Setting up an EDH "tournament"
Commander (EDH) forum
Posted on Nov. 21, 2013, 8:14 p.m. by wnorris17
I am hosting my first EDH night at my house this week (10-12 people) and I am wondering what the best way to format a semi-competitive night like FNM is formatted for standard. We would like to play in a multiplayer fashion. I have heard the word "pods" mentioned before, how does that work? Thanks in advance for answering my noobish question!
Really really resist the temptation to do that. Multiplayer games of more than 4 or 5 people bog down REALLY fast.
When I was in university we famously did a Tribal tournament that was a 15 or 16 player free-for-all multiplayer game. Players would end their turn, get up and go to the store, and come back before play had gone halfway around the table. The game went for about 10 hours.
November 21, 2013 10:47 p.m.
Hey thanks a bunch for the suggestions! I like your first suggestion better as it will make things simpler, especially for the first night! Ill post how it went on saturday!
Devonin says... #2
Generally a pod is 4 players, so you could do 12 in 3 pods.
The 4 players play standard multiplayer EDH. How you score it is where it gets tricky.
The most obvious thing to do if you want to do a couple rounds is to give out say, 4, 3, 2 and 1 points in order of when they died. For multiple people dying at once, divide up the points equally. So if 1 person kills everybody at once, they get 4, and the other three split 6 points for 2 each.
Do 2 or 3 rounds, scrambling up the players, and the winner is the winner.
Another common (Though I -really- don't like it personally) scoring method is the list of achievements. You do things like award 1 point for eliminating a player, 1 point for being last one standing, and then people often go crazy giving plus and minus points for random junk in the game or to control things like comboing out. I've played in events that gave you -1 point for every extra turn beyond one you took in a row, +5 for controlling a permanent of each colour, and stuff like that.
The problem is that it rewards gross metagaming, and can leave certain high-scoring achievements unobtainable by some pods (In the one with the +5 for controlling a permanent of every colour, no pod I was in all night even -had- every colour present in decks, and the guy playing 5-colour Sliver Queen got the bonus every round and won, even though he basically got ganged out of every match first.
November 21, 2013 9:08 p.m.