Tournaments

Tournaments have been Star Wars CCG's organized competition since 1996. Each player brings two 60-card decks (one Light Side, one Dark Side) with no Magic-style sideboard, and events use Swiss pairing scored by victory points plus differential. Decipher ran the circuit through 2001. The Players Committee has run it since 2002. GEMP is the online table used for many modern events.

A chronological event index is List of SWCCG tournaments. Every World Championship: World 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.

December 1996 — first public desk

The first tournament page, decipher.com/starwars/tournaments (captured 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: the tournament guide (last updated 15 April 1997) and constructed, sealed and junior command cards. It also had 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

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.

Players quoted their ratings on mailing lists and fan sites. Decipher kept rating sanctioned Star Wars CCG events after the license ended. From 1 January 2003 the Players Committee's events used a higher "K" value for higher-level tournaments (16 local, 32 Level 1, 48 Level 2, 64 Levels 3–4), and after the 2003 World Championship Decipher re-rated Worlds with a "64K" value, which made Jonny Chu the #1 ranked player. In January 2004 Andrew Howard wrote that a new DeckTech ratings system was being built, with a first trial planned at DPC Atlanta. Decipher converted its ratings system on 1 June 2004; historical SWCCG, Young Jedi and Jedi Knights ratings moved to the new system only if players flagged them to be kept. The Players Committee did not keep a public Elo table.

The rating was a competitive factor, not just a statistic. Paul Todd Feldman, a Worlds finalist in 1996, 1997, 1999 and 2000, said it drew players to events he played in rather than directed. Beating him took his rating points, and the table had a number "kind of like chess."

World Championships

Each year's World Championship has its own hub with the full results, published decklists and photographs; all of them are indexed on World Championships. Two Decipher-era hubs show how Decipher Swiss ran at championship scale: 1998 (the official packet: a Saturday Swiss cut to twelve, scores reset on Sunday, deck changes allowed only on Saturday night, and a two-game final) and 2000 (a three-day cut at DecipherCon 2000, including Kevin Shannon's Modified Win on Day 3).

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).

Decipher's 1999 constructed command card adds a Player ID line and drops the date, tournament director and final score lines.

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

Decklist sheets

Decklists freeze the 60 cards, and later the cards from "outside the deck". The director can check sleeves against paper, and players 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). Every line gained a (V) checkbox to mark virtual reprints. 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, do not count against the 60, and 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, capped in the rulesheet) differs from the later virtual Starting Effect / shield pile.

Current sheets

Later PC organized play dropped the shields block from the everyday decklist. The current blank on the Players Committee Tournament Files page is Tournament Decklist (file Decklist-2016-without-shields.pdf, footer 2017 SWCCG Players Committee). It has 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. The 2015 form with the shields block remains available on the same page.

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. Named planet regions for Regional Championships — Decipher geography, then the Players Committee maps — are on SWCCG regions. DecipherCon 2002 already had the modern shape. Two Day 1 Swiss flights each advanced their top 20%. Saturday's Day 2 was 8 Swiss games and included Regional, Mini-Open, Summer Open and World Champion byes. A Top 8 single-elimination Final Confrontation followed, 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.

See also

• Retro League

• Decklists — collated published 60s
• List of SWCCG tournaments — chronological event index
• Unknown players — blank-name and incomplete-name sheets
• World Championships — Worlds hubs
• Hall of Fame
• SWCCG regions — named planet regions for Regional Championships
• European Championships
• Formats — Standard, Legacy, Open, sealed, cube
• Tournament Guidelines
• Players Committee · History of the Players Committee
• GEMP · GEMP planned features · 2026 Tenth Annual GEMPC · 2026 San Diego Super Open
• SWCCG Memorabilia
• Making Custom SWCCG Cards