Organizer Guide

Everything needed to run an event, from creating it to what happens after the last match.

Creating a Tournament

Go to My Tournaments and click Create Tournament. You are taken through a few steps rather than one long form, and the first step decides how many of them there are.

Instant or scheduled

A scheduled tournament is the normal case: you open registration, players sign up ahead of time, pay if there is a fee, and check in on the day.
An instant tournament skips all of that. There is no registration phase and no payment — it goes straight to check-in, players check themselves in on the spot up to the player limit, and their entry is created at that moment. For a casual evening or a spontaneous round, it is the shorter path.

When and where

Date, time, place, postal code and country, plus an optional description shown on the tournament page. The description has a formatting toolbar — bold, italic, headings, lists, links — and a preview tab that shows exactly what the tournament page will show. You can also type Markdown directly; the toolbar only writes it for you. The same editor appears on every other text you write: recap, payment instructions, prize descriptions, schedule notes and the footer.

Players and format

Format — the Magic format. Pauper, Modern, Legacy, Standard, Pioneer, Premodern and Duel Commander have full decklist checking; Sealed, Draft and Cube Draft are limited pools and are not checked against a card list.
Min / Max players — defaults are 8 and 32.
Collect decklists — turn on to require a list from every player. It becomes a condition for checking in.
Tournament banlist — turn on to give this event its own banned and released cards. The cards themselves are edited later, in the tournament's own Banlist tab; see below.
Unlisted — the event stays out of the tournament list, the landing page and organizer profiles, and is reachable only by its link. Registrations, pairings and results all work as normal, and it still shows a link preview when shared.

Match rules

Round timer — minutes per round; 50 by default.
Best of (Swiss) and Best of (Finals) — three or five games.
Rounds override — leave empty to let the system work out the number of Swiss rounds from the checked-in count, or fix a number.
Top cut — four settings; see The cut further down.
Finals timer — a separate limit for cut matches, or none at all.

Payment

Only for a scheduled tournament with a fee. The next section covers it.

Club

If your account belongs to a club, the event can be assigned to it. The club's page then lists the event, its branding defaults apply, and the club is named as the host. When there is exactly one club it could belong to, it is filled in for you.

Your tournament starts as a draft — invisible to players until you open registration.

Payment Setup

Pick how players pay:

Cash at the door — nothing to configure. You mark each player paid at the venue.
Bank transfer — enter IBAN and account holder. You can add a PayPal link alongside it, and free-text payment instructions shown to players after they register (for example, asking them to put their name in the reference). You confirm each payment by hand.
Online by card — players pay in a checkout and their registration is marked paid without you touching it. This needs your Stripe account connected; the step offers to set that up if it is not. PlanesForge charges 0.50 € per online registration.

For a scheduled event you can also set a payment deadline, a refund deadline, and how many days before the deadline a reminder goes out.

The Tournament Banlist

Where you turned the banlist on, the tournament gets its own Banlist tab. Two things can go on it:

Extra bans — cards the format allows but this event does not.
Releases — cards the format bans but this event allows.

Only cards the format already bans can be released. Anything outside the format's card pool stays out, so a Pauper event cannot start admitting rares — which is what keeps card search and the archetype data intact. A list that instead names the only legal cards is a different thing and not available yet.

The tab appears on the formats that have a card list to deviate from — Pauper, Modern, Legacy, Standard, Pioneer, Premodern, Duel Commander. Not on Vintage, whose restricted cards are not modelled yet, and not on the limited formats.

Until when you can change it. Until the first round is paired. The rules that apply are frozen when check-in opens — that happens for every tournament, not just yours, so "under which rules did this event run" stays answerable afterwards. Changing something between check-in and the first pairing re-checks the decklists already submitted: affected players are emailed the cards by name and fix their own lists, and you see a count rather than a task list.

Reuse. A list can start from one of your earlier events, or from one of your club's templates, and can be saved back as a template. Both are copies — editing a template later changes nothing about an event that already started from it, so this Monday's list can be corrected without touching last Monday's.

Statistics. An event that ran under house rules keeps its own meta analysis in full, but is left out of the format-wide statistics, because it was not quite that format. Its tournament page and meta page both name the rules that applied.

Managing Registrations

The Registrations tab lists every player with name, email, location, status, payment status and payment type.

Register a player manually — the form at the top adds someone directly. Postal code is optional here, unlike on the player-facing form: whoever signs someone up at the table usually does not know it.

Import several at once — paste a list to create registrations in bulk.

Set payment type — Transfer, PayPal or Free per registration. Setting Free marks the payment as paid. Registrations paid in the online checkout arrive already marked and typed as such.

Mark payment — confirm a payment you received. This is what unblocks check-in.

Handle cancellations — cancel a registration, or drop a player who has already checked in. Cancelled and dropped entries can be deleted for good.

