What if we put time limits on phases instead of games? Like a three minute time limit per phase per player. If someone goes over that time limit perhaps it means they aren't familiar with their spellbook enough to play faster. Give them a warning or two and if they're still going past the three minute mark on phases they lose the match. Also because games of arena vary so much in their length, it might be necessary to find a way for shorter games to compensate for longer games. Instead of waiting for that one 15-20 round game to finish while everyone else waits for them or cutting them off prematurely, simply give players a score card which includes a list of all of the opponents they will fight in the tournament, which will be randomly generated in advance. Each time they finish a game they can put a check mark next to that opponent's name. And instead of having separate swiss and elimination portion of the tournament, just combine them into one swiss style tournament. Whoever wins the most games is the winner, and if they're a tie you have a tiebreaker match. I know it's more dramatic for TV if people can be eliminated from further participation in the tournament, but it's always more fun to play more mage wars games rather than fewer mage wars games, and swiss style tournaments are probably more fair in general because the results are determined by just a simple win count out of a certain number of games all against different opponents.
I really don't see the need for elimination rounds in Mage Wars Arena tournaments. All it does is make things appear more dramatic on TV and increase the tournament length unless you use time limits to prematurely cut games off. And it's not like mage wars is a media sensation like some other games.
Then again it might be harder to cover a bunch of games in a swiss tournament then focusing on the "Finals" because then you have more games to focus on. But the solution to this is obviously to have some partipants volunteer to write about their matches afterwards, and to have some people taking pictures of different games at various points. While it's not the same as full video coverage of the entirety of any one particular match, it's still plenty comprehensive, and you could still sometimes video record some of the more interesting matches.
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