Tournament DWL I Format Discussion

[Mokratha]

Definitely a big fan of limiting 8/7/6 to a maximum of 2 flex slots per week giving the niche formats a time to shine and making DWL have its own identity. 3 drafts for SV as you're guaranteed to play that twice and 2 slots for the rest as you're not guaranteed to play them both and matchup fishing is ass anyway, just draft a good team.

 

[DonMarto]

As someone with less rep than the above repliers, I would like to point out that in the event there is no limit, then many match ups will be "mini dcl". The vision of this format is to be different from dcl/dfl, so we should see the formats that actually set them appart be played every week

 

[Dddddsf]

Along with the announcement of our 2026 Tournament Calendar, we announced a new team tournament that would be taking up the DLWC slot called the Draft Winter League I, that came with a proposed format that was discussed internally between the mod team.

Initial DWL Format idea

SV Standard
SV Standard
SV Low Tier
SV Low Tier
SV VGC
SV VGC
SV National Dex
SV National Dex

Following the feedback we got from the initial announcement it is clear to us that theres no longer a demand for a team tournament that is focused on current generation metagames, like Clash of Kings did in past generations, and that the demand for past generations is bigger than ever. So we have come to propose a new format based on internal discussion and feedback from different contributors. But first some quick points to catch up on the DWL concept:

• Traditional 8 teams, Best of 8 auction-based Draft team tournament
• Each team will be allowed 2-3 managers
• Self-buy rules TBD
• Will have a custom avatar prize

The format we are looking at using is adapted from NUCL, where in this case there would be 2 fixed SV slots and 6 flex slots - with each team picking 3 (but a team cant pick the same format twice). Here are two Format examples the team came up with:

Format Idea

2x SV
6x Flex

Flex can include 5 or 6 of the following formats:
SS, USUM, ORAS, SV VGC, SV NatDex, SV Low Tier, BW, DPP

We are also open to other format structures that prove to be popular among the community, as long as they fit the criteria we set up for this tournament:

Tournament Criteria

• The tour will not have more than 2x SV standard slots; this thus rule out Draft creation formats by extension
• The tour must be unique from DCL/DPL
• The forum mod team is only open to adding any of the following tiers, all other tiers are not up for discussion: SS, USUM, ORAS, SV VGC, BW, DPP, SV NatDex, SV Low Tier
• The format must "make sense", for example randomly cutting SS but having USUM and ORAS in the tour will not be allowed

Along with the format, other topics up for discussion are:

• Updates to the self-buy rules - only one self-buy but buying the slot not the player/ 2 selfbuys but bigger increase on the second one
• Decreasing the number of drafts for the non SV formats

We are looking foward to new feedback regarding the proposed formats or new ideas the community might have for the first DWL. Comments that are off-topic or not relevant at all to DWL discussion will be deleted

Manager signups open December 15th.

Personally one of my favorite drafts I have been a part of was a ND LT draft. I’m not expecting it to be added but any LT draft for any of the generations would be a fun addition