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[Deadlock39]

some of my fellow playtesters have a particular love for Procession

I don't have any clue what you want to tell me  (btw. the Procession board was not my highest rated one this season )

What I think we could do:
- Only have "some" submitted boards (like 2-4) and some more random boards, at least as a test. We'd have to figure out how to alternate among those.
- We could have "random preselected" ones instead of just full random, by having some of us organizers doing random and filtering those ultimately dull ones (Rebuild-nothing/Cultist-nothing). We shouldn't use too high standards, otherwise those boards won't be much different than the usual submitted ones.

Ha, well it wouldn't have as much of an impact except for the fact that you happen to have an accomplice in your Processioning who happens to have a Ph.D. in deforming metal .

If we do pre-screen some random boards, then I agree the standards should not be high.  I don't think we would be playing them (at least not before selecting). We would just want to check for obvious near-coin-flips like Rebuild and such.

If you're going to go with that, just publish a banlist of cards for the champion random boards up front and be done with it. That way the criteria is set ahead of time and there's no specific judgment that needs to be handled on one of the random kingdoms.

I don't really agree that all subjectivity would need to be removed from such a process. I think most people around here can look at a random board and decide if there is a 1-card strategy (or 2-card combo perhaps) that might be stronger than whatever else you might consider doing on the board. Excluding every board that rolls with Rebuild might be a reasonable approach to that card, but I think throwing out every board with Embassy would be a mistake.

[Mic Qsenoch]

Throwing out any board because of a single card is completely insane.

[Seprix]

You can beat Rebuild. If there's a Colony game with huge payload for engine like Wharf and Scrying Pool, it would be an interesting fight. I think the engine player would want at least a singular Rebuild anyways to pile drive quickly and out rush the opponent and take away any chances of coming back. That sounds a lot more fun than some boring Rebuild game, and it still has Rebuild.

[Deadlock39]

You can beat Rebuild. If there's a Colony game with huge payload for engine like Wharf and Scrying Pool, it would be an interesting fight. I think the engine player would want at least a singular Rebuild anyways to pile drive quickly and out rush the opponent and take away any chances of coming back. That sounds a lot more fun than some boring Rebuild game, and it still has Rebuild.

There are plenty of boards that can beat rebuild. All you need is a fast engine. It is just monolithic enough that I would suppose throwing out all boards that contain it wouldn't effect the strategic range of the boards you generated by much. It was nothing more than a dumb example I put forth while disagreeing with the idea of rejecting boards based on a "ban list".

[schadd]

You can beat Rebuild. If there's a Colony game with huge payload for engine like Wharf and Scrying Pool, it would be an interesting fight. I think the engine player would want at least a singular Rebuild anyways to pile drive quickly and out rush the opponent and take away any chances of coming back. That sounds a lot more fun than some boring Rebuild game, and it still has Rebuild.

There are plenty of boards that can beat rebuild. All you need is a fast engine. It is just monolithic enough that I would suppose throwing out all boards that contain it wouldn't effect the strategic range of the boards you generated by much. It was nothing more than a dumb example I put forth while disagreeing with the idea of rejecting boards based on a "ban list".

witch-bm beats rebuild you guys. the reason rebuild is highly rated as it is, it's not attackable (witch wins because -10 vp), it does as well as it does without ability to be countered, it melts duchies so there isn't a contingency thing, and it can mill provinces. if there is something that can just get like 5 provinces by turn 13ish then it can beat rebuild handily, and most engines that have an good component can do that

[Accatitippi]

I'll chime in late, I hadn't noticed this thread before due to how subscriptions work.
I have watched a few (3-4?) of the past championship matches, and I must say that I found the mix of kingdoms to be the worst part when it comes to entertainment value. All the single kingdoms were very good, but I didn't like the experience as a whole for two reasons:
1. you can take only so many long, weak engine games before tabbing away.
And more importantly 2. ultimately the mix just didn't feel like I was looking at normal, fun, varied games of dominion, but rather at a series of "puzzles" put together for the players to solve. I think that this spoils the way I look at a board, since I'll be wondering "what is the designer thinking" rather than "how can they come up with a way to link these tools together to win this". I don't think this is a fault of the specific kingdoms, but rather a inherent feature of designed Kingdoms.
I'm not attracted to kingdom design, so I'm not affected by that side of the issue. I'm sure that having top players play your kingdoms is very cool for many.
Watching the top two players play each other is cool, and I sure wish it involed more random boards (for me, ideally 100%, with or without filters against Complete Dud Kingdoms).
If they're going to be a mix of random and designed, I think the players shouldn't know in advance which are designed and which are random.

