Have you ever thought about tournaments, and what could be learned from them? Boy, do we have a piece for you!
I am joined today with Aapo “Khormag” Järvelin, the prince of Joensuu (Finland)! He is an accomplished tournament player, a member of Hall of Fame (five tournament wins on his belt), and – as is most relevant to this interview – the transcriber and archivist of the European Championship 2022 (Helsinki) deck list database.
The EC decklist archive is open for anyone to dive into and analyze, with deck contents and final scores of each deck for each EC event. The data is open for all sorts of interpretations and analysis, for example as explored by our resident Phoenix in his article. The data does not collect itself, however!
The lead transcriber and archivist of EC 2022 has graciously promised to answer a few questions to illuminate the process. With this light shed on the affair, any event organizer should feel more comfortable in gathering data.
Kraus: Hi Khormag! Thank you so much for your time! In case someone doesn’t know you through VtES already, would you care to tell the audience a bit more about your VtES career?
Khormag: Hey! No problem at all! My name is Aapo Järvelin, and I am the current prince of Joensuu, Finland. I got first introduced to VtES as early as somewhere around 2014, when some of my friends from miniatures games and Magic the Gathering used to play VtES too and recommended the game for me. Back then I thought the game would be a bit like Commander, the multiplayer variant of MTG which I didn’t personally enjoy, and I ignored VtES because of that.
A year or so later, I had gotten a bit bored with MTG and the way the game was going, and I was looking for an alternative game. I read a bit more about VtES and got a couple of decks for myself, but didn’t play the game until late 2016. When I actually got to play the game, I was instantly hooked. VtES has all the elements I really enjoy in games: interactivity, you can play mind games with your opponent, and the competitive community is active, extremely welcoming and friendly – something that I always felt was missing from MTG. VtES is also a great game for a deck builder, which is a huge and important part for me in card games, even if I can get a bit too stuck to my own formulas.
Kraus: Before we get into the nitty gritty, there’s the necessary question of which clan were you embraced to! Furthermore, do you find yourself still playing that clan in VtES?
Khormag: My first two decks were a Ventrue Antitribu Grinder and a classic Malkavian 94 bleeder, which I got as an extra “gift” with the !Ventrue deck. I traded the decks for one Italian Karakas, a rare Magic Card I had extra copy of. I only played the Grinder for something like 6-8 months, before testing the Malkavian deck. After that I started building more and more decks, and quickly forgot the !Ventrue, having found my “second love” in Tzimisce.
I still play !Ventrue from time to time, but only in tournaments. I used to play the Grinder a lot and presently I kind of find it a bit boring to play. I like to experiment a bit more, or to play some pure wall or combat/wall decks.
Kraus: Organizing the EC must’ve been an ordeal. What can you tell us about the history of EC deck list processes from previous years? What was the thought process of demanding deck lists by email?
Khormag: I have only been to the EC three times, so I don’t have that much experience, but I do believe that you had to have a decklist in all of them. I’m not sure if the decks have been published after the events. I feel like at least some decklists were published, but I am unsure in what capacity.
My original plan for this year’s EC was to go to Helsinki and play myself, but life got in the way, and I had to change my plans. I have always hoped that VtES events would gather and release more data from the tournaments, a bit like bigger games like MTG do, because I really love to dive into the archives and go through decklists others have built and played. When it was clear that I can’t make it to the EC, I thought that I could still be part of the event in some way, so I asked the organizers if I could help with checking the decklists and if there was interest in getting them published after the event. Email was an easy and quick way to set up some kind of way to collect and organize hundreds of decks.
Kraus: Going into detail of the event, what steps did you take to prepare for gathering and checking the decklists? What tools were used?
Khormag: We had an email account created for the event. Before the event I created some folders and a tag system for identification in Gmail. When a decklist was sent to us, it could be tagged for the tournament it was used in and moved to a said folder. This way it was quite easy to check if every player had sent the decklist for a said tournament.
After and during the event, I started moving all the decks to VDB. I chose to do this because it would organize all the decklists in the same format and I thought it would be cool to publish the decks in the VDB public decks archive too. I also really like VDB as a tool personally. I think it is the best option for deckbuilding and collection management since Secret Library. It is also very easy to export decks to VDB, as it is possible to export decks from clipboard.
