King of Tokyo tournament

 The store will host a month long King of Tokyo tournament on Tuesdays in June. Come in and play one or more games of King of Toyko on Tuesdays and report your win to the staff at the register.  The player(s) with the most wins on the 26th will receive prizes courtesy of Blue Orange Games and the player with the most wins receives an entry into the national championships at GenCon

Alliance Impact Premiere

 Alliance Impact Premiere event this weekend.  $25 gets you packs and entry into the 1 p.m tournament on Saturday.

Disney Lorcana and Melee

 The store hosted a Disney Lorcana Shimmering Skies Store Championship earlier this month and the turnout provided yet more evidence that the once hot game is cooling off dramatically. Whereas for our first Store Championship we had people driving 2 to 3 hours to get here and easily an hour for our second one, this event struggled to fill the required 8 seats. All the players were locals that played in our regular weekly league which was certainly good but not even all of them showed up to play, meaning we had to readjust the Melee tournament software to account for the fewer numbers than expected. We managed to do it but we have found that Melee’s tournament software does not make anything easy.

Standard Rotation

 The following sets rotated out of standard with the release of Bloomburrow

Innistrad: Midnight Hunt

Innistrad: Crimson Vow

Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty

Streets of New Capenna

These sets are currently included in Standard Format

Dominaria United

The Brothers' War

Phyrexia: All Will Be One

March of the Machine

March of the Machine: The Aftermath

Wilds of Eldraine

The Lost Caverns of Ixalan

Murdrers at Karlov Manor

Outlaws of Thunder Junction

Bloomburrow

From August 2 through 31, players who participate in up to four in-store Standard events at participating WPN locations will receive one reward in Arena per event played. Players must participate in each event using their Wizards Account that is connected to Magic: The Gathering Arena in regions where Magic: The Gathering Arena is supported.

Once they're registered in an eligible in-store event with their Wizards Accounts, players will be set to earn the following rewards based on the number of events they participate in:

After the first event: one Random Rare card reward

After the second event: one Random Rare card reward

After the third event: one Bloomburrow pack and Ral, Crackling Wit card style

After the fourth event: one Bloomburrow Mythic pack

New Banned Cards

Yesterday, WOTC announced the banning of 1 rare, 2 uncommon and 1 common cards from Standard format tournament play. The rationale for the banning is that the 2 decks running combinations of these 4 cards dominated the Standard environment, getting played in about 40% of games tracked by WOTC at the Pro level of play. Rampaging Ferocidon has already dropped in price from an average of $4 to as low as 75 cents from one online retailer

WOTC gave the following three reasons for the banning:

1. The length of time for which these decks have been dominant—as long as five months or more depending on how one categorizes different energy variants.
2. The Standard rotation did not meaningfully weaken these decks or result in new decks that are competitive with them.
3. Despite the metagame having many months to adapt to these decks, counterplay options have proven insufficient.

Kaladesh Saturday Showdown Requirements

In case your are interested, here are the requirements for the Kaladesh Standard Showdown tournaments, per WOTC.

They must:
1 Occur on Saturday starting November 26
2. Be Standard Format
3. Run at least 3 rounds with 8 players

There are NO requirements as to how the Standard Showdown boosters are to be distributed, except that stores can give out no more than 10 per tournament. There are no requirements that a winner receive so many boosters or that they be distributed according to some form of "payout" schedule. WOTC suggests several methods by which to distribute them and we will be giving out some following those suggestions i.e. 2 to the overall winner and 1 to players who played in the previous 2 Saturday tournaments we hosted. Note that that is one per person and not one per tournament attended. We will have a list of people who played in the previous Saturday tournaments and will give you one if you play on the 26th.

Anything else you might have heard regarding mandatory awarding of the Standard Showdown packs is not official WOTC procedure.

Why No Sneak Peeks?

We have had a couple of people inquire as to why the store has not hosted the last couple of Yu Gi Oh Sneak Peeks. The answer is due to Konami policy.

In order to qualify to host a Sneak Peek, as well as other special Konami events, such as Yu Gi Oh Day, Konami requires stores to host at least one sanctioned tournament per month for the preceding quarter. If a store does not meet this requirement, it loses the opportunity to host Sneek Peeks until such time as it meets the requirement again.

We have not had turnout for our weekly tournaments which are scheduled at noon on Saturday. We tried moving them to Tuesday nights for a period to accommodate players, who said that was a better night for them to show up but after a couple of weeks, those players stopped showing up as well.

