Effective Date: Immediately, May 17th 2024
Initially, when we decided to implement the eight-card sideboard for competitive Grand Archive events, we wanted this sideboard to be mainly used for Material deck cards. This was achieved due to the low cap of cards, the impact of including one Material deck card in your sideboard was much greater than including one Main deck card. The goal with this old implementation of the sideboard is that players would be rewarded more for including more tech options in their mainboard Main deck.
Now, we're changing the design goal of the sideboard to make players more frugal with their mainboard Material deck cards. We are changing the sideboard so that it uses a 15-point system, where players are allowed to have up to 15 cards in their sideboard, but Regalia and Champion cards in the sideboard take up 3 slots or 3 points of that 15. This means that players can configure their sideboard to have 5 material deck cards and 0 main deck cards, or 0 material deck cards and 15 main deck cards, or a configuration in between.
We hope this change will reward competitive Grand Archive players who take the time to understand the meta before a big event and can craft a sideboard that is useful for many matchups.
As this is a new rule, we ask event organizers to be lax about this rule change at first at their local level events, as it may take some time for the news to proliferate.
The Tournament Rules & Guidelines has been updated to reflect this rule change.
Initially, when we decided to implement the eight-card sideboard for competitive Grand Archive events, we wanted this sideboard to be mainly used for Material deck cards. This was achieved due to the low cap of cards, the impact of including one Material deck card in your sideboard was much greater than including one Main deck card. The goal with this old implementation of the sideboard is that players would be rewarded more for including more tech options in their mainboard Main deck. Now, we're changing the design goal of the sideboard to make players more frugal with their mainboard Material deck cards. We are changing the sideboard so that it uses a 15-point system, where players are allowed to have up to 15 cards in their sideboard, but Regalia and Champion cards in the sideboard take up 3 slots or 3 points of that 15. This means that players can configure their sideboard to have 5 material deck cards and 0 main deck cards, or 0 material deck cards and 15 main deck cards, or a configuration in between.
We hope this change will reward competitive Grand Archive players who take the time to understand the meta before a big event and can craft a sideboard that is useful for many matchups.
As this is a new rule, we ask event organizers to be lax about this rule change at first at their local level events, as it may take some time for the news to proliferate.
The Tournament Rules & Guidelines has been updated to reflect this rule change.