Official TLR Little League Philosphy
Hello!!!!
Recently our discord community had a long discussion about how to improve our little leagues. Lots of people had lots of opinions, which warmed my tiny heart because it shows how invested our awesome players are in the format and how they’d like to play it. We want you to know we really appreciate that.
We’re still working on how to best run the leagues and adjacent tournaments and I imagine it’ll be an ever evolving project. So we want to ask for some patience and grace as we do our best to manage the influx of new regular players.
However, before we can do a lot of the work that needs to happen we need to explain and define what we’re actually trying to do.
So that’s what this is! Explaining The Committee's philosophy on exactly what we’re trying to accomplish with these monthly leagues.
The Philosophy Behind Our Monthly Leagues
The monthly leagues are there to offer everyone a place to play organized, accessible, low-stakes Tiny Leaders.
Organized
We want to provide a space where people know they’re going to get to play at least one game this week.
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from playing Tiny whenever you want with anyone you want. Go use the LFG ping, it’s great. But that has its limits! People are busy! Maybe you don’t have an IRL playgroup you can get regular games in with. It takes time and effort to find an opponent, and unless you’re the most organized person alive, you’re probably not going to schedule a bo3 for the 2 hour window when you’re available in 3 days.
By joining the tournament you know you’re going to get to play Tiny this week. We’ll find your opponent for you. We’re organized so you don’t have to be.
Accessible
When I say everyone, I mean absolutely everyone. That includes our new players, veterans, spikes, casuals, people from the other side of the planet from you, your dog, your friend from grade 3 who ate your lunchables. Everyone.
The monthly leagues will ALWAYS be completely and totally free to play. Yes there are prizes available, but it will never be a barrier to entry.
Tiny is for everyone and we really do get everyone here. We have players from nearly every continent and so many different walks to life.
We also understand that playing a niche commander variant micro-format is probably not super high on most people’s priorities. Nor should it be. Playing just one game per week makes the tournament accessible to people with busy schedules, people from different parts of the world, people who maybe just want to play a little bit of Tiny. We also start rounds at the beginning of the week to give most people the most amount of heads up that they may need to block out 40 minutes of their weekend to play. Plus 4 rounds fits nicely into a month-long schedule (for the most part)
Low Stakes
In short, we want the monthlies to be akin to your Friday Night Magic. Your way to go test your mettle against other people for glory and fun, and sometimes there might be prizes, but mostly it’s just because Magic The Gathering is a fun game we like to play.
In other words: It’s Just Not That Big Of A Deal.
However, just like your regular FNMs, we can acknowledge there’s different types of people playing. People have fun in different ways. We all know about Timmys, Johnnys, and Spikes. These players can all coexist. The important thing is we’re not going to separate these crowds. Your FNM doesn’t divide out the casual from the competitive and we’re not going to either.
This is also why low-stakes is not NO-stakes. We keep things Regular REL. Because the rules do matter, and there are some things at stake
Some, but not all, of our players are playing for real life money, and there’s opportunities most months to qualify into more competitively focused tournaments with more prizes. This is why we maintain our cockatrice hash-code bookkeeping, this is why Gray gets paid the big bucks being our resident judge (we actually don’t pay him but feel free to slip him a 20)
Because we want to keep the monthly leagues accessible (ie: Free) there are limits to what we’ll do in them. But we want to reward our most invested players by giving them the opportunity to convert consistent success into something more than the monthly leagues can offer on their own.
Our intent with the SCT season is to give players something to strive towards during the regular monthly season. These invite-only tournaments do have prizing. But again: this requires absolutely no buy-in from anyone. The only barrier to entry is your own skill, and your commitment to playing. If you only enter one league, you’re probably not gonna qualify. If you’re scrubbing out, you’re probably not going to qualify. The SCT and Tiny Titans tournaments aim to give those spikier players a higher-stakes place to play. But everyone has an equal opportunity to earn invites so if you want to play with the big dogs you gotta earn it!
I hope this has adequately explained our intentions. If you have feedback on how we can better achieve these stated goals, we’re always happy to listen. Tiny is built on its community so we hope we can rely on each other to make the best possible experience for everyone!
Fishe,
Committee Advisor