Does anyone know what the format will be for the upcoming tournaments? The only thing I really know is the games will most likely be best 2 out of 3 in an hour but beyond that I have no clue. Will there be sideboarding? What battlepacks can be used? Anyone else have these types of questions?

Yes. I think a lot of us are waiting for FFG to swoop down from the heavens and provide a standard set of tournament rules but as of yet there isn't one.

Please FFG add sideboard to tournament rules, so more cards can be playable

The Regionals: Orlando allow for an 8-card sideboard and are running best-of-3 rounds with an hour time limit. All cards released will be legal. All of them.

It is more the opposite way. Sideboarding reduces deck variability because you can adjust your deck later. Without sideboarding your deck msut be prepared to be able to fight against all enemys so you are more likely to include more different cards.

ugh, perosnaly I would not like to see sideboards, not that i have used them all that much in other games, but i just find that it removes a lot of the deck building challenges, and i like the challenge of trying to build a well rounded deck.

I think that to many people are expeting it to be like other games when obviously it is not, if they wanted it to be like MTG or anything else then we would see the simularities, but his game is already way different, i think they should keep it that way to avoid any more comparison to other games (which there is already plenty of the way it is.)

But that is just one persons opinion...

Here's another vote for no sideboards. This game does not need sideboards, if you end up drawing a card that won't be very helpful against your current opponent there is something useful you can do with that card throw it down as a development.

Overseer Lazarus said:

Wow, how do you already know?

No, also, to sideboards. I think they limit creativity, in general. Make a deck and live by it - be a brave gamer.

Based on conversations I've had with James Hata I've inferred that games will be best of 3 but that's all I could ascertain (and even that may not be entirely accurate).

Toberk said:

In social settings, I agree with most all of you about sideboards. Don't care for them at all. But this is the first truly competitive event that FFG has put together for this game, and sideboards are a fundamentally necessary part of modern card game tournaments. Invariably, there are going to be 2 or 3 deck archetypes that show up more often than any others in the tournment scene, and they'll all be vastly different. There is no way possible to account for each of these strategies, and without some capacity for adjustment, a win becomes nothing more than a function of fortuitous matchups. If Joe's deck style just happens to be the answer to everything that John's deck does, tough luck for John. He's a victim of circumstance and there's nothing he can do about it. This scenario simply doesn't determine the most proficient and effective card gamer in a balanced, competitive environment, and that's the entire purpose of a tournament. If a football team comes out stacking the box on defense, but quickly falls behind because their opponent starts filling the air with footballs, they're not forced to play that same style and get drubbed all game long. If an army attacks at night, but gets destroyed because their enemy fights better in the dark, the commanders aren't required to keep sending their troops into the slaughter. There is always an allowance for adjustment of strategy and design to counteract whatever the opposition is doing successfully. Sideboarding provides the means for players to analyze the situation they're in and craft a solution through strategy and vision. That said, sideboards have never seen the light of day in my group, and only ever will in major tournament events like this one.

Overseer Lazarus:

In social settings, I agree with most all of you about sideboards. Don't care for them at all. But this is the first truly competitive event that FFG has put together for this game, and sideboards are a fundamentally necessary part of modern card game tournaments. Invariably, there are going to be 2 or 3 deck archetypes that show up more often than any others in the tournment scene, and they'll all be vastly different. There is no way possible to account for each of these strategies, and without some capacity for adjustment, a win becomes nothing more than a function of fortuitous matchups. If Joe's deck style just happens to be the answer to everything that John's deck does, tough luck for John. He's a victim of circumstance and there's nothing he can do about it. This scenario simply doesn't determine the most proficient and effective card gamer in a balanced, competitive environment, and that's the entire purpose of a tournament. If a football team comes out stacking the box on defense, but quickly falls behind because their opponent starts filling the air with footballs, they're not forced to play that same style and get drubbed all game long. If an army attacks at night, but gets destroyed because their enemy fights better in the dark, the commanders aren't required to keep sending their troops into the slaughter. There is always an allowance for adjustment of strategy and design to counteract whatever the opposition is doing successfully. Sideboarding provides the means for players to analyze the situation they're in and craft a solution through strategy and vision. That said, sideboards have never seen the light of day in my group, and only ever will in major tournament events like this one.

