ECL Civs

I feel a bit disappointed by the implementation of the civ selection rules in ECL so far, especially with the most recent middle east tournament.

1. Why have civs in the pool which are not associated with the region?

With the most recent middle east tournament, we had Franks, Britons, and italians which are connected I guess through the Crusades, but in the end we basically saw very little of the civs actually based in and around the middle east like Saracens, Turks.

I get that maybe they wanted a larger civ pool to give more choice and possibly create more unique match-ups but then ....

1. Why, if you are going to use a large civ pool, have games that don't use civ pool civs?

Most of the games where bo3 and only two of the games where civ pool. There were 10 (I think) civs in the pool, is it really necessary to have a non civ pool game. Imo it detracted a lot from trying to theme each tournament and meant that only a few of the civs from the pool were ever chosen.

1. Lack of civ diversity

The choice of civs for the pool and the small number of games from the pool meant that we saw a lot of repetitive and predictable match-ups. I get that for 1v1 some civs are clearly preferred but it would be interesting if players were forced to pick Saracens or Turks in the 3rd game instead of the Mayans Aztecs wars we saw.