Hi everyone, we're going into 2026 soon and as a team we've been discussing the circuit will be looking like next year. There are obvious issues with the size of classic as a tour currently, it incorporates a massive 8 generations as part of itself, and when gen10 hits that will become even worse. This does make the qualifications stages quite overwhelming, alongside playoffs involving a significant number of tiers not seeing play each series and a much larger amount of work in prep. These concerns are definitely very commonly shared at this point in previous discussion threads and on discord.
We also have some concerns over homefield advantage as a tour too generally, it feels a bit lacking in an identity currently and the fact you can play anything from gens1-9 means it can get quite matchup fishy in the homefield picks too with very few players having enough expertise in enough oldgens and SV at the same time to genuinely have a competitive matchup versus a lot of picks, our proposed routes in this thread are intended to hopefully tackle this somewhat too.
In this thread we are proposing four different routes that the UU circuit will take in 2026, and would like to gauge community opinion on which one is the best one. I'll also be providing a prospective look at what the tour schedule for the year would look like under each option, although this would obviously be subject to some certain changes when going into specifics next year.
A - Status Quo
B - Classic Gens1-5 + Double Elimination 6-8 tour
C - Two different classics for 1-5 and 6-8 (+ potential LCQ)
D - Classic Gens1-5 + Homefield 6-9
We would love to hear feedback on this from anyone who would like a say in which approach we take with all of this, we're really looking forward to making our tour circuit the best possible going into next year.
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Route A - Everything stays the same, worry about this going forward with Gen10.
Our least favourite option, because we obviously feel there are issues that need resolving currently.
Route B - Classic becomes Gens1-5 only, Homefield is replaced with a Double Elimination Fairy Gens Tour
After discussion this is probably our favourite option on paper. Classic being Gens1-5 makes it a much more manageable tour, 5 tiers matches Bo5 playoffs nicely without missing tiers, it means the qualification stage doesn't last as long and is more manageable for players to join in, and also lets us get rid of best finish limits to reward true skill across all generations more rather than performance in a limited number of generations.
Under this route homefield advantage would be replaced with a separate double elimination tour for gens 6-8 for fairy gens, this would give those remaining oldgens a neat home in a slightly different faster paced format while still giving it that more than 1 game feel like classic with delim. This would have a better identity than homefield too, while we're not overwhelmingly concerned with removing a partial SV tour given homefields (lacking) identity focused a lot on oldgens too, and we decided to add an extra seasonal this year.
The proposed plan for the year with this tour is below, we're calling it "UU Stour" here as a placeholder but to be clear it is a double elimination tour and not stour format. UU Classic (1-5) gets moved early in the year with this format so thatt there is roughly half a year between the formats, and the timeline works out nicely so that we get very minimal overlap between two SV tours or two oldgen tours, Top row is all our SV tours and bottom row our oldgen tours and team tours, with the only overlap being a small portion of UULT. It is a more "full" circuit than some of the other proposals but the lack of overlap is nice still.
In terms of overlaps Gen1-5 classic + Gen9 masters is quite polar opposite to each other, while the gen6-8 tours overlaps occur only with playoffs of uult being fairly small, and the tail end of the gen6-8 tour where hopefully it should be same with showtime, so overlaps should not be too disruptive really.
Route C - Classic Split into 2 classics (with potential LCQ)
This option is an interesting one that isn't particularly our favourite, but does ensure that gens 6-8 keep a proper home still going forward. Classic being split up makes it more manageable for players going into it, but the main downside is its not actually possible to particularly shorten the two tours still because both will still run for about 10-11 weeks.
Under this route there is the potential to put LCQ back in after its removal this year if desired, its a short 4 week tour so it would fit and provide some SV coverage. This route means we would likely need to consider readjusting point values so that the two classics don't suddenly become worth twice as many points collectively.
The tour format does become a bit more cramped with this, we can generally avoid overlaps still and removing LCQ could remove the triple overlap that does occur in July.
Route D - Classic becomes Gen1-5, Homefield becomes Gen6-9
This was the original proposal I made last year and had some popularity, I still do like it to a degree as it keeps SV representation in with homefield but gives the tour more of an identity as the stour-esque modern gen tour, with less tiers to focus on and hopefully more consistency in matchups due to it. Classic also becomes a more manageable tour. The obvious main concern with this route is that homefield still may not be a particularly desirable tour to maintain to a lot of people though, and might still be a weird identity with the fairygen current gen mix.
This would just use the exact same tour schedule as Route A as classics length won't really change and Homefield would keep the same length, just have a slightly adjusted format.
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