Unfortunately, I think sideboards is one of the elements from Magic that is being brought into WI unnecessarily. In Magic, drawing a single card each turn was a steep restriction and you couldn't afford it to be a waste. For example, if your opponent is playing black and you draw Karma you're incredibly happy but if your opponent isn't playing black your draw was an absolute waste.

In WI you're not limited to drawing a single card, so the disadvantage in drawing that "useless" card can be minimized by drawing a second or third "not useless" card. Of course, no card is useless as it can always be played as a development.

There is no way possible to account for each of these strategies, and without some capacity for adjustment, a win becomes nothing more than a function of fortuitous matchups.

Sure there is! If you're including cards in your sideboard that will help you defeat certain archetypes, include those cards in your main deck.

No, there's not. What cards are you going to take out to make room for the narrow-focus cards you're talking about? Of course you have to tailor your deck for your opponent. I won't run the same defense against the Orlando Magic as I do for the Cleveland Cavaliers. And I won't pitch the same way to Ichiro Suzuki and Albert Pujols.

Some folks are confusing sideboarding as a Magic thing when it's actually a tournament cardgame thing. Trust me, I've already stated that I have grievances with WotC as a company, and you'll never hear me extol the virtues of Tragic: the Blathering. So make no mistake that I want VERY much for Invasion to form and solidify its own identity apart from all other cardgames. Sideboarding is necessary for a tournament to function as its supposed to: as a distillation of the most prepared, proficient player among the present participants (I just LOVE alliteration. Must be from my comic book youth).

Most of the angst against sideboards, though we usually won't admit it, stems from a general distrust and resentment towards the palpable elitism and arrogance that wafts through the room at just about every Magic tournament. The facial expressions, the way people "squiggle-tap" their cards, the rules-lawyering - a lot of people are turned off by this general atmosphere. As a former DCI judge (emphasis on 'former', and I don't miss it one iota), I'm among them. But despite the images that it might conjure, the sideboard is not the enemy; the ego is. If we, as a group, are conscious about our approach to competitive events, we can avoid creating the smug environment that I can see so many of us dislike. Sideboards are about strategy and adjustment, not laziness or entitlement. I will concede, however, that like most issues that people have a passionate opinion about, we won't all come to a perfect consensus on this. Which is totally ok!

Overseer Lazarus said:

Here, yet again, is a bit of that mindset that I don't think is really that fair to bring to this game (and by extension, its community). It may feel like a fundamentally "necessary" part of "modern" card game tourneys to you or to other people from an entirely different game but that doesn't mean things have to be that way for W:I. It doesn't seem reasonable (imho) to slap a label on this game that somehow (due to a lack of sideboarding) Warhammer: Invasion won't be viewed as modern enough for players from other games that come to W:I. I have to respectfully disagree about this label.

Overseer Lazarus said:

I wanted to respond to the underlined part in particular here - the capacity for adjustment comes from how you play your cards and in how your build your deck. If you avoid the trap of viewing deck-builing in W:I through the filters of other card games (whose deck-building strategies may or may not apply at all), you'll have a bit more versatility built into your deck (as Dormouse has frequently - and imho - correctly pointed out here) and will have the capacity to respond a bit better to other deck builds. W:I is exceptionally interesting in that regard as you can swing your economy in interesting ways as needed.

Overseer Lazarus said:

Again, a player should also be able to achieve this via good non-linear deck design and tactical card play. Sideboarding effectively neuters the importance of player skill (how hard is it, really, to look at your opponent's deck and pick out counter-cards to it via a side-board??) by making the entire game much more focused on deck-building responses than the actual playing/interaction with your opponent. Along those same lines, sideboarding leads to overly focused deck archetypes since players know that they'll have the security blanket of a sideboard to save them from their own poor deck-creation choices should they face an abhorrent match-up, rather than relying on their game-playing skills to help them instead.

I prefer that the two most enjoyable aspects of the game (deck-design and gameplay interactions) both go hand-in-hand, each balanced with each other. Sideboarding leads away from that type of environment and in that regard, feels rather antiquated, rather than "modern" to me.

