Tournament Finals Structure Promotes Stalling

Ankha wrote: I don't like randomly picking a winner. You are not playing 8 hours to have someone win randomly, it discredits the whole tournament rules.

Then get rid of the final. Make a final Swiss Round pairing for everyone. The player who got a GW on the highest table wins the tournament. Or just count the total score of all rounds.

Boris The Blade wrote:

Ankha wrote: I don't like randomly picking a winner. You are not playing 8 hours to have someone win randomly, it discredits the whole tournament rules.

Then get rid of the final. Make a final Swiss Round pairing for everyone. The player who got a GW on the highest table wins the tournament. Or just count the total score of all rounds.

Finals make the whole thing more climactic. You can seriously get 0vps round one due to some overdone cheese played by your predator, take the whole table round 2, then anything can happen in the finals, and that's only a standard 2R+F setup. Seed should allow you strategic seating in finals. If that's not enough of an advantage/reward for playing well in the previous rounds, then oh well. I agree that the current setup will reward meticulous slow play for top seed, and that the person in 5th by outcome of a die roll has it in their best interest to play faster. Even in a deck where it's a slower deck by nature, you REALLY need it to play out and get set up, because first seed is cool with everyone being 12 cards deep in their deck in 2.5 hours and getting the win.
The top seed guy/gal also knows that it is in their best interest to over-analyze and excessively evaluate every choice.

I agree with all of this.
If player are good and if judges are experienced, top seed is a curse.

I saw a few years ago a final of a big tournament (30+ players) where the player in top seed did a villein for 10 + giants blood on his Stanislava in the beginning of the game.
People kept playing like it never happened and like there was no seeds.
Obviously, he won.

kschaefer wrote: Have higher seed only affect seating. Have ties determine the winner randomly from among the tied players. There is no longer an incentive for anyone to not gain VPs in that scenario. If the table times out completely, with .5 VPs, then you have a 20% chance of winning via die roll.

I agree with this. I find the finals to be less compelling than initial rounds, in general. Allow tournaments to end in ties. I realize that many tournaments would not have a winner , a very eternal struggle thing to me. If you want to win play fast or dominate.
The concern I have is how the current finals structure interacts with the play to win notion. There is no maximizing vp in finals so it just turns into a lot of play to lose kingmaking.

In regular tournaments you don't even need "a winner" !

But even if I could conceive it I agree that having either no Champion or one determined by a dice would be anticlimatic, to say the least.

Orpheus wrote: In regular tournaments you don't even need "a winner" !

But even if I could conceive it I agree that having either no Champion or one determined by a dice would be anticlimatic, to say the least.

Do you find the time out tiebreaker champion a worthy conclusion? To me it's much like drawing a name out of a hat.