While most of the elemental gods weren’t thrilled with the idea of mortals joining their ranks, they took great joy in watching the contests become bloodier as they went along. They would sneak in weapons, throw sand in opponent’s eyes, and even attempt to kill them. However, there were many less than honorable fighters that would stop at nothing to gain immortality. Many were devout martial artists that have used their knowledge of chi to perform many superhuman feats. Mortal Kombat had lured in a wide variety of combatants to the battleground. The elder gods had hoped that these rules would keep combat fair, but they forgot that mortals always find a way to break structure and order. While the gods watching the tournament were more than willing to applaud the skills of weapon masters, weapons were originally forbidden from use in fights unless both fighters were armed. This would often cause the tournament to last for several days, possibly even weeks depending on how fierce matches can become. As for how many fighters from each realm could compete, at most fifty competitors from each realm could compete at a time. The gods served as the judges of the tournament, looking out for any rule violations as well as keeping fighters in designated arenas.
The gods of the realms were required to gather these selected fighters for the tournament, they were forbidden from interfering. As the title implied, participants in the tournament had to be mortals. On top of the bracket system, the Mortal Kombat tournament had more rules that had to be followed. Unfortunately for the elder god of chaos and fortunately for the elder god of order, the bracket system was chosen for the structure of the tournament.
Abacus and Zaggot would argue about the structure of the tournament with Abacus believing a bracket system would make the most sense while Zaggot wanted Mortal Kombat to be a battle royal where the everyone fought in bloody combat until one remained alive. The Mortal Kombat tournament had difficulties when it first began.