Overseer Lazarus said:

I think this reflects a bit more on what Dormouse and others here have been saying about W:I - it's important to approach deck design in W:I from a totally fresh approach. While no one can really disagree that much with the usefulness of having a focused deck in terms of cards utilized and in the total size of your deck, I see far too many new W:I fans here posting 50-card deck after 50-card deck - as if somehow that magic number of 50 cards will ensure success. I find myself very much in agreement with Dormouse in this regard. Players shouldn't allow their deck-design choices to be informed by the amount of cards in their deck as much as they should the theme. If the themes that you want to promote would lead to the creation of a 59-card deck (gasp!) then I'd suggest building that size of a deck rather than shoe-horning a partial theme into a 50-card deck.

Just wanted to comment on this and I want to reiterate that I'm not debating the intelligence of card ratios and so forth but I AM promoting the understanding that occasionally (or frequently, depending upon your perspective) players need to cater to theme over a desperate desire to match some pre-determined magic deck-size number.

I agree to what Wytefang says, that players should be able to create a deck that is not one demensional, and sideboards would definately contribute to making them like that.

Plus, think that Invasion sort of fixed the problem of sideboarding because in most games you can only draw one card a turn so i can see the want for smaller deck, to get certain cards easier, so a sideboard is often the solution. But in Invasion a player can draw as much cards as he wants, so it is okay to have larger decks without having a fear of not getting that important card that is needed to win, so sideboards are not needed, players can just throw the cards in their decks.

Everyone here is assuming that "taking out cards to replace" means that someone is trying to force 50 cards, but what if they are at 100? There is a card cap too you know.

I will posit simply this; If everyone starts to make 50 to 60 card decks, and then design a "sideboard" and just throw those cards into the maindeck to play with their 65-75 card decks, Orc Rush will win every single tournament. The lack of sideboards actually rewards the most narrow, fast, non-interactive decks because they don't care what you are playing, they just plow through before you draw your hate (if you play it).

darkdeal said:

I dont see that being a problem for the time being, maybe after a cycle or two (or more).

I still do not think that this game will allow for three tournament games in an hour in any kind of halfway diverse field, so I think a lot of the opinions on sideboards will be moot (unless you want to allow players to board in cards after seeing opponents' capitals).

I certainly don't detest sideboards just on general principle. I might even say I like them in a best-of-three formats, but this game does let you draw a bunch of cards AND it gives you the option of playing useless cards as developments. You can afford to main-deck a card like Zealot Hunter, which will be totally unplayable in some games, if you decide it is going to be a game-changer in some other games, especially if your strategy involves developing every turn anyway.

I'd like to clarify my stance a bit, too. I don't detest Sideboards but I don't think they're terribly necessary either - or at least I'm not convinced by the logic of the arguments presented here yet. I will say that perhaps Darkdeal's points are somewhat concerning. I don't want to have to either play an Orc Rush deck OR an Anti-Orc Rush deck only in order to have a chance to succeed.

I see Orc Rush as STILL being the predominant deck by a mile. I'm positive that I'll see a butt-load of these decks at the Regionals here at the FFG Center in a few weeks.

Toberk said:

My 2 cents...

For our national "league" (not regional, but an actual league) we run "2 out of 3" games of 50 minutes total (swiss rounds + Top).

Then, we allow a 12 cards sideboard.

Who says healthy debate is dead in America? Good stuff, folks. I love it.

The points have pretty much all been made, so I'll probably bow out after this one. But the one thing the "anti-" posts is missing is this: drawing more useless cards is not the solution to drawing one useless card. What does it matter if I draw 10 cards a turn if none of them is the answer to the blind, dumb luck matchup across from me? All that does is spare the misery of getting beat senseless by decking myself quicker. People, you CANNOT put a card into your deck for every threat in the game. It's neither practical nor competitively possible to simply "kitchen sink" everything to death. Why do you suppose the successful tournament players obsess over minimum deck sizes? Trendiness? Not so much. It's because card games, at their core, are about mathematics. The inventor of trading card games, Richard Garfield, was a college math professor, and it shows in every single hobby card game ever made. With a 3-copy limit to every card in your deck, stockpiling answers to every conceivable threat so fully dilutes the probability of drawing any one of them in a remotely useful situtation that you've essentially ensured defeat for yourself, certainly over the extended course of a tournament. THAT, friends and neighbors, is why speed kills in tournaments. Because a tight, efficient engine that fires first beats reactive theme decks, and worse, unfocused kitchen sink decks. And by the way, how in the world does playing that Zealot Hunter as a development stop those 5 Totemed Orcs from thumping me for 14 on turn 3? Or that Bolt Thrower from pelting me with 12 indirect damage at the end of my turn? Or help me damage a capitol that redirects the first 2 damage done to it to my own board and then cancels the next 3, after which it heals itself of 2 at the beginning of its owner's turn?

