The new PT re-qualification system is based on something called Adjusted Match Points. Similar to how Pro Points were handed out at Worlds, the first three wins are discounted and after that each match point earned in the tournament counts toward your AMP total. After the system is up and running, it will take 39 AMP over the previous three events to earn an invite to the next one. (A top 8 is worth 39 by itself, so the top 8 are qualified for the next year.)

If this had been the system in place all along, how many familiar faces would attend every Pro Tour? I ran the numbers on this for @mechalink on Twitter; the results are in this spreadsheet. Only two players—Reid Duke and Raphael Levy—would have had an AMP qualification to every one of the last 24 paper PTs. Most other players who attended 4+ PTs in this era had fewer AMP quals than PTs attended; this means that, in order to have the career they had, they’d need to manufacture other qualifications somehow. The biggest mismatch was Marcelino Freeman, who would only have had two re-quals from AMP but actually attended seventeen(!) PTs in this era. If he had to go to the regional championship all 15 of those other times, how many of the 17 PTs would he have played?

This sheet made me believe that, to whatever extent there is a “train,” it is much smaller than before, and we should relatively quickly see a lot of turnover in the makeup of the PT field. Don’t read me as disparaging the system here—I’m just trying to describe and comprehend what’s coming. We’re coming from an era where success in 2017-18 was worth way more than one year’s worth of equity; the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way.