Unfortunately no, not of the match play set. I do have 2 sets 1 set of 3-strikes decks available.
will you be selling them eventually?
Yes! My test decks just came in. Will be ordering a large batch soon and have them available just before/after my tournament.
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Question about the game/order selection. The proto-guide mentions using D20 rolls for this stuff. Does that mean have the 4 members of a group roll D20 and play according to the number they get (like, lowest first, next highest, etc?) With roll offs for ties? Or something different?
Have you used the dice for game selection also?
You don’t have to use D20 rolls but yes, that’s how I’d run it with a smaller group. All 4 players roll, highest number gets choice of game or position. Rolling a 20 gets you both. Do another roll to break any ties.
Of relevance to Critical Hit organizers. In MatchPlay you can now move players between groups (it’s not yet possible to remove a group completely or create a new group from scratch). Details: Match Play Events Open Thread
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Going to be running my first 3-strike tourney here in San Francisco on Labor Day - any other best practices folks have? I listened to the Buffalo Pinball podcast as they discussed their experience running one and just wanna be prepared (excited that I can use @haugstrup’s new feature in MP!)
All Match Play Edition cards have been revealed. Decks have been ordered and I should have them available early/mid September. Purchase link will be posted here once ready.
Still plenty of spots available for my tournament in Van Nuys. I’ll be posting a registered player list soon. iepinball.eventbee.com
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Just ran our first 3-strikes tournament and it was fun but ran LOOOOONG. Some of that was the machines not being super hard so like on Spider-Man we had a game go over an hour (everyone had over 200M). Can’t wait to see the Match Play cards and how it goes.
Anyone else who’s run the 3-strike. How long has your tourneys run? And anything you did to speed things up?
I’ve added some notes on questions we had in the Google Doc Tournament Director’s Guide too since some scenarios are a bit confusing on what trumps what and how long things last etc. as far as the various powers each card had.
I ran a 3 strike with 12 people with some custom rules, and it took 3 hours.
I gave everyone 3 cards to start. If you got last on the game you played you got to get another card. Other than that, we played pretty standard. My games don’t play long, so that’s wasn’t an issue. Took time to get rounds going due to people not being familiar with the game, and also there were times that 4,5,6 people got into a back and forth playing lots of cards. Not sure if we did that right to be honest. Haha
3 strikes head to head or group 3 strikes? There is always around 10-12 rounds for 3 strikes, if you have long playing game and good player on them, averaging 45 minutes per round things could run for an hour…
MatchPlay is not better except that you control the number of round up front. If you dedicated to do a 10 round of matchplay (qualifier + finals) it would be the same length as 10 round group knockout.
Setting up the games hard if you can or else removing long game from bank when possible is a way to streamline. Best run tourney like these on quick playing EMs and SS machines 
we did group strikes and it went pretty long. We did both phases but I think more it had to do with excellent players and standard game setups for location vs making them harder and/or using more SS/EMs 
I ran a group 3 strikes CH tournament last night.
We had 16 players. It went 13 rounds, and lasted just under 5 hours. But that included instructions and an auction phase where each player could bid and add 1 card.
Congrats to Brian O’Neill for winning it all!
There was a really good example of when it’s useful to add a ball to another player: in the quarterfinals group 4, after “normal” play had concluded, Jay Collins was low man with less than 10M on Tron. Billy had the 3rd place score, meaning that the standings at that moment were Mark 6, Billy 6, Derek 5 and Jay 4. Derek thus stood to be eliminated. Derek used a “heal player” card on Jay to give him one additional ball. Derek was hoping that Jay would score enough to pass Billy but not enough to pass him. Passing Billy would produce the 6-5-5-5 result you see, thus getting Derek into a tiebreaker with a chance to move on. Note that in this particular instance, if Jay also passed Mark, Derek still gets a tiebreaker, since now Jay is the player with 6 and Mark drops to 5. As long as Jay passes one or both of Billy and Mark but doesn’t catch Derek, Derek is in a tiebreaker. And, of course, Jay will play fully motivated since this also gives him a chance to get in that otherwise he wouldn’t have. The getting into the tiebreaker part worked; alas for Derek, he didn’t win the tiebreaker - - Jay made the most of the opportunity by winning the game on Paragon.
Sidebar note and caution for future players: beware the “frozen card hand”. As in a set of cards containing two invert cards and not much else of use. One invert is a great opportunity - - swap for something better. Two stops you - - if you use one, the player you swap with gets your hand and the other inversion card, and seeing that there’s little to use there, they’ll likely swap right back.
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Yep, made the most of that opporunity for sure… and made it through two tiebreakers on Paragon (THE GREATEST GAME OF ALL TIME) to make the finals and the semis respectively. Unfortunately, what Paragon gives, it also takes away, so of course after I kick off the semis with a solid game rolling Jungle Queen (for 2 points), I had 3 balls disappear with only a couple flips.
This tournament also made it apparant to me that nudging and flipper skills won’t make up for a lousy brain and poor game knowledge on modern machines. I obviously don’t have what it takes when the game is more complicated than… 1. Shoot that spinner 2. Hit those drops 3. Profit
Thanks Karl, I was miserable all weekend and still had a blast. Great tournament!
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@PAPA_Doug tried his hand at a Critical Hit style tourney a few years ago and it ran until after 7AM. 
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It didn’t run quite that late… but it was too late.
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Match Play Decks are now available to order. I also have a limited number of t-shirts available on the order page as well.
United States orders:
https://www.neverdrains.com/criticalhit/order.php
International orders need to go through this ebay listing so I can take advantage of the Global Shipping Program and not spend so much time filling out customs forms and waiting at the post office again.
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Ordered. Our October monthly will be using them. Hope it doesn’t run too long, but it’ll be small, so we should be ok.