from the battlefield, the next cast doesn't count.
 - 3 points for destroying/exiling/returning to the Command Zone a Commander each opponent owns. You have to do this for each opponent, and if an opponent has multiple Commanders thanks to Partners or Backgrounds, then only one needs to be affected.

I'm removing last year's "Keep your Commander around" points because, well, everyone got it eventually. Me running a Planeswalker last year in the form of Saheeli Rai was partly because of this rule, and it was stupidly easy for me to get it.

I did like the encouragement for interaction by removing Commanders, and upped the points from 2 to 3 in the process. I also made it clear that you only need to hit one partner, not both; and hitting both owned by the same player doesn't mean you get to skip an opponent.

 - 4 points for losing the game due to a spell, permanent or ability you own but do not control!
 - -3 points for winning the game via an Alternate Win Condition before every player has had six turns.
 - -1 point for every Boardwipe or Mass Bounce after the Second. THIS IS REPEATABLE, and counts all players! However, this penalty doesn't apply if one player has more affected permanents than everyone else put together, or if all players agree that the board wipe is justified due to the game state and not just setting everyone back for no good reason.
 - -1 point for each extra turn you take past the first for each full pod rotation. However, if someone else gives you an extra turn, then you don't lose a point. 

The first point is because while I thought the idea of committing glorious suicide was fun, in practice it was "I kill myself, take my points and go", which made me feel bad as the other player at the table where someone would be rewarded for telling everyone else to f- right off. No. However, my brother also rolled up with a Zedruu the Greathearted *f-etch* deck, so I thought, why not give that a chance? If someone steals something from you, copies it, gets it out of your graveyard, or you just outright give it to them, and then you die? That's fun (hopefully) and should be rewarded a little. Shades of the time I had a Traxos, Scourge of Kroog deck, and my opponents took turns passing it around and hitting me in the face with my own Commander.

Second is intended to put the brakes on solitaire combo pieces like Thassa's Oracle and Demonic Consultation, or other such win conditions. 6 turns should hopefully give people a chance to react when it happens and have the resources to do so. But I don't want to shut them down entirely.

The third point is basically the "I don't want to have to rebuild again" penalty. But I wrote in two outs. One where someone is so far ahead of everyone else that a wipe is the only reasonable response, or if the table agrees to not penalize the player for it. And it scales. -1 point for the third. -2 points for the fourth. And it doesn't matter who casts them. Let's end the game people, not start all over when there's ten minutes left.

Lastly, this is there to stop Tivit infinite Turn, Kill everyone with Commander Damage combos. Or just taking an absurd amount of turns in a row. Everyone gets a turn before you get your next extra turn. I'm thinking of putting down that once Time is called at the end of the round, there will be no extra turns to prevent abuse as well.

And there you have it, my proposed core points for the Slow Grow tournament. It's simple, it tries to keep abuse down without going overboard on it. But these are, as I said, the Constants. No, not in the Bioshock meaning. Because next week is when I reveal my grand stupidity. Well, either that or utter brilliance. You'll see.

The idea is to cover all the general bases without forbidding anything, or encouraging bad behavior in the tournament setting. And once I get out my Variables next week, I really do want to hear what you guys all think of it. Please!

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!