It has probably not escaped many of you that the Blackbox system has returned for the competitive division and the 2020 ruleset. The new system is slightly different than what it used to be, as it's running in the competitive division alongside the normal gamefinder system.

When selecting teams, you can choose a "mode" for your team, where the choices control which of the systems you want the team to participate in:

- Open: Restricts teams to the regular gamefinder and even if you activate for the blackbox, these teams will not be entered into the random scheduler
- Strict: These teams are only participating in the Blackbox system, and will not be matched against teams on the regular gamefinder.
- Mixed: These teams participate in both systems.

The scheduling method used tries to match by Current Team Value, with a minimum of 1 000 000 CTV.

While this has been available for a few days now, what is new is that the Blackbox Trophy has also been revived under this new environment with season 6 starting today, and running for the rest of the year. For those of you who have not heard about the blackbox trophy, it's a long meta event where coaches designate a squad of new teams and play a number of games over a longer period of times, scoring points as they go along and fighting for a spot in the top 10.

There are a couple of new things with season 6:

- Teams in squads are forced into strict mode, and will remain so until either the team completes the games for the season or the season ends, whichever happens first
- You can have multiple concurrent squads should you want to.

Beyond that, the settings for this season are:
- 4 teams per squad
- 15 games per team
- Running until the end of the year (December 31st)

Scoring and roster composition details can be found on the trophy page:

Blackbox Trophy

The costs for the rosters are very quickly based on the win rates of open play Competitive division, and it's quite possible that there are some rosters that should be costed differently. We'll see how it turns out!

As always, this is a new feature and is likely to have some issues and bugs. Please feel free to get in touch if you encounter problems (preferrably on the Discord server).