Organizer Guide - Swiss Unity League Season 2023

Interested in becoming an organizer? Register here

In this guide, we explain everything you need to know, to register your events for the SUL. If you wish to understand how League Points are awarded to players, and to see more information about the end-of-year Championship 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 Championship tournament with 2.5k prizes.

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

Changelog

11 April:
- SUL Premier requires 17 players.
- Communicate SUL Premier events until 30.06.23.
- Recommendation: Announce SUL Premier/Regional 1 month in advance.
- Upload results within 1 month.
- Top 8/Playoffs clarification

Tournament Types

You can register all of your tournaments for the league to make them award Qualification Points (QPs) to the participants. 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 QPs your event will award.

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

SUL Regular

All your normal events (weekly, FNM, Prerelease) will be SUL Regular events. From the organizers side there's no fee and therefore it allows you to award additional prizes to your player base for free. Therefore if you do not wish to finance the prize pool of the league or you do not have the necessary funds, it is still possible to participate in the league by running all of your events as SUL Regular events.

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.

For each format you can organize one of these events per month (1 Modern, 1 Limited, 1 Standard, etc per month).

Running an SUL Regional event comes with a fee of CHF 2 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 15 needs to be paid.

SUL Regional events without playoffs can also easily be held on a weekday evening.

SUL Premier

Every organizer gets the chance to organize 2 SUL Premier events per year. Since there is a very limited amount of SUL Premier events we expect people to travel all around Switzerland for them.

Running an SUL Premier event comes with a fee of CHF 3 per participant. Running a top 8 is mandatory and comes with an additional fee of CHF 75.

Tournament Type	Limitation per organizer	Playoffs	Fee per Participant (in CHF)	Playoff Fee (in CHF)
Regular	Unlimited	No	free	-
Regional	1 per format per month	Optional	2.-	15.-
Premier	2 per year*	Yes	3.-	75.-

Organizational Overhead

We try to make participating in the league as easy as possible through automating many workflows on the website. Here are the few tasks that still remain from the tournament organizer's side.

Enter your event details in the calendar on the SUL website. These will also link back to your website, which provides you with free advertisement.
At the end of each of your events the results need to be imported on the SUL website. This can be done directly via link or PDF from Eventlink and Aetherhub. No points/standings need to be entered manually.
The fees will be calculated automatically and you will receive an invoice every 3 months.

Examples

Ajani wants to turn their Saturday Modern event with top 8 into a SUL Regional Event. He arranges for this with the League and creates the event on the website. Ajani's event runs well and he manages to have 22 players. Once his event is over, Ajani uploads the results on the League website, which immediately updates the ranking. Some time later, Ajani receives an invoice from the League for 22x2 + 15 = 59 CHF, which goes in the prize pool for the invitational.

Benefits for Organizers

Advertisements for your events through the Swiss Unity League event calendar.
Players are motivated to participate in your events more regularly.
Players from other regions that are also part of the league are motivated to travel to your events.
Extra prizes at your weekly events in the form of QPs at no cost to you.

League Rules

Tournaments participating at the Swiss Unity League need to be “Magic: the Gathering” tournaments in a single player format and run in real life. Digital SUL events on MTG Arena, MTG Online, or similar are not allowed.

Magic Tournament Rules

SUL events need to be in accordance with 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 decided by the TO individually.
- For SUL Regional events without playoffs, the number of Swiss rounds can be decided by the TO individually, but at maximum 5 rounds.
- For events with playoffs (SUL Regional or Premier) the number of Swiss rounds and playoff type (top 4/8) played in SUL Regional events needs to be in accordance with what is specified in “Appendix E—Recommended Number of Rounds in Swiss Tournaments” of MTR. (e.g. 9-16 players play 4 rounds, 17-32 play 5 rounds, 33-64 play 6 rounds, etc.)

Tournament Logistics

SUL Regional events

For each format you can only run 1 SUL Regional event per month.
All different types of Limited events count as 1 format. Hence you can only organize one Draft, Sealed or combined Limited SUL Regional event per month.

SUL Premier events

You can only run 2 SUL Premier events per year.
To run a SUL Premier event your venue needs to offer seats for at least 50 players.
If less than 17 players show up to your SUL Premier event, then your event will be downgraded to SUL Regional (effective 11.04.23).
Players need to be able to preregister online for the event.
SUL Premier events need to be held on a Saturday or on a Sunday.
Allowed Formats: Limited (any combination of draft and sealed), Standard, Pioneer, Modern, Legacy.
Competitive REL is mandatory and at least one judge is required.

If you wish to organize SUL Premier events, please communicate this to leoninleague@gmail.com until 30.06.23. You can still request to run a Premier event later on, but we can't guarantee that there will be slots available.

Deviate from League Rules

If you wish to deviate from the above league rules for a given tournament, you can ask beforehand for approval at leoninleague@gmail.com. Please also mention the reason why you wish to deviate from these rules.

Examples of such deviations:

If you wish to run more than 2 SUL Premier events per year.
If you want to increase the number of Swiss rounds played at your SUL Regional event.
If your venue doesn't have the required 50 seats to host SUL Premier events.

Late joining Organizers

Tournament organizers (TO) can join the league at any point during the year. In order to not disadvantage late joining TOs, until 30th of April 2023 TOs can register their past tournaments for the league to let them award Qualification Points retrospectively. These tournaments can only be registered as SUL Regular events.
From the 1st of May onwards TOs need to upload events within 1 month from the date they were held. Additionally the final deadline for uploading events is 31.10.23. After that we decide the final ranking and no more events can be uploaded.

Labeling your Events

To make SUL events easily recognizable to players it is important that all SUL events are labeled in a consistent way. You should therefore mention the following details for each event in the event calendar of your own website:

Mention that the event is part of the Swiss Unity League and awards Qualification Points for it.
The type of the event (SUL Regular/Regional/Premier)
It should also link to the Guide for Players for more information.

If possible please announce SUL Premier and Regional events at least 1 month in advance.

Uploading Results

Please adhere to the following guidelines to ensure accurate and consistent reporting of tournament results:

Ensure players' names are entered as first name followed by last name separated by a space. Example: Jari Rentsch.
- If using pairing tools like Aetherhub or Mtg Melee where players can enter their names themselves, please remind players to input their real names accordingly.
When using Eventlink make sure to submit tournament results right after the tournament. On the following day player names can be replaced with [[Redacted]].
For events with Playoffs:
1. First, upload the standings of the last Swiss round as usual and click submit.
2. Next, you will be redirected to the view of the event where you see the uploaded results.
3. Click on the button called 'Add/Edit Playoff Results'.
4. Enter the results of the top 4 or top 8.

Finances, Liability, and Sponsoring

SUL will be financed by sponsorships and the fees organizers pay at their SUL Regional and Premier events. The main organizer of SUL, the Leonin League association, will take all financial liability for SUL. Leonin League is a tournament organizer based in Zürich. If you wish to sponsor SUL please contact: leoninleague@gmail.com