Trust the Process: The Case for Relegation

Here’s the Process: if you’re a bottom-4 or bottom-3 team in the League, and Relegation is in play, save your votes. Don’t go for Blessings, don’t vote on Decrees. Everyone else will be trying to improve, so letting the team drift while you stockpile votes will be sufficient to put you in last place eventually. And then once you’re worst in the league, and you know your whole roster will get replaced, spend all your banked votes. Your chances of winning impactful blessings will be much higher than normal, and they’ll go to a whole new set of players who are probably better than the chumps you just threw back into the black hole (or whatever you do with them)!¹ That’s right: I’m talking about tanking.

Previously, tanking in blaseball was very inefficient and difficult to achieve. Teams had to devote their entire Wills budget to, say, shadowing crucial players, hoping the rest of the team parties for a while, and then spending even more Wills to bring those shadowed players out again. This was tried a few times, but the results were distinctly mixed. But with Relegation in place, a team willing to just do one thing—save their votes—could relax, root for their players to blow it for a while, and when they inevitably slip behind every other team, splurge on blessings in a big way, instantly taking their team from being a hopeless reclamation project to being a contender.

In other, non-blood sports, tanking takes entire material-plane years to execute, and is pretty unpleasant to experience. But in Blaseball, it only would take a few weeks. Meanwhile, rooting for the team during the Process is easy; you just root for them to lose. Blaseball has already experimented with the Underbracket, which was well received by many Fans. Blaseball players don’t have agency, and they don’t feel bad when you root for them to lose, so it’s much more fun to embrace being bad in this splort than it is in a material-plane sport. And besides, when your players get kicked out of the league, you’re doing them a favor. You’re getting them out of being chained to a blood sport!

Committing to a multi-season “traditional” rebuild is hard. It requires you to contest each election with a lower fraction of votes, so the timeline can be quite uncertain. In the meantime, the whims of fate could easily undo your incremental gains. Depending on what types of weather come back in the new Era, your players could get blooddrained, or feedbacked, or reverbed, or incinerated, or encased in a giant peanut shell, pushing you two steps backwards for every one step forward. But if you had the opportunity to just get a new roster and boost them a bunch all at once, you could avoid the problems of bad luck ruining your incremental progress. Instead, bad luck would just help push the tank forward in its goal!

Multiple teams could execute tanking plans at the same time, but only one each season would “win the draft lottery,” so to speak, and get the chance to spend their banked votes. But if a few other teams are banking votes, that means the odds of winning blessings for the team getting Relegated are that much better. So having a few other active tank jobs in the league would actually improve the effectiveness of the strategy.

Relegation would open the door to efficient, creative strategic opportunities that have never been possible before in Blaseball, and would give struggling teams a much more interesting path to contention than hoping they get lucky for 4 elections in a row. It’s a new era, and we have the chance for a new start, a chance to take the game in a fresh direction. Trust the Process: Vote for the Relegation Decree this election.

Besides, the Book isn’t going anywhere. It’ll just sit there until someone opens it. What’s the rush?

-glumbaron

Notes

1. Historically, ongoing effects of Decrees occur before elections are decided; for instance, the Moist Talkers Evolved in season 23 before Wills and Blessings were given out.