Tournaments

Tournaments are how Star Wars CCG has been played as organized competition since 1996: two 60-card decks (one Light Side, one Dark Side), Swiss pairing, victory points plus differential, and no Magic-style sideboard. Decipher ran the circuit through 2001. The Players Committee has run it since 2002. GEMP is the online table used for many modern events.

This page is the history and the paperwork: websites, the rating system, Worlds formats, decklist sheets, and the current Tournament Guide. Year-by-year Worlds hubs start at Championships. Format names live on Formats.

What a Star Wars tournament is

A constructed event asks each player for two decks of 60 cards. A round is typically two games — one with each allegiance — against the same opponent. Pairing is Swiss (you play someone with a similar record), not single-elimination from round one.

Scoring, as printed on Decipher command cards and in the 1998 Worlds packet:

• Full win of a game: 2 victory points
• True tie: 1 point each
• Modified win (time): 1 point
• Differential: cards remaining in Reserve Deck + Used Pile + Force Pile (the life-force leftover). Tie-break after victory points.

Decipher designed this against Magic: the Gathering. Magic settled on 60-card decks, a 15-card sideboard, and best-of-three matches. Star Wars has no sideboard. You bring both allegiances and the answers have to be in the 60. Deck changes between days of a multi-day event were allowed at 1998 Worlds (Saturday night only); they were not allowed between games of the same day.

Tom Braunlich (a designer) was a chess player. Decipher's own "What is it?" page compared the game to chess: simple rules, deep play. Swiss pairing and an Elo-style rating are the chess pieces Decipher kept.

Decipher websites (1996–2002)

The public tournament desk moved twice. The pages below are the working copies; this wiki cites the Wayback capture next to each.

December 1996 — first public desk

decipher.com/starwars/tournaments (19 December 1996) already split five jobs:

• Running a sanctioned tournament (the only events that fed an official rating)
• Running a non-sanctioned event (supported, not rated)
• A tournament locator
• World Championships / qualifier overview
• Ratings of tournament players

The page is explicit: "Playing in a sanctioned tournament is the only way for a player to get an official rating. The rating system will be maintained and published by Decipher."

1998 — overview, command cards, Worlds banner

By December 1998 the same path had grown an overview with downloadable PDFs (tournament guide last updated 15 April 1997; constructed / sealed / junior command cards), a sanctioned-director form on christo.decipher.com, a locator, and a ratings search. Three sanctioned formats are named on the overview: Swiss, Junior Swiss, and Sealed Deck.

Ratings were a separate database per format. The 1998 index: "Each of the sanctioned formats has its separate rating scheme."

2001–2002 — tournaments.decipher.com

By June 2002 Decipher had folded Star Wars, Star Trek, LOTR, Young Jedi, and Jedi Knights into one desk at tournaments.decipher.com. The old Star Wars page became a pointer:

Tournament management functions for all Decipher CCGs and TCGs have been consolidated in a new Decipher Tournament Area. Sign up to be a tournament director, find tournament resources, register or locate tournaments, enter tournament results online, and check player ratings at tournaments.decipher.com.

The new home page had five buttons: Find a Tournament, Check Player Ratings, Tournament Resources, Sign Up to be a Director, Director Login.

Star Wars-specific downloads sat on resources-sw.asp (8 August 2002):

• Official Tournament Guide (HTML + PDF)
• Timing of Games & Final Confrontations
• True Ties rulings
• Format notes: OTSD booster draft, EPP Overdrive, Jabba's Palace Sealed, Reflections II booster draft, Death Star II closed environment, Episode I closed environment
• Deck List Form (required for championship circuit) — PDF
• Constructed and Sealed command cards
• Pointer to the Star Wars rules page for Rulebook / Glossary

General resources (all games) listed the DGMA Code of Conduct, prize support, FAQ, release dates / legality, and About Ratings, Rankings, and the ELO System.

