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PREAMBLE
All 3 Blackbox Majors are supposed to have a very distinct, unique flavour, amongst themselves as well as compared to Ranked Majors.
There are, entirely different to most Ranked Majors deliberately, no qualifiers at all!
(In fact, each Blackbox game can be considered a Rainbow-qualifier, whereas Majors and Minors actually also constitute Altdorf/Tilean qualifiers)
This will strongly facilitate administration and prevents tournaments from dragging on endlessly. In Ranked, qualifiers often seem to draw off the attention from the main event, which most coaches are excluded from anyway. Blackbox could offer alternatives here, as dubious team-pimping and powergaming are by no means as easy as they are, at least for coaches dedicated enough, in Ranked.
Blackbox's equivalent to the FUMBBL-Cup, the Black Cup, is designed to capture the very essence of Blackbox with regard to strength-domination at higher TR. Here, even the meanest and most violent coaches can indulge in their passions: Slaughter, mayhem and fouling in particular as well as all forms of genocide in general, without having to bother whether their actions are fair or not. Watch out for massacres unheard of to occur in this competition!
The Rainbow Islands Championship, quite differently to the Black Cup, is addressing the reverse of the Blackbox-medal: Allegedly low diversity and dead boring domination of brutish, stalling strength teams. By adding fan factor and racial restrictions to the equation, an exciting, colourful tournament should be guaranteed, especially as high FF usually is the result of versatile, attractive and skillful play. Earliest in the semifinals, supposedly boring mirror-matches could occur, without discriminating any races.
The circle would be closed by the Altdorf and Tilean Invitational, which would resemble Champions League and Europe League, respectively.
Qualifiers would run the entire year without prolonging anything as each Major and Minor happens to be a qualifier for the Invitationals as well!
The 10 games rule is meant to prevent "too much pre tournament team pimping and parking". This also ensures that coaches can't just camp a team with major prizes for the next major. This as a nice contrast to Ranked were your teams can, theoretically, hide for as long as you want. 10 is just a random number, it should, however, be feasible for any committed coach to roughly average 3 games a month with their preferred teams.
Considering the fact, that teams can't really dodge the competition in Blackbox (that would require either organized mass-laming or hardcorish multiple-accounting) and are destined to lose their precious prizes sooner or later anyway, some cash and FF really don't seem to be imbalanced here. The team prizes, despite being unique and worthwhile, are definitely not broken for the same reasons (and have to be paid for with TS on top of that) and in no way near as powerful as Temple Guards or Beasts of Nurgle, nevertheless nice trinkets to compete for, though. All 3 prizes are, hopefully, far from redundant and supposed to contribute to the specific fluff of the respective event.
FF+5 might seem much at first glance, but winning 2 Majors should probably count more than winning 9 Minors. With an average of 3 to 4 brackets per Minor, about 30 to 40 points of FF will be awarded yearly, 27 points of FF plus the odd player awards FF-increases would appear to be appropriate in comparison. It will be extremely hard to defend such an FF-gain in B? anyway (especially with a 10 games rule in place). However, the actual height of FF increases should hardly be of particular importance, no matter whether the suggested numbers are justified or not.
A large number of coaches strongly fancy player statistics and Christer himself has always been encouraging team fluff as well as player fluff. The popular leagues on FUMBBL sport thorough statistics and award medals to players. Therefore, it would appear to be a nice change to pay tribute not only to teams, but also to individual players for outstanding performances in Majors. Again, TS has to be paid for the benefits acquired, and these new fluffy rewards could constitute a nice change to the common "the winner takes it all" policy often encountered in R-tournaments. Now, even coaches whose teams don't have a realistic chance to ever win any silverware have at least a small trinket to fight for. Possibly, the competition of players will raise the interest for such tournaments significantly, and we might see many famous (and/or infamous) legends rise and fall as Majors go by. Once more, player rewards are supposed to add to the character and fluff of the 3 Majors the same way as team prizes.
Awesome fluff there. Unfortunately, as mentioned in several posts, the proposal comes with significant drawbacks:
1) Qualifiers are played (qualifiers prolong tournaments).
2) Racially restricted qualifiers are played to in order to increase racial diversity (sort of XFL light).
3) Format allegedly favours low AV teams in general and dark elves in particular.
4) Wildcards!
Again, great fluff, the team prize is over the top, however. No team should be able to permanently gain benefits, access to new stars (with a considerable discount even) on top of that could totally breaks the game. The tournament itself sports rule-altering events (too many of them on top of that).
However a tournament resembling Champion's League and Europe League could be excellent.
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