John's Questions for MARCATo

[ThisIsMyUsername]

As those of you who have played Imaginary Landscapes will know, the classical music in this tournament was generally easier than in those tournaments. (Which is not to say that it wasn't still hard for the many non-classical-oriented players!) That is, I aimed to write as many questions as possible that end with one of the most famous classical pieces of all time, to keep conversion numbers up. In fact, many of the questions in MARCATo are based on ones I had planned for Imaginary Landscape No. 6 (which I am no longer going to write since I'm rather sapped by this), but made easier. For example, the tossup on "four players" was originally a piano quartet tossup, from which I removed one clue and added a string quartet at the end; the preludes tossup was originally on Debussy preludes, but I added Rachmaninoff at the end to be safe. As you may have noticed, though, some of the tossups are still "themed" or partly themed to keep things interesting. For example, the Shostakovich tossup is all on his "popular" stuff. The wealth of common-links was partly so I could maximize the number of different composers I could include in the tournament. (Also, I find writing common-links to be fun!)

If I write another MARCATo, I may distribute by genre instead of category. Honestly, by far the hardest part of writing this was coming up with enough accessible pre-1750 answers. As it is, there is more Bach and Handel in this tournament than I feel fully comfortable with. I'd do this amount of pre-1750 music again only if I decide to write a harder tournament.

For jazz: in the interest of accessibility of giveaways but depths of early clues, I deliberately did not toss up any albums. I focused on artists and standards. I would like to have done even more in the way of standards than I did. But, I must admit, I used up a lot of those ideas in IL 4, and some of the ones that I had left seemed too hard for MARCATo.

Finally, I'll note that unlike last time, this time I was in charge of the multimedia (movies, TV, video games, etc.). I'm aware of and apologize for the first clue for Ocarina of Time, which I later found out also appears in Majora's Mask. If you have other thoughts about these questions played for you, I'm very curious.

[Cheynem]

I unsurprisingly adored the multimedia in this tournament. I do think that sometimes there was a challenge in figuring out what to say (i.e., how specific or not to be)--I thought the "TV game show themes" and "Disneyland" tossups kind of had this issue--in a normal tournament, you would just be prompted or antiprompted, but you can't do that here.

[magin]

I thought the classical music questions for this set were excellent. Since this tournament was played in doubles teams instead of room-wide shootouts, the decreased difficulty was ideal, I think. I really enjoyed the themed tossups on answers like gardens and the young.

I also thought the multimedia and musicals questions were great. I like the trend of asking for directors instead of film composers, since that opens up the answer space even more. It's wonderful to see these questions so well-executed from a technical standpoint.