Kraus: Did everything go smoothly, or were there hiccups?
Khormag: Things went smoother than I expected. Of course, there were some small problems here and there, some deck lists were submitted in a handwritten form, and it was a bit hard to read from time to time. There were also some incomplete and/or missing decklists, that I had to hunt down during and after the event. But I think we did a pretty good job, only missing one decklists from the whole weekend.
Kraus: How were the decklists processed after the event before publishing?
Khormag: All the decklists were first transferred to VDB and then made anonymous, and the score they had at the tournaments was added. I got help to this from Tommi Hakomaa and Petrus “Kraus” Makkonen (editor: That’s your’s truly – I helped!), which was a huge thing, as there were so many decks to process! Realistically, this would be a two- or three-person job for an event this size. Something to keep in mind for the future.
Kraus: The archive was published on the EC website, free for everyone to use, as a Dropbox link. Was this ideal? How would you imagine the future of publishing tournament deck list archives?
Khormag: My original plan was to only release the decks in VDB, but I think the current solution was okay for this time. In future I would like to see a more organized way to handle things, at least an official “EC Archives” or “Continental Championship Archives” in an easy to read and access format.
Kraus: How would you improve the overall process? I heard mentions of VDB QR-codes at registration, for example.
Khormag: If I would do this again, I would make it a requirement to have the decklist in a digital format. Something like a VDB link would be ideal, but it’s not really a problem to have the decks attached to an email. It would be cool to have a proper tournament software that you could use to collect the decklists too, but software development and upkeep is not free.
Kraus: Thinking back at the whole process, how demanding do you think it is? Could anyone do it?
Khormag: For a single tournament, I would say that this is somewhat easily doable for anyone. Using VDB, it takes no time at all to export the decks for, say, 15-25 people. Even something like 40-50 decks is not that bad. If the event is larger than that, or if there are multiple tournaments to do, I would suggest having more people on it.
Kraus: Should players be worried that they’re asked for extra work or preparation?
Khormag: I don’t think so. It is very common in other games to require a decklist for most tournaments, and I have personally never felt it as a problem. I would assume that most people already use a tool of some kind to build and keep track of their decks. So, it should not be a huge deal to have a link or a copy for the decklist somewhere when going to a tournament.
Kraus: What do you see as the best uses for such archives?
Khormag: I think it’s an important tool for understanding the competitive meta of the game and monitoring if any specific cards and or archetypes need an adjustment or boost. And I don’t necessarily mean banning or changing the cards, but maybe some new ways to interact with some cards and/or strategies, or maybe some new hot tools for less played clans and or archetypes.
Such archives can also be important for new competitively minded player to get some idea of what kinds of decks are good in the current environment and to learn deckbuilding. Experienced players can also use these archives to get some new ideas, and new and fun decks to play.
Kraus: Which kinds of events should collect deck list data?
Khormag: I think all data we can get is a good thing, but I would love to see that at least continental championships and national championships would collect and publish this data in the future. I also don’t personally see that much value in data gathered from two round tournaments or events with less than 15 players. This is because of the more random nature of two rounds. But I wouldn’t mind reading through the decklists from these kinds of events either!
Kraus: Anything else you would like to add?
Khormag: Thank you for everyone who attended the EC in Helsinki! It is great to see the game getting back to life after the Covid-19 situation. Also huge thanks to Tommi and Petrus for their help with this project! I hope to see similar projects for other larger events in the future!
Thank you so much for your time!
Indeed, thank you for the hard work, as well as the interview, Khormag!
Where do we go from here, then? From this interview we can gather the following:
Players should not feel intimidated, even if deck lists would be asked by tournament organizers. Firstly, following organizers’ instructions to submit the info they need, either before or after tournaments, is often just pressing a few buttons! Secondly, you would be helping the whole community and the game’s publisher a lot!
Similarly, organizers should not feel intimidated to ask for deck lists! As Khormag explained:
- setting up an email,
- importing text files into VDB,
- formatting if necessary,
- and finally exporting them as a bulk,
results in an easily accessible, uniformly formatted set of data for hosting on cloud storages, such as Dropbox. For most events this is doable by a single person, and for larger events you might want to ask for help.
So what are you waiting for – get gathering those decks in your events! I’m sure Phoenix will love to dissect them…
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