It is quite simple. In order for us to host special events like Sneak Peeks, we need duelists to show up and participate in the weekly tournaments, for which we charge $5.   We can run them for free if players would like but then we would only give out one pack of cards to the overall winner. Let us know if you would like this option. Be that as it may, until we have at least 4 players show up for a tournament once per month, Konami will not offer a Sneak Peek to players at the store.

How To Handle The "I Don't Want To Pass this Card" in Draft Situation

Given the high value of cards in the Modern Masters 2 set, the popularity of drafting the set and the extremely slim possibility of pulling  both a rare and a foil version of that rare from a pack, the question of what to do in that situation has come up.

Say you are playing in a sanctioned MM2 draft. You open a pack and there, staring at you, are a Tarmogoyf AND a foil Tarmogoyf. What do you do?

You have two options: you can continue drafting and hand one to the player next to you or you can drop and leave with the cards. Under WOTC tournament rules, the cards are your cards and there is nothing to stop you from leaving the tournament with them.

I have read some suggestions that say the draft organizer can let you keep the cards and purchase another pack for use in the draft. From what I have read about Magic draft rules, that could be done, but only if the draft is unsanctioned, as that brings additional cards into the draft and is unfair to the other players. For the draft to remain sanctioned, your only options are to pass off one of the cards or drop.

KrosMaster Arena and King of New York

The weekend of December 13, we will have a couple of really cool events. On December 13 from noon to 4, we will have a representative from Japanime Games in demonstrating Krosmaster Arena. Come learn the game and take home a cool promo item.

Then on December 14, we will have a qualifying tournament for the King of New York Nationals. Come destroy New York, get spiffy promo cards and the winner gets a seat at this summer's King of New York National Championships.

GateCrash Pre-releae Wrap Up

Well, we made good use of our customer space this weekend with the Magic the Gathering GateCrash Pre-release running both Saturday and Sunday.  It was our best attended pre-release ever, though not our best sales weekend ever.  We received 150 Guildpacks from WOTC and could probably have used a dozen more to take care of latecomers that we had to turn away.  This is the first time I can recall we have gone through all of the packs provided for pre-release tournament players in the years since we started running them.  Overall, we, and more importantly the players, were very happy with this set.   Suprisingly, we had the highest number of tournament drops of any pre-release that I can recall.  A number of players registered, then either left or played first round and dropped, usually without telling anyone,  Ergo we wouldn’t find out until partially through or at the end of the round, when their opponent would come tell us that no-one had showed.  I don’t recall this proving such a serious problem in prior pre-releases.  All in all, a very entertaining and profitable, made more so by the flexibility WOTC allows us in running the event, made slightly less so by the salad dressing I spilt on my pants halfway through the final tournament.

Kossi Software

Tried out the Kossi software for running Yu Gi Oh today.  Typically, Kossi runs on the cloud which makes it very easy to upload results but makes the system run very slowly if lots of people access it at the same time.  Konami has made available downloadable software to run tournaments, which runs a lot more quickly than the could based stuff does. The big problem is that it doesn't automatically upload when you end the tournament.  You have to save it to the hard drive, then send it to Konami's tournament organizers, adding an extra step to the process.

Launch Party vs. Sneak Peek

While running the Sneak Peek for Yu Gi Oh's Storm of Ragnarok pre-release today, I found it interesting to read over Konami's rules for running the Sneak Peek and compare them to WOTC's rules for running last weekend's Mirroden Besieged Pre-Release . Considering that both events are supposed to emphasize having fun playing with the new cards, I found Konami's rules/ guidelines much more restrictive.

WOTC sets the weekend for the event and otherwise leaves it up to the store as to formats, prices, times, prizes, etc. Konami is much more specific as to format, price for the event, times (has to begin after 8 a.m. and end before 8 p.m. While both companies supply promo cards, Konami supplied a pair of playmats. If stores wish to award additional prizes, they must do so at their own expense. WOTC provided no deckboxes but did ship out displays of Mirroden Besieged boosters to hand out as prizes.

Finally, both companies have tournament software to assist in running the tournaments. Those WOTC's Reporter runs a bit slow at times, it stands head and shoulders above Konami's KOSSY software in terms of flexibility in running events. In addition, Reporter installs on your computer, while KOSSY resides in the cloud, which can cause problems if you disconnect from the net. KOSSY logged off from the web at least three times during the tournament because it apparently didn't detect any activity between rounds and thought we had abandoned it. Never any such problems with Reporter.