Organizer Guide - Swiss Unity League Season 2024


In this guide, we explain everything you need to know, to register your events for the SUL. If you wish to understand how SUL Points are awarded to players, and to see more information about the end-of-year Invitational tournament, please also read the Player Guide.

Abstract

The Swiss Unity League (SUL) is a collaborative tournament series between various Magic: the Gathering event organizers in Switzerland. Only the best players will qualify for the end-of-year 2-day invitational tournament with 2.5k prizes.

Any organizer can register their tournament for the league to make it award SUL Points. Players need to collect these points in order to qualify for the invitational tournament.

Eligible Tournaments

The 2024 season runs from 01.11.2023 until 31.10.2024 and qualifies for the Invitational tournament in November 2024. During that time, you can register all of your Magic: the Gathering events for the league to make them award SUL Points to the participants.

Eligible are all Magic: the Gathering tournaments that are:

Digital and multiplayer events can still be advertised on our website, but they cannot award SUL Points.

Tournament Types

There are 3 types of tournaments (SUL Regular, Regional, and Premier). To each of your tournaments, you can assign one of these types, which defines how many points your event will award.

To finance the prize pool of the invitational, organizers pay a fee to run SUL Premier and SUL Regional tournaments. The higher the fee that you pay, the more points your event will award to players. SUL Regular tournaments are free to organize.

SUL Regular

All your normal events (weekly, FNM, Prerelease) will be SUL Regular events. These events don't have a fee and allow you to award extra prizes in the form of SUL Points to your players for free. Therefore, if your budget is limited, it is still possible to participate in the league by running all of your events as SUL Regular and not paying any fees.

SUL Regional

If you wish to make your local events more attractive for people in your canton, you can turn them into SUL Regional events.

Each month, you can organize the following SUL Regional events:

  • For each format, you can run 1 SUL Regional event. (e.g., 1 Modern, 1 Legacy, 1 Pioneer, etc.)
  • For each weekly recurring event, 1 event of this series can be SUL Regional.

Example: If you have a weekly modern event on Wednesday and a weekly legacy event on Friday, you can have among these events 1 Legacy and 1 Modern event be SUL Regional per month. Additionally, you could organize a Modern event on a Saturday and a Legacy event on a Sunday, both with top 8.

Running an SUL Regional event comes with a fee of CHF 1 per participant. Playoffs (top 8 or top 4) are optional for regional events. If your Regional event has playoffs then a further fee of CHF 20 needs to be paid.

SUL Premier

SUL Premier events are the most competitive events of the year. Since there is a very limited amount of SUL Premier events, people travel all around Switzerland to attend them.

Every organizer gets the chance to organize 1 SUL Premier event per year. If you have already organized Premier events in the previous season, you can run 2 Premier events instead.

Running an SUL Premier event comes with a fee of CHF 100 plus and additional CHF 2 per participant. Premier events require at least 24 participants and a top 8 must be played.

You may use these logos to label your events on your flyers or website

Tournament Type Overview

Tournament Type Limitation per organizer Fee per Participant (in CHF) Playoff Fee (in CHF)
Regular Unlimited free -
Regional For each format 1 per month (+1 for each weekly event) 1.- 20.-
Premier 1-2 per year 2.- 100.-

Organizational Overhead

We try to make participation in the league as easy as possible by automating many workflows on the website. Here are the remaining tasks required from the tournament organizer's side:

Example: Ajani wants to turn his Saturday Modern event with top 8 into an SUL Regional Event. He creates the event on the website, which is then advertised on the SUL calendar. Ajani's event runs well and attracts 22 players. During the event, he manages the pairings and results as usual with the Eventlink app. Once the event is over, Ajani downloads the results from Eventlink and uploads them on the SUL website, which immediately updates the ranking. Some time later, Ajani receives an invoice from the League for 22x1 + 20 = 42 CHF, which goes into the prize pool for the Invitational.

Benefits for Organizers

SUL Rules

Tournaments participating in the Swiss Unity League must be “Magic: the Gathering” events in a single-player format and held in real life. Digital SUL events on MTG Arena, MTG Online, or similar platforms are not allowed.

Magic Tournament Rules

SUL events must follow the official Magic Tournament Rules (MTR). The following exceptions and additional rules apply:

  • Number of Swiss Rounds
    • For SUL Regular events, the number of Swiss rounds can be determined by the TO individually.
    • For SUL Regional events without playoffs, the TO can decide the number of Swiss rounds, up to a maximum of 5.
    • For events with playoffs (SUL Regional or Premier), the number of Swiss rounds and type of playoffs (top 4/8) must comply with “Appendix E—Recommended Number of Rounds in Swiss Tournaments” of the MTR.
  • Tournament Requirements

    SUL Regional Events

    SUL Premier Events

    Deadlines

    Deviation from League Rules

    If you wish to deviate from the league rules for a particular tournament, please contact us in advance.

    Examples of such deviations:

    Labeling Your Events

    To ensure that SUL events are easily recognizable to players, it's important to label them consistently. Therefore, include the following details for each event in the calendar on your own website:

    Additionally, you may use these logos to label your events on your flyers or website

    Redeem Invitational Prizes

    The prizes of the SUL Invitational 2024 will be paid out in store credits of eligible organizers of SUL. Among all the TOs that offer their store credit (or other prizes), the players can choose freely where they want to redeem them.

    To be eligible, a TO needs to pay at least CHF 400 in SUL fees for the Season 2024 (01.11.23-31.10.24).

    Finances, Liability, and Sponsoring

    The Swiss Unity League is financed through sponsorships and fees from organizers of SUL Regional and Premier events. The main organizer, the Leonin League association, assumes all financial liability for SUL. If you wish to sponsor the SUL, please contact us.

    Swiss Unity League API

    The Swiss Unity League offers an Application Programming Interface (API) which allows you to write plugins for the SUL website.

    Some possible plugin ideas:

    We provide some example code for the API as well as a playground to test your code without showing it on the SUL website. If you are interested in using it and need help, please let us know!