Recently I tested a Keyforge format I thought of to address some of the downsides of adaptive (too long) or adaptive short (requiring a significant amount of knowledge in the game to "properly" engage with it).

Team Adaptive

Played in teams of 3. Teams are paired for a match consisting of 3 rounds of games.

In the first round, each player is randomly matched up with a player on the other team. Each player plays their own deck. Decks will remain at the "table" they are in round 1 for the duration of the match.

In round two, each player shifts over one table, with each teams shifting in opposite directions. Again, decks stay at the tables they began at. In this round, players play the deck the opposing team brought, against their teammate's deck.

In round three, players shift once more in the same direction. Players bid chains for which deck they will play in this round.

In this way, every player plays all 3 of the deck match-ups, and plays against every player of the opposing team.

Matches consist of 3 rounds of 3 games, so best of 9 games wins the match (it is possible for a team to win before the 3rd round).

Time is allotted between games to allow players to discuss insights of the match-up they just played to their teammate that will be playing the match-up next.

In a sense, this format allows 3 "traditional" adaptive matches to be played simultaneously (a single elimination tournament with 12 players can be completed in at maximum 6 rounds of games rather than the 12 rounds of games that would need to be played for traditional adaptive swiss), and players can have plenty of information about the match-up before they bid chains (unlike short adaptive).

Based on trying the format, the discussion was certainly the most notable aspect. Some players really liked this part, though I felt like there were other players that were just wanting to play Keyforge and and had "enough talk".

Of course, a huge disadvantage of the format is you need a number of players exactly divisible by 3.