Major League Quidditch is always looking to remain on the cutting edge of gameplay within our sport. That said, overall, we were largely satisfied with the way our ruleset worked during the 2021 season. Because of that, we will be making no major changes for the 2022 season. Instead, we will be making some minor alterations that we think will continue to optimize our game.

One area of potential change we have chosen not to apply this season is the opening procedure. We have put much thought into this area, but to date have not come up with an alternative that we think provides the excitement and entertainment we are looking for out of the opening minutes of our matches. We will continue to experiment with alternatives during the offseason and will consider making a change again for 2023.

For the 2022 season, MLQ will use the rules in US Quidditch’s Rulebook 13 in coordination with our newly updated MLQ-Specific Rules document. Below, we will highlight the notable changes you will see in that document.

Change Log

Resets: 
As we’ve shown many times throughout the years, we are pretty regularly looking for opportunities to increase the pace of play and reduce the use of “slow ball”, provided we can do so in a way that does not negatively affect the quality of gameplay. One thing we have realized is that while limiting teams to one reset per possession did limit their ability to stall, it remained almost impossible for a defense to fully press a team that still had its reset, since the ball carrier could run all the way back behind their hoops until the pursuing beater was all but forced to give up. We did not see this as an entertaining or interesting pattern of gameplay, so this season, we will be changing a team’s own keeper zone line into a hard boundary once they cross it. Teams can still take their one free reset back across the midline once they cross it, but they can never retreat back across their own keeper zone line. This will allow for more aggressive pressing defense and what we hope to be a heightened pace of play.

Blue Cards:
Since the introduction of blue cards in our sport, they have often been criticized as being unnecessary. These feelings were only heightened when we changed the yellow card regulations so that it took three yellow cards to become a red card. With almost no players receiving red cards through yellow card accumulation anymore, the blue card and the yellow card have truly become the same foul. We feel that this should not be the case, as blue card penalties are non-dangerous, technical penalties and therefore deserve a lesser punishment. To fix this, we will be reducing the length of blue card penalties to 30 seconds.

Timeouts:
We felt that the regulations around calling timeouts were needlessly restrictive. As long as a lull in the game could be effectively determined, a judgment referees were already making with the prior rule, we wanted to allow timeouts to be called. So, we are doing away with the restriction that the ball must be in possession of the keeper and that it must be in the team’s own keeper zone. Additionally, we are allowing timeouts to be called in the second period of the game after the snitch is caught, since, in practice, this is no different than the seeker floor period.

Gender Maximum: 
We are always looking for ways in which our rules and gameplay policy can increase equity in the sport. We have observed the execution and reception of the permanent four gender maximum in both the USQ and IQA rulesets, and have come away impressed by both its reception and execution. We will be changing our gender maximum rule to be four at all times in gameplay.

Contact:
After debuting two-armed tackling in 2019, we have continued to see a positive effect on gameplay and an overall positive community response to it. However, there were some small alterations we felt were necessary. After observing USQ’s increased scope with contact from behind, it was determined that it had a net positive impact on the game. Giving defenders more freedom when a player turns their back was seen as a general positive change, and one we will add to our rules.

The MLQ Rules Committee looks forward to seeing how all of these updates play out in the 2022 MLQ season. You can find the complete list of MLQ-Specific Rules here. As always, we want your feedback as the season progresses, so please do not hesitate to reach out to our gameplay department with comments, concerns and suggestions at [email protected]. Thank you, as always, for your time and dedication.

Want to play under these new rules? Sign up for the MLQ franchise nearest you! Tryouts are happening now.