No. In a fencing tournament, the idea is that of all the participants, to have a single-elimination tournament, you have to start the single elimination with a set number of players. Here, the problem is you need exactly 8 teams to do it the way you want to do it. If you get 16 teams, you can still do it the way you want to, but the problem is that you have more than 8, and less than 16.kyle wrote: @Lucifer, don't you think that would be too time consuming
So, in fencing, they deal with this situation by filtering out the suckiest players right away. You organize everyone into pools, give them abbreviated bouts, and just have them do several bouts. Eliminate enough people in the pools so that you have your ideal number of players to start single elimination. Typically, the pool bouts will be timed, exactly one minute long. Sometimes they only go to first touch, where the first person to score a point on the other wins the bout.
Here, you could do one round instead of a whole match. Or even just do first to 10 points (where you could win by slaughtering the other team and not even touching their fortress). Organize your pools a certain way, make the initial matches short enough, and you can be done with the pools in 15 minutes. The results of the pools can be used to seed the tournament, or you can just do whatever you normally do with the 8 teams that are left. The only real point of the pools is to end with the ideal number of teams you need to have the single-elimination tournament you want.
That way, everybody has to get into the first single elimination round the same way. There's no disadvantage to be had by having some teams have to play an extra round (and therefore risk getting eliminated early), and there's no need to play the "teams that have been in the Ladle before get a bye" card.