Still, I see the appeal of having submitted kingdoms played by top players, but I think it simply doesn't fit too well in the Championship match of the most important online Dominion tournament thing. Maybe make a side event/unrelated thing to host that, with willing players and an interested audience? You could offer a place to the top two interested A-players, or something like that.

[drsteelhammer]

Thanks for all the feedback you've given so far. Your opinions are pretty diverse, so we'll make quite a few people unhappy with our decision how to handle this for sure.

This season, I assume we'll play some random ones and some designed ones since some Kingdoms have been submitted already and it seems unfair to dismiss them without any prior warning. I don't think that will be many, though.

For season 15, we will probably set up a poll on how to continue. Options so far seem to be: Submission (with better seection); Random; a Mix of the two; Themes; alternating between them and seperating the two entirely. Any other ideas?

[MarkowKette]

Thanks for making this thread, i think this topic is really worth the discussion.

As for my view:

I don't really agree with the argument, that as a part of the league the champions match should follow the same rules as the normal matches. The regular league is already over for everyone at that time and the winner of the A division could just be the winner of the league as a whole without an extra match. To me the match is supposed to be different from the normal matches.

I loved submitting kingdoms and i loved playtesting kingdoms (when i didn't submit any).
For my personal viewing experience i think pre-designed kingdoms make it more interesting.
Creating boards with new and fun interactions is quite a joy for me and many others so i love that the league gives a regular opportunity to submit those and maybe seeing them played out by top players.
But i do very much understand some of the concerns with the current system.
Some of the very "interesting" kingdoms that involve for example mechanics like top-deck interactionsand games where the slightest ordering mistake could win or lose you the game tend to be very time consuming. I agree that this can majorly decrease the fun in wieving and playing.
Thus I'd strongly advise to not put more than one of those kingdoms into a championship match. The time factor clearly matters. There are still lot's of engine boards that play out rather fast.
As for Boards with different competing strategies: I really enjoyed championship games where where the competitors went completely different paths and to see how it turned out. (Usually being Mic going for a Big money approach, while Stef was trying to get an engine with a huge catchup potential going fast enough) but this can be very annoying if it's an engine that plays out very slowly, so almoast all of the time is taken by the turns of the engine player and in the end the engine often only overcomes the early lead of the other strategies by continuously being able to kill its opponents turns almoast entirely with strong attacks.
This isn't very much fun to play as the non-engine player and not really much fun to watch either.

I agree that having some random boards mixed in aswell could make for more diversity and sometimes there are just not that many submissions that the playtesters really like.
I wouldn't really want to watch completely dull games in the championship match, but banning certain cards isn't a good solution to this and pre-judging of random boards to rule out the dulls can be difficult to do in an appropriate manner since everyone has their own standarts of when is a board too one-sided boring to be accepted for the match. So with random boards i would actually just leave them completely random. With all the expensions out there complete dulls are less and less likely  and if there happens to be one in the CM then the players and viewers would survive that in my opinion.

[mith]

mith's dumb proposal for an alternative championship match:

X minutes before the match, each participant is given a random selection of 31 Kingdom cards and 3 Events (numbers subject to change). They can then design three kingdoms out of those cards. Viola, six randomly designed kingdoms. (It's sort of a mash up of MtG sealed deck and those trick shot billiards tournaments where the players pick the shots.)

FWIW: I enjoy designing kingdoms; I care less about submitting interesting kingdoms I've played. Either way, I can certainly understand the appeal of watching the best players play those kingdoms, and also the appeal of the best players not having to play them all the time. I know I would prefer to play all random.