A Battle of Wits!!!

For the longest of times i have had an idea for a campaign.

The origines of the idea are born in magic the gathering, i realise i am not know for heaping praise at the feet of the game butt...

the fluff is good.

Anyways,

The idea is every player plays a mage of some type (i would probably run the game in gurps because the magic system has much more potential then any other game.)

And they would all be competing against each other for a prize of fairly epic proportions.

The power level would be set at high to begin with and go up from there.

I am just not sure how i could run it .... and make it work.

Any thoughts?

A very interesting idea matty.
For a competition with a big prize, a gladiatorial arena works well, obvious things to consider are, is it one on one combat? or a free for all? how many npc's in this competition? is it a fight to the death, will you have to reroll your character every time you lose a fight?
now for the fluff, the first things i would be thinking about is why these mages are in this contest to begin with, is it voluntary? are they convicted felons perhaps? or gladiator slaves? but if they are there against their will, who is powerful enough to keep all these spellcasters from escaping, or killing the guards?
As i said, a very interesting idea.

Sorry i wasn't clear enough.

The arena would be a world or a continent and they would all be trying to find the item "x".

It would be a contest held by their circile of mages or something similar to see who would be the next high mage or what ever..

Ahh, so basically a treasure hunt on steroids :p
An entire world or just continent would be rather interesting, because you would of course not only have obstacles, but there would also just be normal people living out there lives, the locals.
As for the item, is it something that has been lost (Ie there can be no archmage without the ceremonial staff, which has been missing for XXX years, the person who finds it becomes the first archmage since it was lost) Or is it something that has been hidden on purpose, where the whole ordeal is just one big test?

Do the players act in a party, or individually?

If you made it kind of like survivor, where there was Party A (pcs) vs Party B (npcs), that could work.
So each player had to work as a team, but against the individuals therein.

Completely individually, i have no idea.

well i was looking at more individualy but there would be nothing to stop them from makeing or brakeing alliances.