The Decipher rating system

Rating and ranking are not the same. Decipher's own 2002 explanation:

• Rating is a number for sanctioned performance against every other rated player (a GPA).
• Ranking is where that rating places you in a region or in the world (class rank). Example they printed: a 1597 rating might be no. 223 in the home region and no. 2879 in the world.

The math is Elo (chess). Facts Decipher published on that page:

• Every player starts at 1500
• Points move after games, based on wins/losses and opponent strength
• 1600–1700 is called expert
• 2000 is called a master of the game
• The scale is 0–3000, average around 1500

Earlier tournament guides used for Star Trek / shared Decipher organized play add: only sanctioned events move the rating; constructed, junior, and sealed are separate rating databases (play in one does not change the others); K-value weighting by event level appears in later DGMA / LOTR writeups of the same system (local / territorial / continental / Worlds).

Players could look themselves up at tournaments.decipher.com → Check Player Ratings. Decipher did not publish a standing world list that survived in an easy public dump; players quoted their numbers on mailing lists and fan sites. After the license ended, that lookup went away with the Decipher desk. The Players Committee did not keep the same public Elo table.

1998 World Championship packet

The third official Worlds (56 finalists) shipped a paper packet dated 20 November 1998 over Kendrick Summers' (Marketing Manager) letterhead. The format page is the best single snapshot of Decipher Swiss at championship scale:

Saturday 21 November — first stage, Decipher Swiss: 4 rounds / eight games, random pairing at the start. Top twelve advance on victory points then differential. Saturday scores do not carry to Sunday. Those twelve "will be allowed to change their decks on Saturday night if they wish. This is the only time during the tournament that players may make adjustments to their decks." Everyone outside the twelve plays a Sunday sealed event instead.

Sunday 22 November — second stage: all twelve start at 0. Four 60-minute Swiss games, random pairing again. Top two on points then differential.

Final conflict — the top two start at 0 again. Two games (each player uses light and dark). Highest total from those two games is 1998 World Champion. If still tied on points and differential, one extra game with allegiance randomized.

Sunday sealed (the rest of the field): four 45-minute Swiss games plus a winner-take-all between the top Dark and top Light; earlier sealed scores do not carry into that last game.

The same packet includes a December 1998 Current Rulings supplement (Cane Adiss, Cloud City location layout, cloud sectors, Hunt Down, etc.) and the Code of Conduct overview Summers promised in the cover letter.

Command cards

A command card is the scoresheet. Decipher's 1997 constructed card (still issued in 1998) has two copies per sheet. Each round has game #1 and #2 with columns for allegiance (L/D), opponent, result, victory points, differential, and cumulative score. The printed example is a full win with Light (+11 differential, 2 VP) then a full loss with Dark (−6, still 2 VP cumulative, +5 differential).

The 2002 resources page still offered constructed and sealed command-card PDFs alongside the deck list.

Decklist sheets

Decklists exist to freeze the 60 (and later the cards from "outside the deck") so the director can check sleeves against paper and so the field cannot swap a starting location after seeing the opponent's.

Decipher championship circuit (2002 PDF)

The form required on resources-sw.asp is a 60-line sheet: Light/Dark checkboxes, event, date, player name, deck title. Instruction: "Please list multiple copies of a card on separate lines, one for each copy of that card." No shield box — Defensive Shields did not exist yet as a tournament outside-the-deck pile. Footer: "Decipher allows unlimited reproduction of this document and its contents."

Players Committee form with Defensive Shields (2002–2015)

Once Starting Effects and Defensive Shields existed, the PC form added a DEFENSIVE SHIELDS block (15 lines on the 2015 printing) plus a (V) checkbox on every line so virtual reprints could be marked. Line 1 is labelled Objective/Starting Location. Footer on the 2015 sheet: "2015 SWCCG Players Committee."

Filled example: 2008 Worlds Day 1, Warren Maruszak, Dark Side "AORS" (Agents Of Black Sun), on a sheet still marked 2002 SWCCG Player's Committee. The right-hand block lists twelve defensive shields (Abyss (V), Alterations, Battle Order, There Is No Try, Oppressive Enforcement, You Cannot Hide Forever, Restricted Access (V), Secret Plans, …). That is the era when listing shields on the sheet was required.

