Draft Pod Changes

Draft is one of LSS premiere organised play formats, and is a great way to challenge your skills in a new environment. One of the challenges with draft, however, is that it's principally intended to be played with groups of 8, which means that when events take place that don't comprise a round multiple of eight players, some draft pods have to be set with differing numbers of players.

We've heard the feedback from the community that some of the ways that GEM has dealt with pod creation for odd sized tournaments hasn't been ideal, so ahead of this year's National Championships season, we've made some changes to how the system works that we hope will improve the experience for players that end up in odd-sized pods.

The new pod structures were designed with the following principles in mind;

1 - Try to make sure that the end pods are no larger than 10 players and no smaller than 5 players

2 - Only the last pod should be able to feature an odd number of player

3 - Make the top pod 8 players where possible (subject to the above two constraints)

4 - Minimise the distance between actual pod sizes and the target of pods of 8

This all mostly works out to a reasonable set of rules. The only slightly odd outcome is what happens for a 19 player tournament vs a 27 player tournament. For 19 players, the pod break ends up being 8-6-5; rule 3 takes precedence here, so the top pod has 8 players, and then we're left with 11 more which breaks into pods of 6 and 5, which means the allocation as a whole creates a minor breach of rule 4. For 27 players, the rules end up with an 8-10-9 split; rule 4 says to minimise the distance to target pods of 8, and a 10-9 split is closer than doing an 8-6-5 split.

The table below shows how GEM has been updated to work for tournaments of up to 32 players. For larger tournaments, they just follow the pattern from 25-32, just with more pods of 8 added into the draw.

We hope that you find that this change is an improvement over how the systems has worked previously, and wish everyone the best for the upcoming drafts at National Championships!