Gods Unchained's largest prize pool tournament so far, The Infinite Mana League S1 Main Event (8MLS1ME for short, lol), just wrapped up, with [Octopus] Geno taking down everything. At 8M and E1337, we want to make these tournament series recurring, hence the "S1" for Season 1. Season 2, which will be some time in 2022, will be a new series with potentially different tournaments with different formats. Team leagues? High-roller events? Region-specific tournaments to facilitate faster matchups? Definitely thinking about it ;).
For the past month I've spent a lot time preparing, organizing, running, and coaching players for this tournament. Somehow everyone in my real life has not abandoned me yet. I wanted to braindump some of my thoughts about Season 1 as we prepare for what's next in competitive GU.
The Good
Optimizing the player experience: We want to host high-quality tournaments for GU. This means improving how players feel when they participate in our events. I think we did a great job on GU-specific tooling: In Season 1, we introduced deck registration and God ban tools for GU. My plan was to introduce one new element per tournament, so that we can soon put on what I believe are the most competitive tournaments possible (without overwhelming players): Swiss, Conquest Bo5s with locked decklists and the ability to ban one of your opponent's decks. We have the means, it's simply up to player appetite at this point.
The Show (tournament casting): I think part of a good player experience is also having your games shown to a global fanbase, elevating your name and reputation in the process. Shout out to [8M] CopperPitch, who worked long hours casting a ton of games on stream, with the Final 8 preserved on YouTube forever. Towards the end, we tried making this more of a show, not just a game cast. To that end, I made some player interviews/intros which were pretty well received given I'd never really edited videos before. CopperPitch added really cool transitions, layouts, and organized a co-casting crew throughout the tournament. I'd like to keep expanding on this concept in the future, but with someone else at the video production helm as opposed to myself :).
Highest level competition: While there are always upsets, everyone who made it deep into the tournament deserved to be there. The whole point of a high-entry free tournament was to create a competitive environment to showcase the best of the best in GU. No gimmicks, like who's the best with F2P decks, or best when X, Y or Z cards are banned. We threw everyone into the gauntlet, wished them luck, and the best prevailed. I'm really glad the later stages were highlighted by tournament and ladder veterans alike, with some surprising decks brought out late in the tournament. One of the lesser known names in the Round of 8 was Nackarub, who at the moment is ranked #14 in our Power Rankings and #26 in our Legacy Rankings. According to our data, he's legitimately a top 20 player in the game over a huge sample size. I'm glad he made it as far as he did. Meanwhile, the entire Top 4 consisted of absolute tournament legends.
Lysander's Mercy: Geno brought a Control Light deck in his semifinal match against cautionfun and won with ease and in style, mostly because of Lysander's Mercy. A day later, Lysander's Mercy jumped 2x in card price. It's really amazing how these high-profile casts can showcase new tech and cause a ripple in the card market.
The Bad
Month-long duration: With eight total rounds, it was hard for us to avoid a long tournament given the global nature of the game and making sure we gave everyone enough time to get their games in. Because we were forced into a long tournament, it meant having to maneuver around anticipated balance patches as well as a falling GODS price. If we expected there to be a balance patch (or multiple) within the span of our tournament, how could we lock decklists without forcing everyone to re-upload decks mid-way through the tournament? We decided it would be easier to make decks unlocked, which led to some very exciting results, but felt slightly uncompetitive to the alternative.
I intended for an $18-20 USD entry fee (6 GODS tokens) when we announced the tournament. By the time the tournament registration ended, 6 GODS tokens was worth $13. By the time the tournament finished, 6 GODS was worth $7.40. Our prize pool shrunk about $2000 over the course of the tournament. Having said that, we have no regrets. Being able to send/receive transactions without any fees via TokenTrove.com and Immutable X is a godsend. We had 182 players, could you imagine how much would've been sacrificed to fees if we forced everyone to send us money on Layer 1 (and again when we paid everyone out?).
Random seeding: I overlooked how bad this would end up being. I assumed random would be fine, after all, most tournaments to date have had random seeding, and the most recent non-random one was seeded by Fakemews for his own tournament, and we knew wouldn't get away with something like that for a tournament in which our own 8M players would participate.
In reality, we could have devised an algorithmic seeding system. After all, we host detailed ranking systems for GU on infinitemana.gg. But I overlooked it while preparing for everything else. Our future tournaments will have an algorithm built to determine seeding in a more fair, competitively healthy way.
As my punishment, we ended up having four 8M players in the same bracket prior to the Ro64. At least no one could accuse us of rigging the brackets ;).
Work with us
This was originally part of "The Good", but it was so good that it merited its own section. Hosting the tournament was quite a bit of work, but what I was blown away by was the assistance I received not just from co-organizer [8M] Fastexe, but also [FF] Stack15 for data consulting, VeteranHoplite for sponsoring viewer giveaways, TheProfesserf for agreeing to be a neutral community judge, and everyone else who helped me in some shape or form to make the tournament operate smoother.
To that end, I'd like to shamelessly promote the idea that we're looking for people who love this game and community if they'd like to volunteer to be part of the Infinite Mana League in some way. For instance, helping manage the tournament, helping sponsor it in some form, developing creative assets like graphics and promotional videos, and so on. There won't be any compensation (yet)—8M is sponsored but those funds go to our pro roster; no one gets compensated directly to host these tournaments—but I think it's a great way to get involved with us and help build the future of competitive GU. Please message me on Discord at saintsintosea#9137 if you're interested!
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Excellent job with the tournament! I like the idea of a team league as it's never been done before in GU. My teammate, Clutch, plays for his college Hearthstone team and they have a cool format where each team works together to pilot a deck against each other. I think this could be possible with GU via streaming on discord.
This was actually my biggest concern with team leagues, like "how do we make sure it's not just player X from team Y playing all games for their team?", but one way to get around it is to willingly embrace it the same way Hearthstone Collegiate works like you said
Really enjoyed catching the tournament streams and hanging out with everyone in chat. It's such a different feel from regular ranked play. A lot more deck variety and mental games played in deck selection before the matches even start.
LOTS of mental gaming for the deck queueing. An art of its own, but I also prefer locked decklists myself :P. As Fakemews put it, it's still a lot of strategizing, just at different parts of the tournament (locked lists: before the tournament starts. Unlocked lists: before each game starts)
Had a blast casting all these matches, and glad it all came together like it did! Can't wait for S2!!!
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Well run event, thank you for involving me; very happy to help the community have a fun and great time.