After finishing up cities marathons and such as a Pokedad, I wanted to throw in my 2 cents. The CP system is a good way to determine the invite structure, but as expected with any first implementation it could really use some work.
1. I had not thought of the tied Swiss results getting the same CPs before, but this is an idea I really like, especially if they are going to keep just top 2 points for battle roads. This is especially good for the junior tournaments. My son finished 3rd at 3-1 in 3 BRs that had attendance as high as any cities, and got nothing for it because of resistance. It would help alleviate the system demand to attend so many tournaments.
2. The best finish limits are too high across the board. 8 battle roads is simply ridiculous. 4 out of 5 for state-regionals is too high, would prefer 3 of 5. Some would prefer regionals-cities to be split. In that case I would really like to see 1 of 2 for regionals and 2 of 3 for states. Cities need to be cut back to 4 events tops. There are multiple problems caused by this.
First it rewards players in soft geographies too much. There are places with turnout 25% of the more competitive areas. There is no way to catch those players that can pad their numbers with lots of poor turnout battle roads and cities.
Even without the geography issue, it is simply too demanding as is. Among a group of roughly equally talented players with equal decks, it is going to reward the ones with more free time and/or more financial resources to travel who can attend more tournaments. I can say for sure that it has already created too much burden to travel longer distances, buy more hotel rooms, and to spend less time on other valuable family activities. There is no way that we will sustain this year after year. Both the kids and parents will burn out for sure. Finally, it has created a fairly large financial barrier to be competitive that will keep out a lot of new juniors from ever entering the game.
Let's say one's top cut rate is 75% in a very competitive region (which would be a good player obviously), that player will need to attend approximately 24 tournaments to reach his/her number of limits, and he/she would have to attend probably more than 30 to improve lesser finishes with better finishes. This is simply too many tournaments in a year, but it will be necessary because of the CP structure, and it is magnified by regional competitiveness issue. The bottom line is that the "must attend" tournament number really needs to be dropped or it needs to be re-focused around the higher level events.
3. Battle Roads: I would simply like to see BR dropped from CP all together, especially if best finish limits among cities-states-regionals are not reduced. At the very least, it needs significant cut back in best finish limits. The reason for this is three fold. a) it has the most pronounced geography inflation problem, and it is the biggest contributor to inflating the number of must attend tournaments, b) four levels of CP is plenty - cities, states, regionals, nationals - no more is really needed to determine the best players, c) I would like for BRs to return an event where players can test out rogue decks, new engines, deck refinement, new formats or to simply play something for fun, instead of having to bring one's A-game deck because CPs are on the line.
After reading Pooka's points on local competition vs premier events, I am just more convinced that BRs should be dropped from CPs all together, and base the rating on cities, states, regionals and nationals. There is really no good reason to push it so low and put so much demand on number of events attended.