The July 2018 Tournament Guide 2.2 still treats shields as "outside the deck": they must be the same set under the Starting Effect for every game of that deck, they do not count against the 60, and they must be listed. Guide 2.2 also requires the first line of a list to be the starting location or objective, and it allows common abbreviations at the director's discretion.

A separate PC file was labelled Tournament Decklist (for Reflections starting effects) — the Decipher Reflections III starting-effect pile (Fear Is My Ally / An Unusual Amount Of Fear, historically capped in the rulesheet) is not the same as the later virtual Starting Effect / shield pile.

Current sheets

Later PC organized play dropped the dedicated shields column from the everyday decklist. Shields still exist in the game; they are just no longer a required fill-in box on the sheet the way they were on the 2002–2015 forms. Keep both generations: the Decipher 60-line sheet, the PC shield sheet, and whatever the event posts today. Tournament Guide 2.2 remains the procedure document until the PC replaces it.

Players Committee organized play

Decipher's last Worlds were 2001. In January 2002 the company stood up a Players' Committee to keep tournaments and (later) virtual cards going. The November 2002 swccgpc.com tournaments page for DecipherCon 2002 already shows the modern shape: two Day 1 Swiss flights (top 20% each), a Saturday Day 2 of 8 Swiss games including Regional / Mini-Open / Summer Open / World Champion byes, then Top 8 single-elimination Final Confrontation with published prize money.

Guide 2.2 (July 2018) is the current long-form procedure: event levels, pairings, differential, Final Confrontation, travel vouchers, deck-list rules, deck checks, infractions, starting effects / outside-the-deck cards, Jabba's Prize (V). Alternate formats (Legacy vs Standard, sealed variants, cube, closed environments) are in the Alternate Format Tournament Guide (2015 revision) and on Formats.

Live results and GEMP-importable lists: starwarsccg.org/tournaments and this wiki's Championships / GEMPC hubs.

Differential, the cut, and why lists exist

Swiss + differential punishes decks that spend a lot of life force (Hunt Down, mutual loss) and rewards retrieval. DecipherCon 2000 Day 2 is the worked example: 58 players, 8 games (4 Light / 4 Dark), 12 advance. Clint Hays 14 points / +85; several players on 10 points missed the cut on differential (Martin Akesson +69 made it; others on 10 with +57 down to +15 did not). Day 3 then reset the twelve; a modified win decided who reached the final two.

Decklists exist because starting locations are supposed to be simultaneous, because a 60-card check is the only way to catch extras, and because championship events post the lists after the fact. That is also why 1998 Worlds allowed a single Saturday-night rewrite: the next day's list is a new freeze.

Fan narrative of Worlds 1996–1999 (Vail 1996; 1997 becoming more international; 1998 timed with Special Edition; 1999 made more exclusive and widely criticized) is on Trandosite's "History of the World Finals." Use it as a contemporary fan account; pair it with Decipher packets and result pages.

See also

• Championships — Worlds hubs
• Formats — Standard, Legacy, Open, sealed, cube
• Tournament Guidelines
• Players Committee · History of the Players Committee
• GEMP · 2026 Tenth Annual GEMPC
• Making Custom SWCCG Cards

Sources

• 1998 World Championship packet (Category One scan)
• Tournament Guide 2.2 (July 2018)
• 2015 PC decklist form (shields block)
• Decipher deck list PDF (Wayback id_)
• Constructed command card PDF
• 2008 Worlds Day 1 lists (filled PC 2002 form)
• 1996 tournament desk
• 1998 tournament desk
• 2002 Star Wars pointer
• 2002 TCG tournament home
• 2002 general resources
• 2002 Star Wars resources
• About ratings / Elo
• How SWCCG Tournaments were Set Up (community presentation comparing MTG, chess, and Decipher Swiss)
• PC tournament resources
• PC tournament desk