Starters:

• Battlefield
• Tower of Salvation
• Pokémon Colosseum
• Yoshi's Story
• Smashville

Counterpicks:

• Dream Land
• Final Destination / Waiting Room

Important Clauses:

• Stage Striking: Before Game 1, players strike stages in P1-P2-P2-P1 form. The higher-seeded player is considered Player 1. P1 strikes the first stage, and P2 bans two stages. P1 then chooses one of the two remaining stages.
• Counterpicks: Following Game 1, the winning player will ban 2 stages and the losing player will pick from the remaining stages to play on. Players are allowed to gentleman to any legal stage they like. Tower of Salvation and Final Destination are "shared bans", meaning that if you can one of those two stages, the other will also be banned. For example, if you ban FD, ToS would also be banned. In Top 8, the winning player will only have 1 stage ban.
• Dave's Stupid Rule (DSR): Players cannot go back to the stage they already won on without the other player's consent.
• Simplified Lag Clause: In the case of bad connection, all players will perform a lag test on speedtest.net. To have a passing speedtest, both players must have:
• Download speed of 15 Mb/s or higher;
• Upload speed of 5 Mb/s or higher; and
• Ping of 35 of lower
• If both players pass the test, then they will be asked if they use a wired internet connection. If one player does not, they will forfeit the set. If both players have a wired connection or not, the higher seeded player will advance.
• Replays: Make sure you put all of your replays in the channel named #replay-zips in the FFC Discord. Put the replays in a ZIP file (RAR files are fine too) and label them with the tournament round and players. In Top 16, send it in the private replay chat.

The full ruleset can be found in the official Alliance ruleset. The TO has the final ruling in every dispute.

Top 8 is Best of 5. The rounds before are Best of 3.