Raw Deal Outside of Tournaments: League Alternative Part I
by Drew “Darth Weasel” Barton
Raw Deal Staff Writer
darthweasel@hotmail.com

Flash back to 2001. I had walked in to Rainy Day Games to purchase some random item and saw a new game sitting on the shelf called Raw Deal. I picked up a Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin starter deck and tried out a couple of games in solitaire fashion. The game play was quick, intuitive, and entertaining. So I asked my brothers and a couple of their friends who their favorite wrestlers were and picked up decks for them. Soon we had Derek playing Mankind, Kenneth playing Triple H, I had the Rock, some one else had Stone Cold and Chris Jericho and a couple of Undertakers.

Not too long after that the Fully Loaded set was released and more of our friends started playing. Now we had Chris Benoit, a Kurt Angle player, an Eddie Guerrero player…in fact, most Superstars had 2 or even 3 people playing them because most of us were running multiple decks. There ended up being considerable overlap but there was something else…a desire to have some sort of lasting meaning to our games. At the time we were unaware of the tournament scene so we had to create our own meaning.

Naturally we elected to create a WWE Title belt. We held our own King of the Ring style tournament to crown a winner. Logically, this tournament turned out to be a great deal of fun but two problems arose. First off, by this time we had as many as 7 or 8 people playing and one belt just did not seem like enough. Second, we needed some way to establish a number one contender for the belt.

The first problem was easily solved. We developed the Intercontinental Title and held a tournament for that with the WWE Championship holder disqualified from the tournament. Then we set up a hierarchy for title shots.

The rule was pretty simple. To get a shot at the Intercontinental Title belt you simply had to defeat three different people in succession. For example, if Derek and his Mankind deck held the Intercontinental Title and Kenneth wanted a title shot he would simply need to defeat Kevin’s Chris Benoit, my Rock and Mark’s Eddie Guerrero. However, if he beat my Rock and Kevin’s Benoit but then lost to me in another game before he had a chance to play Mark he had to start over. This gave the Title Holders some permanency and led to a certain amount of stability to the belt.

To earn a shot at the WWE Championship the Intercontinental Title holder was required to successfully defeat 3 consecutive qualified challengers. Thus title reigns for the WWE Championship figured to be somewhat monumental.

Our player base kept expanding so we kept expanding the belts. We developed a Tag Team division, had a Cruiserweight Title, a European Title, a Hardcore Title and eventually an ECW Title. All the belts had similar requirements to earn a title shot; defeat 3 consecutive opponents to earn a shot at the European Title belt, defend it 3 times in a row to get an Intercontinental Title Belt shot and so forth. The WCW belt required 5 consecutive wins, but they could be against as few as 3 different people. The Tag Titles only required 1 non-Title shot win and the Cruiserweight Division was limited to people who had once been Cruiserweights. Additionally, the Hardcore Title was on the line in every match that title holder was in.

This created a lot of excitement as the belts actually became cherished items. We represented them with Trophy Ribbons someone got from some random spot and they were brought to the matches to signify who held which title.

Since some of the titles were hard to get at we ruled they must be defended at least once a month at the Pay-per-View. We then set up Pay-Per-Views that reflected whatever the WWE was doing that month. If nobody had earned a shot at any given title then the Champion could hand-select his opponent.

We also developed rules for interference that allowed others to interfere in the matches. It was difficult finding a balance that made interference worth taking a chance on occasionally…but not so good that it was done every game or even more often than once every 15 or 20 games. This led to some incredible (and incredibly fun) matches such as the classic in which RVD (played by Phillip).

Over the course of time there were hundreds of title changes. We had a great deal of fun with them but by this time we had also discovered the tournament scene. As a result there became less impetus to build decks that were less than tournament level. As a result we started keeping less and less track of what was going on with these belts until finally we stopped this private league entirely and devoted the majority of our energies to building tournament decks. However, that does not prevent us from looking upon those halcyon days of yore through a shimmering glaze of wistful satisfaction. And you know with verbiage like that it MUST have been great….

Not too long ago we started developing a project to restart the league. This time, however, we would need to be more involved. Each person would need to compete for each belt. Furthermore, we wanted to differentiate the belts even more than we had done before. As a result we developed specific rules for each belt we chose to play for, worked up rules for stables, interference in matches, how to handle things such as Enforcer based Superstars, Tag Team Superstars and other unusual situations. As a result we elected to differentiate the belts and what you needed to compete for them.

It is my hope to lay out over the next couple of weeks an idea for a league incorporating some of these ideas. It may or may not be something you can use but if any ideas come out that you like, please take them as a baseline, adapt them to your local area and you might have a fun new way to play Raw Deal. You might find that as much as you enjoy sanctioned formats, you might get just as much enjoyment from a Title won in a league with no ranking points on the line, no international bragging rights up for grabs, and no meaning other than looking your friends square in the eye and saying, “You just lost your title when you got pinned by The People’s Elbow. That’s just embarrassing.”