MTG Celebration

We hosted the 2013 Magic Celebration or, as WOTC called it on Twitter #MTGCelebration, Saturdaywith about 18 happy players but no more sales than we would have during a typical Saturday.  Similar to most stores with which I have discussed the MTG Celebration, turnout ran much lighter than it would for a pre-release or Launch Day..  On the plus side we have  6 new players show up and fill out DCI cards, making about a third of our players  either comparatively new or, as several commented, people who had not played magic for several years and wanted to get back into the game.

One comment I heard from several other stores, and thank goodness it didn’t happen here,  related to players complaining about the giveaways for the event. You would think people would be happy, maybe not with the free half deck, but certainly with a free 2014 Core booster and the opportunity to receive more boosters just for winning games of Magic, at no financial cost to themselves, but apparently not.  At some stores, players complained about the packs given out and/or the lack of a promo card for the event.  It appears we have trained those who have played Magic (and other CCGs) to expect a promo card tied to a particular event, and, if there is not one, they feel slighted, even when the event is free.

One problem I noted was that, according to the instructions sent with the Celebration materials, stores should run players in pods of 6, sending out a new group whenever the store had six people ready to play.   Unfortunately, the way the event formatted for reporting in DCI Reporter, stores would have to have at least 8 players in the event and submit it as a Swiss style event, with players assigned to an opponent for each round.  This format defeated  the overall casual ambiance of the Celebration and I heard of players complaining about the more structured formatting used at some stores.  Several stores figured out a work-around to this by entering all players into DCI Reporter and matching them for the first round and either have them play each other or give them all “byes”, then submit the event after one round.  Hopefully, for the next Celebration, it will be sanctionable as a casual event, so that we only need to enter players names into it and report the event much like we do for casual play now, without having to force a structured tournament on the format.

No idea how the Achievement Cards went over at other stores but since WOTC really wanted people to tween the #MTGCelebration hashtag as well of pictures of the event (and people promoting our events and store on Twitter and Facebook is always a good thing), we offered an extra booster pack for each 5 achievements they marked off, meaning that, even if you lost all your matches, you could walk off with one , and maybe two, more boosters, as long as you were willing to get on your social media accounts during the event.  I don’t know how highly #MTGCelebration trended on Twitter but I was surprised at the number of people who completed all the achievements, with two of them even creating Twitter accounts while at the store.