Personally, I think the answer is to remove first round byes altogether. And I'm saying this as a Regional Champion, who has a Bye card that I could take with me to GenCon this summer.

I agree with this 100 percent. As a regional winner, if they announced that they were removing all first round byes for Gencon, I would be much more happy than annoyed. The first round bye creates significant problems in tourney structure. I believe it should go away.

However, I also feel that in it's place there should be an extra kicker for winning a regional, national, or continental level event. This is only my two cents, but I would like a Tournament of Champions style event at Worlds. You need one of those fancy cards to get into the tournament. This would in no way replace/overshadow the World Championship Tournament, and would be a much smaller/shorter event. I think I would enjoy an invitational event in a tournament structure where registration in mostly open.

Personally, I think the answer is to remove first round byes altogether. And I'm saying this as a Regional Champion, who has a Bye card that I could take with me to GenCon this summer.

I agree with this 100 percent. As a regional winner, if they announced that they were removing all first round byes for Gencon, I would be much more happy than annoyed. The first round bye creates significant problems in tourney structure. I believe it should go away.

However, I also feel that in it's place there should be an extra kicker for winning a regional, national, or continental level event . This is only my two cents, but I would like a Tournament of Champions style event at Worlds. You need one of those fancy cards to get into the tournament. This would in no way replace/overshadow the World Championship Tournament, and would be a much smaller/shorter event. I think I would enjoy an invitational event in a tournament structure where registration in mostly open.

I think that would be cool. Maybe even something like your event ticket at the next level up is paid for you.

I've been playing this kind of game for many years, but IA is the first game where I've ever encountered an exclusive (or semi-exclusive) benefit being given to a player as a reward for his/her performance in a separate, prior event. I won my Regional last year too and I happily used my free Bye in the IA championship at GenCon. However, I had no idea what kind of impact on the tournament those things would have. I liked the system well enough last year, but this year I'm not so sure, now that I've seen how these Champion Byes impact the structure of subsequent tournaments.

Quite simply, I want every player to stand an equal chance of winning the event. In every event. It's not that I expect someone who started playing 3 months ago to have the skill to stand up against guys who've won multiple tournaments...but I think he should at least stand on an even playing field when it comes to tournament structure. After that, let skill and squad construction and strategy (and a bit of dice luck, as will always be the case) carry the day... that , to me, is a tournament that I want to play in!