Bracket III Krakens Keep 1K

Bracket 3 Decks Only! Proxies allowed. Judge on site and a day of fun. Four rounds of Swiss play then a Semi Finals and Finals round Hosted by Krakens Keep in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina! First prize takes home a Collector Y'Shtola Commander Deck.

Hello all you fellow EDH noobs/efficianados! With how big of a hit the 1st Bracket 3 EDH Tournament ended up being, we have decided to have another go with a few changes due to majority player reccomendation.

With this in mind, the rules changes are as followed

MLD (Mass Land Destruction) and our stance on it

We have taken into account the overall vague restrictions Bracket 3 has on the official BETA chart. After careful deliberation with the other store owners and players in the community from the last Bracket 3 Tournament, we have gotten to a few areas where we believe MLD to be only restricted in an intent to destroy all lands in play through either a combo or one massive spell cast to attempt to reset the game to its beginning state.

• Spells akin to Armageddon and Devastation will still be considered as MLD and will as such be not allowed within the area of Bracket 3. We of course still believe these to be acceptable restricted cards.

• If there is a recurring Strip Mine combo that is not infinite, it will be allowed to be played. The catch to this allowed instance is that we will limit it to at least only 3 lands to be destroyed through a method like this for each of that player's turns. This is to at least regulate the destruction of lands to be more strategic while also keeping things relatively tame so it does not get to massive amounts of keeping the game at a stand-still resource wise.

• If there is a question about a certain way you wish to carry out Land Denial, feel free to ask the judge (within reason) about your idea to see if it is acceptable.

• Static effects like Winter Orb and Blood Moon will still fall into the category of MLD. This is as Wizards has stated in their initial reveal of BETA and we still feel this to be the correct decision as they generally make games feel like long slogs without the player who played said spells having a way to win. Someday we might change our mind on this with some tinkering, but we overall feel that these static effects should stay away from the scene as it devastates decks running three or more colors and makes it feel like the meta of this Bracket will be geared towards running mono/duo color decks in an attempt to just play in your pods.

• We are still currently working on this restriction and what we will define it as for this tournament and future Bracket 3 events. This will be updated with any changes we feel need to be made so please check back in with us on certain rulings and where we stand on it.

We feel we are getting closer to where we want to be with getting a clear and concrete as can be definition of MLD restrictions and are hopeful this will get more interesting strategies to show up and possibly shake things up.

Now that we have gotten that out of the way...

On the topic of 2 card combos

2 card combos in magic have been becoming more common in casual decks as the days go by and new sets release with the perfect piece to one of your favorite decks by having it create a possible win condition. With Wizards BETA chart for the brackets, it also happened to mention a restriction for Bracket 3 that appears to be just as hard to define as MLD.

"Late-Game 2-Card Infinite Combos are allowed"

Now while they mention that late game is considered to be after turn 6. This did not sit well for some of us and with our first run we decided to see how things went with Late Game being categorized as Turn 9. This produced a mixed result as some games in Round 1 either ended before Turn 9 normally, or the game would be at a stand still till the game hit Turn 9 and someone plays their 2-Card combo. One pod in particular had a situation over the specifics of what is considered a 2-Card combo that ended up being a full reset of that game being played.

After Careful deliberation with the Judge and other players, we have decided the following.

• No 2-Card Inifinite Combos are allowed

This is to keep things simple and allow the main experience of Bracket 3 to be more interactive and stops situations like the previously mentioned game from happening. We are however allowing 3-Card combos as they were previously to provide a win condition that still requires a good amount of resources to have it blast off.

As for Chaining Extra Turns and Game Changers..

We have no plans to change these restrictions as of right now.

We feel that these restrictions were made with the right idea in mind and believe that it is what makes deck building a challenge of itself that pushes players to think of creative alternatives to Game Changers if they exceed the limit of 3 GCs (Game Changers).

It's possible we might have our own Game Changers list at some point, but as of now we feel that what Wizards has provided is acceptable to what Bracket 3 wishes to be.

With the last tournament lasting longer than expected, we believe a change in the structure of rounds was needed. Therefore, we have come to the decision that rounds before finals will be Swiss.

What does this mean, you may ask?

Swiss is normally how the cEDH tournaments have held their preliminary rounds where each pod in round 1 is decided randomly and will be best of 1. After Round 1, the next set of pods are decided by win record or Wins/Loss/Draw ratio and it will stay this way till we get to semi-finals.

The difference between this and the previous round structure is that if you lose, you are not out completely. Players will continue on to play in the next set of pods with similar results until we get to semi-finals, where only the top-cut will make it into the final pods.

If you are in 10th on the leaderboard and top cut is top 10, then you proceed with the other 9 players to the final pods. if you are placed below that cut, then you are officially out of the bracket and your score is final.

Each Win results in 5 points

Each Draw results in 1 point

Each Loss results in no points

There might be a concern a few of you may have regarding "Draws" and I shall specify it here.

A Draw usually only happens when the timer for the current round runs out and there is no defining winner by the end of it. For this upcoming event, we will only count draws during the Swiss Rounds as to have a defining winner at the end of the event.