For those that don’t know, the ICL – Illumineer Champions League, is an online league hosted by Luke Goodwin (aka vVonderland). It is a league meant to highlight some of the top teams across North America and spotlight some excellent meta defining gameplay. For season 2 my best judge friends Ellie O and Jon S were the head judges while I took a step back due to increased family responsibilities! Season 2 was definitely much larger in scope and need and they had their hands full! Below I bring you Ellie O’s tournament report!
And just as a heads up! Season 3 of ICL is just around the corner and you can catch the action on Luke’s twitch!
Tournament Report
The Illumineer Champions League (ICL), Season 2, was an online, team-based, competitive tournament series of Disney Lorcana that occurred from October 2025 through January 2026. The league comprised 18 teams divided into two divisions; Division A played on Tuesdays, Division B played on Wednesdays. The tournament structure was 9 rounds of round-robin (one team in each division on bye each week), with a cut to top 12 (the top 2 teams of each division were given a bye for the first round of top cut).
Each league night (Tuesday and Wednesday) had four matches occuring: one Feature Match which was streamed and commentated, and three others. All matches were played on the ICL Discord server via web-cam.
There were nine active judges throughout this season, and two additional support judges who worked in an administrative/mentorship role. Each league night utilized one Head Judge, one Feature Match judge, and one to three judges on the other three tables.
For context, the previous season of the ICL was a much smaller scale, with only one match happening a night—so fewer matches and teams overall, but every match was streamed to Twitch.
We really did not foresee the substantial challenges we would face by expanding the league. Season 2 of the ICL was tough; through our three months, we had times of unhappy players, overwhelmed judges, and opportunities to reevaluate the worth of the endeavor.
And in the end, Enter The Battlefield just beat SLTC again anyway, so what was the point?! Just kidding. The impact of ICL is something that the players and judges rarely see, as they’re focused on the match in front of them; it’s the space we created for the Disney Lorcana community that has tuned in every Tuesday and Wednesday night to check out meta shifts, chat with fellow spectators and our world-famous casters, and cheer on their favorite teams.
And now that Season 2 is over, we can take what we learned into the next season, and beyond…
“Don’t underestimate the importance of body language…” – Ursula
Some errors covered in the Play Correction Guidelines seemingly have little to do with the game of Disney Lorcana and everything to do with how players communicate with each other and with tournament officials (TOs). One of the more nuanced elements of judging is observing player interactions: communication cues, facial expressions, and body language. These elements help us see when players are joking with each other versus being unsporting.
Now imagine you can’t see their faces, you can’t hear their voices, and every single player interaction is publicly viewable by all players and TOs.
If you are judging a 2,000-player tournament, and two players conspire to submit improper match results, but they do so in the bathroom while you are 300 feet away in another room taking a judge call, I think we can agree that catching and addressing that error is out of scope for your role; judges cannot listen to all players at every moment, that’s just not possible.
But what if the venue is online, players communicate via text messages, and every message is viewable by every player and TO at any time?
Hosting the ICL on Discord led to a unique challenge of examining and clarifying the scope of the judge role in an online setting. Because we as judges had access to everything players were saying, we felt responsible for addressing messages which might be considered unsporting without the context of body language or other communication cues. We also were cognizant that all other players would be able to read each message, so topics that one party felt appropriate might not have been appropriate to others.
We became Discord mods–oops!
Lesson #1:
In an online tournament, judges are not mods. The TO should have moderators that oversee server communications outside of match times.
“… I cannot read.” – Winnie the Pooh
The judge and TO teams relied on documents to keep us organized during the long season:
- Judge Guide – workflows and links to tools used each round (team rosters, decklist submissions, and the penalty record sheet).
- Tournament Guide – a document with the tournament overview, schedule, all rules, and decklist submission links.
While some players and judges used these documents as intended, some probably never read them, based on questions that were asked and errors that occurred throughout the season. While this method of collecting all the rules in a single document was easiest for me, it does not seem useful to everyone. Some ideas:
- Better organization in the Discord Server, so that applicable information was presented to the players when and where they would use it. For example, the decklist restrictions and penalty for late submissions could live in the channel called “Decklist Submission”, where players access the form to submit.
- Keeping the information channels clean, deleting old messages (old decklist submission forms), so that players were only ever seeing the information needed for the current week (round).
- Rely on Team Captains to ensure their team read and understood rules documents.
At the end of the day, we cannot read it for them. We could make all these changes, and some players would still not read the rules.
And due to the nature of a team-based tournament, one player’s error inevitably affected the entire team, which may be one explanation for the frustration we felt from players who unknowingly broke a rule.
Lesson #2:
The more elements you add to a tournament (new decklists every round, teams, divisions, multiple matches happening at once, web-cam gameplay, etc.), the more important organization and concise communication will be.
“Here we come, we’re fifty strong, and fifty Frenchmen can’t be wrong!” – The mob
When you have rules for an event, and a number of people unknowingly break those rules, things can get… hostile. Two is company, three’s a crowd, any more than that and everyone might start singing The Mob Song.
Long-form tournaments require substantial dedication from players, as they show up every week for basically a new competitive tournament each time. Here’s what I mean: An event that spans a set release means you likely need to allow players to update decklists. Weekly decklist changes mean that players need to submit new decklists each week. Giving casters and judges time to review decklists means the lists need to be submitted at least a few hours before the player meeting. For us, that meant submissions were due at noon Central Time, while most players’ minds were far from the realm of Lorcana.
Players that don’t submit their list in time must receive a penalty. This was, surprisingly, the biggest pain-point for the ICL this season. According to the Play Correction Guidelines, the penalty for a missing decklist is a Game Loss. The judge team felt that would not be sustainable, since there were at least 8 more opportunities (9 weeks total) for each player to commit this error than there would be in a regular tournament, so we decided a better penalty would be loss of play/draw choice for that player’s first game.
Still, technology can be clunky for players, and the constant feedback we received was that the decklist submission process had too many points of potential failure. Over the season, we had at least 34 Deck/Registration Errors, which means this is an area we must improve.
Lesson #3:
The best tournaments are ones that are decided by gameplay, not by penalties. If you are constantly issuing penalties, you should ask yourself what systems can be improved to help players succeed.
“Leave the saving the world to the men? I don’t think so!” – Elastigirl
Throughout the season, as we wrestled to identify what the role of Judge should be in an online tournament, I received some feedback that was troubling to me, such as: I was taking the event too seriously, I was abusing my authority.
Players seemed to feel the rules for ICL were too strict and penalties too harsh. I was initially baffled—these teams paid a $200 buy-in, and this was a competitive event. I thought they would expect the judges to uphold the rules to the best of our ability at all times.
At first, I was disheartened. I personally don’t have many local opportunities to judge, so I don’t have as much Head Judge experience as some of my peers, so it’s embarrassing to see that I had failures within my role in the ICL–I love helping players, that’s what I thought I was signing up to do. But given the context: our accidental role as Discord mods, not finding a successful way to communicate the many rules of our unique tournament, and the players’ struggles with the neverending decklist submissions… this feedback makes sense, and I don’t think I will take it personally.
While I believe I was meeting the expectations of the TO, this feedback shows that expectations were not fairly set for players, and that means we have work to do!
For Season 3, we are making changes to better align the ICL with our players’ desires and expectations. Jon, Phil, and I are continuing in our roles and substantially redistributing our judge resources so that we can meet player needs while not overstepping our role.
Learn More!
Find more Ellie O on X and BlueSky and get the latest updates on the ICL on X.
Judging with Phil 
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