During the tournament
Mage Noir competitions use a Swiss-system tournament. Players play 3 rounds, followed by a faceoff between the 4 best players.
What is a Swiss-system tournament?
It is a tournament system where players are not eliminated between rounds.
During the first round, players are paired randomly to face each other.
Victory, defeat or draws award players with an amount of points. Players are then paired according to the amount of points they have in the next rounds.
There are 2 main advantages to this system:
- It allows you to determine a top 4 after 3 rounds.
- Since there are no eliminations, each player can have at least 3 Mage Noir rounds.
After 3 rounds, the 4 players with the highest amount of points face each other.
Unfolding of a round
A round is a best of 3. Meaning players will play Mage Noir games until one of them gets 2 victories.
Between each game, players may modify their deck with cards from their side decks.
They may add or replace cards from their deck, as long as:
- Cards come from their deck or side deck
- The deck they play with during games has at least 40 cards.
Players have 45 minutes to finish a round.
What happens when time runs out?
The current player finishes their turn. Then the other player has one last turn.
Once this is done, the player with the most health points wins the current game. If they have the same amount of HP, then this game is a draw.
This will determine the outcome of this round.
The winner of this round is awarded 3 points.
The loser of this round is not awarded any points.
If the round is a draw, both players get 1 point.
Determining matchups
We recommend using online tools like Toornament for this.
If you want to do it by hand though, for the first round, players are matched against each other randomly.
For subsequent rounds, try to follow those rules as much as possible:
- You can't have 2 players facing each other twice during the tournament (not counting the faceoff between the final 4)
- You should try to pair players with a similar amount of points together.
- It is not always possible to follow these rules exactly so you can pair players with a slightly different amount of points.
Determining the top 4
After 3 rounds, the 4 players with the most points access the semifinals.
If there is a tie between 2 players for the 4th place, check the sum of their previous opponent's points. The one with the highest sum is chosen as the 4th player.
Unfolding of finals
The 4 remaining players are matched randomly.
Matches are a best of 3. We usually don't put a time restriction there, but if you're short on time, you may set a 45 minutes time restriction during the final matches.
Once the first match is done, both winners play against each other to see who's the champion.
The 2 remaining players play against each other to determine 3rd place.
