From Minas Gerais or nearby?
Find out where to play with us. I wrote about the stores I play at in Belo Horizonte and the cities around it, and what each one is like.
Find out where to play with us. I wrote about the stores I play at in Belo Horizonte and the cities around it, and what each one is like.
Methodology
Everything TCMG Top Cut shows about tournaments, players, decks and rankings comes from the official results of Pokémon TCG tournaments run by stores in Minas Gerais, Brazil. This page explains how those numbers are put together.
Each tournament is published from the official tournament file, exported by the software the store uses to run the event. The file carries the players, the rounds, the matches and the final standings. Before it reaches the site, the result is reviewed: no upload is ever published on its own. The original data is kept exactly as it arrived, and the site never deletes or rewrites a match to change what shows on screen.
Stores in Minas Gerais that run official Pokémon TCG tournaments are included: weeklies, League Challenges and League Cups. A store can publish its own tournaments from the store panel, or the TCMG team publishes them from the file the store sends. The upcoming events calendar follows the official Play! Pokémon event list for Minas Gerais.
Each player is identified by their official Pokémon Player ID, which comes in the tournament file. A result with no account linked on the site still counts and can be claimed later. Anyone who registered but played no match, because they dropped or did not show up, does not appear on player pages. Pre-releases are left out too, because the deck is built on the spot from sealed product and says nothing about the player.
On player pages, a bye (a round with no opponent) counts neither as a win nor as a match played. The tournament page shows the official standings, where a bye counts as a win. Both are right: one measures the player's performance, the other reproduces the event's official result.
The ranking uses Elo, the same idea as in chess. Every player starts the season with the same number, and each match adjusts it based on the result and the opponent's strength at that moment: beating someone above you moves you up more than beating someone below you. The first matches of the season move the number more, until it settles at the player's level. League Challenges and League Cups weigh a little more than weeklies, and byes are left out of the calculation. There are no fixed points for a title: the champion climbs through the matches they won. At the end of the season the ranking is archived and everyone starts again from the same point. The 24h Circuit is the exception: it adds up points for taking part and for placement at each stage.
Each player's deck is reported after the tournament, and the TCMG team can correct and lock a wrong entry. The metagame brings together the published tournaments of one format. Each deck's percentage is computed over the reported decks of players who played at least one match, so players with no reported deck are left out of the count.