Magic Deck Vortex: What's New at MDV? The MDV Super Series!

Welcome fellow gamers. Being that we are all drawn together due to our shared competitive nature and desire to learn more about the game Magic: the Gathering, I have devised a way to bring us all one step closer.

Want to know more about it? You will have to step inside and get the low down.

I must tell you guys, that I am very excited about this project. I have been developing it for the last few months in my mind, and finally have the perfect time to launch the project into orbit.

But what exactly is this project I speak of? I call it the MDV Super Series or MSS for short.

The MSS is a year long league, where the winning party is the one that accumulates the most points through out the competition year. This is the missing link that we needed to draw all the MDV contests together.

One of my favorite hobbies is to watch all the major sports and try my best to keep myself informed with the ups and downs of each one. Over the years, I have been very intrigued by two sports in particular, which have very unique scoring systems. In these scoring systems, it is important to win an event, but it is equally important to place well in all of the events. The two sports that I refer to are Golf and NASCAR.

While I don’t really watch them in depth, nor do I know any of the main competitors outside of Tiger Woods, I have none the less liked how they continue to keep hordes of fans happy through out the long seasons. They do this by having a varying degree of difficulty in each event, yet each event is entirely different than the others. While this is going on, each event has different point values, depending on different factors. The point to be made is that all of the races in NASCAR and all of the Golf tournaments have their own identity, and are not lost in the overall scheme of things.

Having said all of that, I want to organize this league to combine the interest of the smaller contests with the excitement of the larger contests.

Did you know that we have weekly and bi-weekly contests? Did you know that we have rounds of X Card Blind starting periodically? Do you participate in the contests that are linked to the articles on MDV?

All of these questions will be answered when you begin to realize how much activity there is at our website. I didn’t even mention our largest contest, MDV Idol.

First, each contest will be pre-determined to belong to one of three categories:

Once we have determined the contest’s category, we can tell you how many points the contest is worth. Points are scored in each contest according to the Inverse Scoring System, or ISS.

Upon the completion of a contest, the final results are posted, revealing who placed first all the way to the last place finisher. At this point, count the number of participants in the contest. The contestants score the inverse number of their placing. To better explain this, let’s use the following example:

Dark Steel Designer just finished up a weekly contest. There were six people involved in the contest, yet one person was disqualified for not following the contest rules, therefore only five people finished the contest completely. Here are the final standings:

1st place – Player A
2nd place – Player B
3rd place – Player C
4th place – Player D
5th place – Player E

Since we see that Player A placed first, and we see that there are five finalists, we can see that he scored five points. We can also see that Player E was in last place and he received one point. Here are the final points for this Dark Steel Designer contest:

Player A – 5 points
Player B – 4 points
Player C – 3 points
Player D – 2 points
Player E – 1 point

In some cases, a contest may not fall directly into one of the three categories. Perhaps it is harder than a Minor contest, but not nearly as big as an Intermediate contest. In this case, the contest organizer can appeal to the league head get a modifier assigned to his contest.

A modifier is a number that is applied to the contest and all of its contestant’s scores in order to represent the extra difficulty of that contest. These modifiers are multiplied to everyone’s score equally, therefore not changing any of the standings.

This round of Dark Steel Designer was a particularly tough design, and a modifier of 1.5 was granted to it. Here are your final scores:

Player A – 5 points (1.5) = 7.5
Player B – 4 points (1.5) = 6
Player C – 3 points (1.5) = 4.5
Player D – 2 points (1.5) = 3
Player E – 1 point (1.5) = 1.5

As you can see, now this contest ways more than a regular Minor contest, as the winner of this five man contest was awarded points equal to the winner of a seven man contest.

Now that we have discussed the way points are scored, let’s talk about the three categories, and their point values.

All three categories use the ISS to determine their base scores. However, a Major and Intermediate contest by default are worth more than a Minor event. The following table should be used as a starting point for all contests once the category has been determined:

Using the NASCAR season and Golf season as guides, we can see that NASCAR begins its season with the biggest race of all. We also see that Golf only has four Major events a year. With this firmly in mind, we will launch the MSS with the release of MDV Idol.

MDV Idol 3 begins the inaugural season of MSS. It will be classified as a Major event and therefore has a point value of ISS x 5. In the first MDV Idol, there were around 42 participants. That means that the winner would have received 42 points, multiplied by five to give him 210 points to begin the season off with. MDV Idol 2 only had around 25 participants, and therefore the winner would have only have received 125 points.

What this means is that if you want more points, then you need to help me get more bodies into the contests. The more players that finish, the more points you will receive.

With the release of the MSS, I am also announcing the MDV Newsletter, the Eye of the Vortex. In the newsletter, you will receive news and updates about the league, as well as a behind the scenes look at MDV in general. Scores and point standings will be announced in the newsletter, which is currently planned to be a monthly release.

If you want to be on the mailing list, please leave your email address in the forum thread provided with this article.

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