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. A chronological event index is List of SWCCG tournaments. 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, in the June 1999 Tournament Guide, and in the 1998 Worlds packet:

• Full win of a game: 2 victory points
• True tie: 1 point each
• Modified win (time): 1 point
• Bye / opponent quits: 2 points
• 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

The June 1999 Tournament Guide (shared Decipher CCG program) adds: only sanctioned events move the rating; constructed, junior, and sealed are separate rating databases (play in one does not change the others).

Players looked themselves up at tournaments.decipher.com → Check Player Ratings → RatingsSearch.asp. The form asked for game (Star Wars CCG among five titles), deck type (Constructed or Sealed), player format (1 v 1 or Multiplayer), rating window (Life Time / Sprint / Year To Date), then optional name, city, state, and country.

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.

The rating was a competitive factor, not just a statistic. Paul Todd Feldman (DRTORCH; Worlds finalist 1996, 1997, 1999, and 2000) described it as the reason people showed up when he was playing rather than directing: if you beat him you took rating points, and the table had a number "kind of like chess."

it all dominoed from just me buying the packs to playing to doing well at it to people coming to want to play in tournaments I'm at because they had I had points that if you I lose you get my points. And so and then they had a rating kind of like chess

Yes: audio from that YouTube interview can be pulled and converted to text (YouTube auto-captions already exist for the 1:44:08 recording). The quote above is from that caption track.

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.

2000 World Championship — Sokol, Shannon, and a modified win

DecipherCon 2000 ran the Star Wars World Championship as a multi-day Swiss cut. Day 2 had 58 players, eight games (4 Light / 4 Dark), and twelve advancing. Clint Hays 14 points / +85 led; 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).

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Day 3 reset those twelve. Four games (2 Light / 2 Dark). Top two advanced to the Final Confrontation:

Finish	Player	Points (diff)	Notes
1	Yannick Lapointe	8 (47)	advanced
2	Matt Sokol	6 (23)	advanced
3	Kyle Craft	6 (2)
4	Kevin Shannon	5 (29)	Game 2 Dark vs Steve Brentson: Modified Win by 14

A full win is +2 victory points. A modified win (time) is +1. Shannon's Game 2 timeout is the cut-math example: if that game had been a full win, Shannon would have been 6 (29) sitting next to Sokol 6 (23) and Craft 6 (2). Lapointe and Shannon would have been the top two. Sokol would not have advanced.

That is why lists, command cards, and the +1 vs +2 distinction exist: one timed game moved a Worlds finalist.

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.

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. The current blank is posted on the Players Committee Tournament Files page as Tournament Decklist — file name Decklist-2016-without-shields.pdf, footer 2017 SWCCG Players Committee. 60 lines with a (V) checkbox, Objective/Starting Location on line 1, and Jabba's Prize (V) / Luke Skywalker, The Emperor's Prize at the bottom. No dedicated shields column. The 2015 form with the shields block remains available on the same page.

Keep all three generations: the Decipher 60-line sheet, the PC shield sheet, and the current Tournament Decklist. 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, the Tournament Decklists archive, and this wiki's List of SWCCG tournaments.

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 above. 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.

See also

• List of SWCCG tournaments — chronological event index
• Championships — Worlds hubs
• Formats — Standard, Legacy, Open, sealed, cube
• Tournament Guidelines
• Players Committee · History of the Players Committee
• GEMP · 2026 Tenth Annual GEMPC · 2026 San Diego Super Open
• Making Custom SWCCG Cards

Sources

• 1998 World Championship packet (Category One scan)
• Decipher Tournament Guide, June 1999
• Tournament Guide 2.2 (July 2018)
• 2015 PC decklist form (shields block)
• PC Tournament Files
• Tournament Decklist (2016, no shields column)
• 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
• Ratings search form
• How SWCCG Tournaments were Set Up
• DRTORCH interview (BillBisco2)
• PC tournament resources
• PC tournament desk
• PC Tournament Decklists archive