Introducing the Trilogy Format.

 

A Trio of Decks

The foremost feature of the Trilogy format comes from its namesake: in order to play a Trilogy match, you must build three different decks. 

At their core, these decks have the same structure as the Premier format: each deck consists of exactly 1 leader, exactly 1 base, and a minimum of 50 cards in the draw deck itself. However, where the Premier format restricts you to a maximum of 3 copies of any given card in your deck, the Trilogy format restricts you to a maximum of 3 copies of any given card across all three decks. This means that, if you wanted to include 3 copies of Open Fire in one of your decks, you couldn't include any copies of it in either of your other two decks. You could put 2 copies in one deck and 1 in another, or you could put a single copy in all three decks; whatever combination you want, so long as you don't have more than three across the board.

In similar fashion, each deck has to have a different leader and a different base than the other two. For example, you won't be able to build three different Sabine Wren plus Energy Conversion Lab decks, but you could build three different Aggression-Command-Heroism decks, if you really wanted to (and your collection has enough different cards to support it). Aside from that and the maximum copies rule explained above, there's no restriction on which leaders, bases, or cards you include in your decks—similar to the Eternal format, the game's entire card pool is legal in Trilogy, so go wild and build the three decks of your dreams!

The Best of Three

Once you have your three Trilogy decks built, it's time to take them to a match! When you sit down to play a Trilogy match, before any games take place, you and your opponent begin with a “Ban Phase.” In the Ban Phase, each player presents their three leader-base pairings to their opponent, and their opponent secretly chooses one of those decks to ban from the match. The two of you then simultaneously reveal your choices, and the chosen decks are set aside and are unavailable for the rest of the match. After that, each player secretly chooses one of their two remaining decks to begin the match with. These are then also revealed simultaneously, and each player uses the chosen deck for game one.

Whenever a game in the Trilogy format is finished, the winning deck for that game is set aside and can no longer be used for that match. Since this is a best-of-three format, this means that you will need to win with both of your unbanned decks in order to claim the match. If you lose the first game, you can choose which of your two available decks to use for the second game, but once you've won a game, you'll have to use the other deck until you win again. So, not only does this format test your deckbuilding skills, but it also tests your ability to pilot each of the decks you built, adding new strategic layers to every match!