Process refunds — requests appear under "Pending Refunds". For an online payment, Refund via Stripe returns the money automatically; for a transfer or PayPal, refund it yourself and click Mark Refunded. On a Stripe refund the player gets the full entry fee back and PlanesForge returns its 0.50 € fee to you — only Stripe's own processing fee, already charged when the player paid, stays with Stripe.

Decklists

With collection turned on, the Decklists tab shows what has come in and what is missing. A player who has not submitted cannot check in. You can enter or correct a list on a player's behalf, which is what you want for someone who hands you a sheet of paper.

Lists are checked against the format and the event's own banlist. On a normal tournament they become visible to other players once the event is completed; on an instant tournament they stay private, but still count towards that event's archetype breakdown.

Opening Registration & Check-in

Your tournament moves through these statuses, changed from the dropdown at the top of the management page:

Draft — only you see it. Every setting is editable.
Registration open — players can find and register for it.
Registration closed — no new sign-ups. Use it to stop registrations before the day.
Check-in — players who have paid, and submitted a list where required, confirm they are there.

An instant tournament goes from draft straight to check-in; the two registration statuses do not apply to it.

Tip: a check-in QR code can be generated and put up at the entrance, so players check themselves in from their phones as they arrive. Players can also check in from the tournament page or from a link in an email.

Running Swiss Rounds

Once check-in is done:

Set the status to Swiss in progress.
Click Pair next round.

The number of Swiss rounds follows the checked-in count unless you fixed it yourself.

How the pairings come about — who plays down, who gets the bye, how the tiebreakers work — is under Pairings & Standings. That is the page to hand a player who questions their pairing.

Per round

Publish — make the pairings visible. Until you do, only you see them.

Timer — start, stop or reset it. Players see the countdown.

Results — players report their own; you watch them arrive.

Edit results — override any match yourself.

Complete — close the round once everything is in. Standings update.

Pair next round — from the new standings.

If something goes wrong

Redo pairing — regenerate an unpublished round.

Delete round — remove a round that is not completed and start it over.

Rematches

Avoiding a rematch outranks every other consideration in the pairing, and it is handled when the pairings are built rather than repaired afterwards: the whole field is matched at once, and a rematch is only ever chosen when no rematch-free way to pair the field exists. When that happens you get a warning naming the table — nothing is silently swapped, because a swap to fix one table breaks another.

Byes

With an odd number of players, the lowest-placed player who has not had one gets the bye. It counts as a 2-0 win — three match points — and its games are left out of game win percentage.

The Cut

The top cut is set when you create the event and has four settings:

Automatic (the default) — no cut up to 8 players, Top 4 from 9 to 16, Top 8 from 17. The thresholds exist so a bracket never admits players the Swiss rounds had not actually separated.
None — Swiss only.
Top 4 or Top 8 — fixed, whatever the field size.

When the Swiss rounds are finished, generate the bracket. The status moves to Top 8 in progress and the rounds run exactly like Swiss ones: publish, collect, complete. A finals timer, if you set one, applies here instead of the Swiss timer.

Completing the Tournament

When every round is done, click Complete Tournament. This:

Publishes the meta analysis on the tournament's public page — archetype breakdown and card statistics.
Makes the submitted decklists visible to players.
Marks the event as finished, and feeds it into the format-wide statistics unless it ran under house rules.

Results are not sealed. A mistake found afterwards can still be corrected from the round view, and the standings, the public page and the shared link preview follow.

After the Tournament

Submit the Top 8 to mtgtop8.com — from the Decklists tab. It needs decklist collection turned on, at least 8 checked-in players, and a list from each of the Top 8. A tournament can be submitted once.

Discord — if you put a webhook URL in the tournament settings, PlanesForge posts twice: when registration opens, and when the event is completed. Each post carries a line of text and the event's own card image. Nothing is sent that is not already public on the tournament page — no email addresses, no participant list, nobody's decklist. The results post names the winner, their record and, where they published it, their deck.

Unity League — a tournament can be synced to Unity League with a category, so results land there without a second entry by hand.

Schedule, Prizes and Locations

Three more tabs in the management view:

Schedule — the day's timetable, shown on the tournament page. Useful for anything longer than a single block of rounds.
Prizes — prize tiers by placing, also shown to players.
Locations — a heatmap of where the registered players come from. Part of the premium features.

Roles

You can bring in help:

Organizer — full management access.
Judge — management access for rulings and results.
Caster — the TV and caster view for live coverage.

Go to Roles, enter an email address, pick a role and send the invite. The invitee accepts from their own account, and a pending invite can be cancelled at any time.

Branding and Premium

Beyond the free tools, a tournament can be upgraded per event. Branding — your colours, your logo, your website in the footer, the "powered by" line removed — sits in the settings tab alongside the broadcast suite, the matchup matrix and the registration heatmap. What is included.

Editing and Deleting

Editing: everything is editable while the event is a draft. Once registration opens, some fields lock so that registered players are not surprised by a change.

Deleting: only a draft or a cancelled tournament can be deleted. An active event with registrations has to be cancelled first, which notifies the players.

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