Howdy all - welcome to the (I think) third issue of Too Far North For Snow, your (not so) monthly report on the ST:CCG scene in South Africa. This issue will be mostly a series of rants and opinions (all my own), as well as some of our plans for ST:CCG in SA for the rest of the year and into next year.

First, let's get things off to a good start with the rants. Decktech. Decktech decktech decktech..... grrr. I posted a tournament report on the site for one of our local tournaments and got a lousy *2* out of 5 rating for it. I haven't read the review, so I don't know why it was rated so harshly, but it was probably justified, given the guidelines set forth by the decktech site admins. That isn't a problem. What really annoys me, though, is the kind of badly spelled drivel which gets four pip ratings from the reviewers. 'nuff said.

Moving on. News from our tournament scene: We've held two tournaments in the last month, both sanctioned, both with eight players. I was playing pretty much the same deck in both - plain old boring Romulans. The first tournament I won without any hitches, with five full wins (four 100-0). The second, I won three and *shockhorrordismay* lost two to put me in fourth. Terrible. At least now I know for sure that the standard of play is rising. New boy (only his second tournament) Craig Gainsborough-Waring picked up 8 points to win the tournament.

Something else now. We've been taking a look at how we run tournaments here in SA. It occurred to us that perhaps we could put together some sort of ruling body to sort out things like prize support, since Decipher does little or nothing (not that I'm complaining, I'm quite glad for the amount of freedom D affords us).

At this point I'll take a step backwards to explain. Cape Town will be hosting the South African nationals in September. This tournament will be sanctioned, but will not be part of Decipher's championship circuit, and as such, the winner will not receive a bye into day 2 of D-Con. According to Bruce "PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR DIRECTOR'S ID WITH ALL CORRESPONDENCE" Umene of Decipher, it is very rare for a country to be included in the championship circuit in its first year of sanctioned play. That's fine, no problems there and completely understandable - in fact, it even carries some advantages.

It allows us to run the championships over the course of two days, and in both sealed deck and constructed deck formats, so as to level the playing field for players with fewer cards. Thus it is possible for someone to finish, say, third in one tournament and still win the overall title.

During our planning for this event, we realized that we had to fund the importing of the sealed deck cards ourselves, rather than expecting all the entrants to pay in advance. To help us out, players now pay a R10,00 (Around $1.25) entry fee for our tournaments. With the number of scheduled events between now and August (the date when we'll be buying the cards, to make sure they're here), these entry fees should cover around half the costs, as well as paying for venue rental and any other hidden costs.

Three explanation paragraphs later, I can now brief you on my original topic (the ruling body thing, remember?). We came to the realization that we should be doing something every year to fund prizes for our nationals - after all, what kind of a national championships has only the two tournament foils sent out by Decipher for prizes? From there, it followed that this R10,00 entry fee should be a standard thing, and then we realized... Hey! Why not allow people to pay a lump some at the beginning of the year which would cover every tournament they enter for the entire year?

Obviously, this lump sum would have to represent a vastly reduced rate on the single tournament entry fee, or people simply wouldn't take advantage of it. The are a couple of advantages to this system:

1. The ruling body could use this money to import cards and sell them off at a profit, to increase funds, or at cost price for sealed deck tournaments

2. Things such as fliers, posters and the like could be funded off this budget

3. An incentive to directors - all tournament directors receive free membership

4. The fact that people would be paying money to play in tournaments means that they would be more likely to turn up for tournaments so as to ensure that they get their money's worth.

The directors (or whatever) of this body would have to represent the entire country (although they would be biased towards those areas which have more players). They would not be paid, and (except for the TDs and Ambassadors) would have to pay a membership just like everyone else. We'd probably have three TDs for each area with sanctioned tournaments, so that they could rotate duty as well as being able to play in tournaments with fewer than sixteen players. Of course, to prevent "just anyone" claiming free membership because they signed up as a TD with Decipher, we might have to devise a series of tests for TDs.

There are also a number of drawbacks to this system:

1. The players might reject the concept, and we just carry on as we are. As it stands, the majority of our local players haven't heard this idea. Fortunately, we have plenty of time between now and the end of the year to hear any objections out.

2. As it stands, ST:CCG in South Africa isn't big enough to support this system. We're running our fourth sanctioned tournament on the 27th of May. That's four since November 26th last year. If people are going to pay a lump sum membership, they have to play in more tournaments than that money could have paid for if they paid in smaller amounts for each tournament. What we need is enough players to support one, maybe even two, sanctioned tournaments *per week*. Since most people don't seem to be able to play more than once every two weeks or so, we might very well need a different set of people to support every second tournament. At a minimum, that's sixteen players, which we've got, but I don't think it'll work with less than twenty-five.

3. The importing cards bit - the local daylight robbers might become a little unhappy if they discovered that we were undercutting them by letting people buy from us at cost price. Since the local daylight robbers own the tables we play on, we could find ourselves with nowhere to play. A solution might be to only import sets which the daylight robbers aren't importing themselves - for instance, the daylight robbers don't realize that just because D doesn't stock BoG doesn't mean that they can't acquire boxes from places like Potomac.

If all this sounds a bit familiar, that's because MtG's DCI has been running a similar system of letting people pay for their own prizes and airfare for many a year now. This system is a bit more involved, but I got the basic concepts from the DCI.

Moving on - I mentioned earlier our nationals. I'll give you a bit more detail about the tournaments. The event will be run from the 21st (a Friday) to the 23rd (a Sunday) of September. There's a public holiday for us on the 24th, so people coming from any great distance have an extra day to get back (since this will still be during the school term for us).

On the Friday we'll hold a normal, five round constructed deck tournament - mostly fun and a chance to test decks. I'll probably do something crazy like playing a Defend Homeworld deck.
Saturday is the first day of competition - sealed deck. We're not sure what format, but it's unlikely to be Warp Speed, and we definitely won't be using the OTSDs, because the cost of importing them is prohibitive. In any case, since it'll be the first sanctioned sealed deck event, we'll run eight rounds, just to get the maximum ratings points out of it. Sunday is the main event - eight rounds of constructed deck play, plus possibly a final confrontation.

To decide the overall winner, we'll take the results from both tournaments and just add them together - the winner will be the one with the highest score over both. What will be really interesting will be to see how the metagame evolves from the Friday to the Sunday. Will players be testing out their best decks, to see how they perform in the environment, or will they hold back, to see what everyone else is doing without giving anything away themselves?

On that note, I think I've babbled on for long enough. If you have any thoughts on anything you've read, email me at
meissn@mweb.co.za