At the crux of this debate seems to be a disparity of thought between casual and tournament gamers. The appeal of a game that provides the guarantee of acquiring every card in the game for less than the cost of a booster box of a standard TCG lends itself to those who, like myself, are either fed up with vacuum cleaner hobbies that decimate our wallets or, even better, never got involved with one in the first place. And I'm all for that. This instinct generally centers around the casual gamer, who just wants a pleasant though spirited contest of wits and intellect. A Regional Championship, almost by definition, appeals far more to the shades-sporting, gold trophy deck box-toting, autographed card-wielding jet-setting set who would hyperventilate without a sideboard. It would appear to me, then, that the loyal faithful who are genuinely interested in jumping into the moshpit of tournament cardgames may need to determine for themselves if town & country can cohabitate harmoniously. Me, I would LOVE to see the Regionals that I run down here in Orlando resemble more Woodstock and less Wall Street!

But we all know that wall street beat woodstock. The hippies grew and decided they wanted stuff and became the most selfish generation the planet as scene!

Overseer Lazarus said:

Having played, competitive, a card game which didn't use sideboards at all, I can honestly say I find your arguement rather M:TG centric. I used to play Raw Deal, competitively, going as far as winning a trip to New York (from the UK) and going to the World Championships for that game, and I can honestly say having to build decks without sideboards made the deckbuilding side of the game very challenging and a true test of both metagaming ability and skill. And the lack of sideboards had nothing to do with me getting soundly beaten at the Worlds either

I have nothing against sideboards, and given the game designer is an ex-Magic player I suspect that the official tournament rules will go down that line. I don't really feel either way about it. I do however feel that catagorical statements like the one you've made is a little wide of the mark.

Your baseline comparison in your examples is Magic, a game which has clear "hosers" in it. If I run a pure black speed deck, and you happen to be running a pure white deck with Circle of protection Black in it, and we play without sideboards, well, yes, Good Game. You win. I can't do anything.

Warhammer Invasion isn't the same card game as Magic:The Gathering though.

So far no clear "hosers" exist, if I take an Orc deck to a tournament, no-one is running 3 x screw over Orcs kind of cards in their main deck, because these cards don't exist. They do exist in M:TG, they don't in WH:I.

Also, given the size of the card pool, which is currently laughably small compared to M:TG, I find the arguement you make decidedly lacks credablity, as currently I can fit an answer for almost everything into my deck. This may change as the card pool increases, but currently, based on the card pool, to even compare WH:I with the complexity of having to answer the problems which the card pool the M:TG players face is Apples and Oranges.

You really aren't comparing like for like.

Punishing card's exist:

For example: javascript:void(0);/*1271023988133*/

Good bye skaven

Overseer Lazarus said:

I feel fairly comfortable asserting that Skaven decks were better than mono-Orcs in the pre-Assault environment. I had Orc/Skaven decks that were good, Chaos/Skaven decks that were good, and I had non-Skaven Orc decks that were pretty good, but generally just doing the same things Orc/Skaven was doing, but without the Deathmaster. So, I was suggesting the Zealot Hunter as the type of card that would be likely to show up in sideboards.

My point was that if you're playing a Dwarf deck, you are PLANNING to develop every turn, because you have Innovation, or Contested Fortress, or whatever else, that needs to see developments in play. Thus, it makes sense to play a few cards that are either really good or really bad rather than a whole bunch of cards that are always mediocre. You may or may not be able to beat 5 Totemed Orcs, but it probably won't have anything to do with your decision to run Zealot Hunter over Runesmith (or whatever).