The Elemental Tournaments
This week FFG announced the upcoming Elemental Events. we’ve summarised their announcement below as clearly as we can. These new events run alongside the existing Kotei system.
The Events
The smaller event, Elemental Challenges, are primarily at conventions and similar events. The winner gets a bye into an Elemental Championship. These appear to be equivalent to proving grounds with a fixed number of swiss rounds.
The Elemental Championships are regional level events run by stores. US application says the location should accommodate at least 64 players, so that’s a ballpark. Undefeated players get an invite to worlds.
No mention of Hatamoto or clan challengers, so that’s reserved for Kotei. As the Kotei page is unchanged, we believe they are unaffected by this Elemental events. So we will still see Kotei scatted throughout the year, but as the Elemental Challenges are designed for conventions, we’re expecting to see less Kotei trapped behind expensive conventions.
Rotating Roles
The events split the year into 3 phases of 4 months each. The first and second phases are two Elemental event cycles, although retailers will only able to run one Elemental Championships (regional) each year. The last phase culminates with Worlds.
- Elemental Phase 1 is January to March
- Elemental Phase 2 is May to July
- Build up to Worlds ends in November
At the end of each of these cycles, a new role is picked for each clan. For the elemental events, the new role will be based on votes of top players. The worlds role will be drafted by the top of each clan.
You will always have the two most recently selected roles to play for your clan. So every 4 months, you’ll get a new role and you’ll lose your oldest role (for Worlds 2018, the roles we have currently will be the oldest ones). The new roles take effect at the beginning of January, May, and September (giving FFG some time to count presumably).
Links: Announcement and Event page.
Unknowns: We’re still not entirely sure about how the roles are picked. It says “No clan may select the same elemental role twice.”, we assume that means Crab can’t have Keeper of Earth and Keeper of Earth. I think that means if one of the two roles Crab already have is Keeper of Earth then they can’t pick Keeper of Earth, even if the role they are losing is Keeper of Earth. We checked with Tyler who confirmed that the elemental voting will not use the drafting system, so the role most voted for by each clan will get selected even if multiple clans pick the same one.
9 Replies to “The Elemental Tournaments”
Regarding multiple clans taking the same Role…that’s not explicitly stated in Tyler’s response, and currently Gordo’s request for clarification is unanswered. It’s possible that votes will be tallied, and if the top selection for your clan has been chosen, they’ll go the next most votes. It could really do with clearing up.
Tyler does say the roles aren’t draft. Surely thats what drafted means? If theres no drafting then each clan gets to pick the role they want regardless of other players selections. I feel like I missing something that you and Gordo have twigged.
It could be that drafting as Tyler sees it refers to the top of clans taking it in turns to select a Role. There’s the possibility that awarded each clan their top-voted Role that hasn’t already been taken isn’t, in FFG’s eyes, drafting. That’s why I think the question needs to be explicitly stated and clearly answered.
The latest article on the FFG site explicitly contradicts what Tyler said.
Read it again, the new article is talking about the role we get after Gencon. Tyler is talking about the roles we in 2019.
Also, Koteis are Premier-tier too, right? It matters for card legality!
You have too many good questions. I hadn’t factored in the names they’ve been using for their tournament document. I’ll have to give it some thought.
The new rotating role system seems fine game mechanic wise, but fails for me from a flavour point of view. A have a what I think is a better solution at https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/279698-flavour-fail-with-new-role-system/
I’m generally in favor of the role-locking thing that cycles what each clan can play but I’m curious as to how many casual / local players choose not to purchase certain packs when they see they can’t play any of their clan’s cards in it. If they only become reliable after a year (or never) when your clan gets the right role, who knows if they’ll still be relevant then. To be fair, I know elemental role locking is a major theme of this cycle and will likely not come back as much as this in future expansions and be less of an issue.
The two-roles is nice, I hope each set of roles are exclusive to a clan. Ex: in the set from Worlds no clan has the same role, then in the elemental set no clan has the same role as to have two sets of seven different roles. Seeing as most clans are getting at least two archetypes, it’s nice not having too much in-clan feuds as to which roles to pick to bolster the appropriate achetype.