We hosted our first event at GENCON2026! The event was limited to 16 Magic players, and it was filled in the first 10 minutes after it went live on the GENCON website.
16 players showed up, on time, ready to play. Everyone was able to register a MatchPunk account on their phone. We created a group called GENCON2026, and all 16 players joined the group. Then, the match began. Everyone played random characters and the ones with the highest rating after 4 rounds were the winners.
The matches worked great! We got positive feedback from nearly everyone. Many thought this was a really cool way to work tournaments, as opposed to a single elimination or round robin. Some thought that an ongoing rating and ranking in a group would be a good way to seed regular tournaments.
We were surprised to hear about the issues people had with the Companion app. Fortunately, MatchPunk didn’t have those problems.
We also got some really good suggestions. Here were a few of them:
1. Instead of tapping the APPLY CHANGES button to change your score, just have a short timeout. If you pause tapping + or – to adjust your score for more than a second or two, the score will automatically be registered. This makes Matchpunk work similar to existing life counters.
2. Add the ability to review the score history in a game. Some serious Magic players are interested in seeing where in a match they lost the most points. It helps with strategy.
3. Instead of having the Code Generator player decide who won, incorporate a way to make them agree on a winner. This would help with cheating.
Thanks to the 16 volunteers at GENCON. We will be there next year!