How to participate in an Aetherhub Tourney

Our tournament system is completely free to use and you can use it locally when playing with friends or as a streamer hosting events. This is a quick guide on how to use it as a participant. 

There can be two types of participants in an AetherHub Tourney:

• Manually added users 
• AetherHub Users

Manually added users are static users added by the event holder, this is mostly for local Tournaments in paper format. The system is based on the official pairing and scoring rules and can be used by local game stores if the official Event Keeper is not working or in your local playgroup is you just want to hold a swiss tourney with your friends. But the strength of the system comes when using...

AetherHub users, these are users registered on the site joining a public tourney event. One great benefit of using a user account to join is that users have statistics on all tourneys they have played in. Another benefit is that this opens for some cool options when streaming. We and our Team have held official Tournaments open for everyone, live on Twitch.tv by letting viewers join the tourneys and see pairings live on the website. 

So let's get into how it works. First of all, you will need to join the tournament, to do that we assume that you have acquired the link to the tournament. All you have to do is to log in with your user account and join the tournament. This is what you will see at the join page:

Enter your name/nick you want to be shown in the tourney to your opponents, this will default to your account name. Game nick is your MTG Arena account, be sure to put this in if you are playing an MTG Arena event as this will make it very easy for your opponents to find and match against you. Remember this is case sensitive!

You will then be presented with this page, nothing left to do here other than wait for the tourney to start. When it starts you will need to come back to this page to see pairings. See instructions in the event. If this is a streamer event you will most likely have to open this page a couple of minutes before the tournament starts.

Now how do you find this page again? When logged into AetherHub, select Tourney -> My Tourneys and you will see it listed there, like this:

Okay, the tourney is starting, you are now opening the page again and can see that the page has changed again:

The pairings are also up and you are ready to face your opponent. Lets quickly go through what we are seeing here. The chat-box can be used to communicate directly with other participants during the tournament. If you look at the usernames in this list you will see that only two of them have a gamepad and a user icon by their side. These are other AetherHub users, the others are manually added, users. Normally there will only be Aetherhub Users in an online event, this is just an example.

As you can see both of the user icons are green, this means that both users are online and have the tourney page open. If the icon is red and it is not showing it means that the users are not live in the tourney. Or they have turned off Javascript and WebSockets(unlikely). In streaming events, most of the time people are expected to open the browser and tourney page before the event to see who is online. Offline users are kicked out as we don't want a bunch of free wins in round one as this can also mess with the results later in the tourney giving you a lot of unnecessary tie breakers. If you are kicked out wrongfully, don't worry, you can rejoin if the admin gives you enough time.

Timmy is now ready to face his opponent in MTG Arena. If the opponent has added their MTG Arena nick in the first step you can click the gamepad icon and copy their nick to the clipboard and paste it into MTGA. By hovering it you can see what it is.

The match is over and Timmy lost, time to report the results. It is important that both players report the results to prevent cheating, this is also the standard in real life. Where both players write the results and add a signature, click the "Add results" pane to bring up the results modal.

andreliverod won 2 games and Timmy 0. There are also options for draws and one option called "no-show". This is used in case your opponent did not show up to the game. typing in the chatbox is useful for trying to reach your opponent. Click "Save Results", now you have to wait until everyone has put in their results. If you need to verify the result just click it again and it will show the result you delivered and if your opponent has delivered a result.

Right now you cannot observe which games are done or not, there is also a global timer that is displayed if the admin has enabled it, showing time left in the round. It will be above the chatbox.

If you have a message for the admin and your opponent you can use the "sticky note" function. This leaves a note attached to the match that the admin and opponent can see.

Between rounds, you can look at the results pane to see standings from prior rounds.

That is all! If this seemed like a lot, don't worry. The system is made quite intuitive and is very self-explanatory. if you have any questions you can also ask the other contenders/admin in the chat-box.

If you are interested in hosting tourneys, check out this article on how it works: How to run an MTG Tournament on AetherHub.com