MTG thread

Taloo_sl said:

LGS is canceling the prerelease to work on expanding the store prior to their PPTQ. Backwards as fuck in my mind but whatever.

Click to expand...

If they make it to 2016 I'll be amazed.

Pretty much my thoughts. Its fucking ridiculous to cancel what's commonly the most anticipated type of tourney to try and have a better set up for a PPTQ which no one cares fuck all about. For fucks sake the nearest two PPTQs so far were in Fayetteville about three hours away and the one last weekend had 28 people show up. They keep talking about folks traveling to come for their PPTQ and I don't think anyone from the shop expects to even hit 20 players.

Kinda pissed and for sure telling the owner how pants on head retarded this is when I see him tomorrow. It gives folks a weeks notice that they need to drive 2+ hours away if they want to play next weekend.

Double.

lol.. yea PPTQs are really not big tournaments in general. I'm hearing even in bigger cities they are getting like 30-40. There's just too many of them, with too low of a real prize support, to be a big tournament. Regular IQs have a bigger prize payout, so I'd say a rule of thumb is if you get 40-50 for a regular IQ, you are gonna get 20-30 for a PPTQ. Prereleases bring out tons of casual players that don't play tournaments otherwise. Much more lucrative for a store. Especially since WotC donates a fair amount of the prize support to help the store out.

Made Day 2 at GP Omaha. Turns out the field is soft to Baneslayer Angels

Huh? They literally send a few booster boxes for free to the store depending on your attendance numbers.

Kuro_sl said:

Made Day 2 at GP Omaha. Turns out the field is soft to Baneslayer Angels

Click to expand...

Nice Kuro! What are you playing when you show up on coverage tomorrow?

Pod, dropped Larks for Baneslayer because Lark was busy being super irrelevant without Combo pieces to recur.

Played 7 Delver Decks in 9 rounds. Nice format.

Killing people who had Ancestral Recalled 4x in one game felt good.

enzie_sl said:

Huh? They literally send a few booster boxes for free to the store depending on your attendance numbers.

Click to expand...

Prize support is vastly reduced from past amounts. Used to be around 3 packs per player now it's like 1.4 or something dumb. Used to be awesome, go 4-0 in your flight, get a playmat and like half a box. Now it's like you go 4-0 and get like 6 or 8 packs and that's it. As a store we can add in extra stuff, but not packs of the set that's being featured in the prerelease which is pretty awful.

If you max our your order of the pre-release boxes, you generally have quite a few of them left over, so you can open some of them for more prize support packs if you have to. Like, we have 5 tourneys over 3 days. By saturday night, we have an idea how many packs will be left after the 2 on sunday, so we open some of the ones that haven't been going as quick.

Also, I haven't noticed an official change in prize support policy. Did your attendance numbers change? You may have been getting too many before, or your numbers have been going up and you havent hit the next 'level' for more support, even though you are getting more players. So, it ends up being less per player.

No the prize support thing changed shortly after they went away from "regional" prereleases to LGS ones.

PPTQs are going to be a problem in the next year or so. It'll work long term, but they need to adjust expectations. Old style PTQs got too large for a lot of local stores to support, but the exponential growth of MTG is starting to taper off a little bit. I'm sure it will continue expanding but not at the rate it has been since Zendikar.

There is a real concern among judges in my area that the number of PPTQs is going to burn people out, and also that RPTQs are going to be too small to train L2s adequately for large events. RPTQs aren't likely to exceed the numbers of an old IQ, much less reach what an old PTQ used to have.

Ended up 10-5 at GP Omaha, losses to the current World Champ, Sam Black, BUG Infect, Scapeshift, and Affinity.

So I beat Scissors, beat all the other Rocks I faced, and lost to Paper, can't feel too bad about that playing Rock (Pod).

Also made day 2 to end up 9-6 in Omaha. I was playing Slippery Bogle to end up 7-2 yesterday, losing to Junk Pod and Bloom Titan. Today I end up 2-4 only beating 2 burn decks and losing to junk pod, junk pod, robots and robots. I wish I played more delvers

Sterling_sl said:

No the prize support thing changed shortly after they went away from "regional" prereleases to LGS ones.

Click to expand...

Oh.. well then I dunno what to say. We've managed 2+ per player for the last year of pre-releases. I wasn't working there the whole time, and the owner didn't give me all the details, but it always seemed like there was plenty of packs for us to give out. I do know he'd max out his order of both boxes and prerelease packs every time. Maybe wizards only gives 1.5 packs per player for 'free' but you can buy more? In that case, it's still way cheaper then the support you give out for any other tournament, and that's a large savings overall.

Like, when we run FNM we do 2 per player, but that's coming out of our stock that we paid for. The profit margin on the entry fee is basically 0. For prereleases that 1.5 free packs is the profit, basically.

Yeah I'm not bitching about the margins, just saying that it's been reduced a great deal since the switch. All good though we max out on all the product they'll let us have for both stores I run. Prereleases are pretty awesome in general. Our normal FNM attendance is like 25-30, and we generally pull between 50-70 for each prerelease event and we run 5 at one venue and 3 at the other.

I miss our old prereleases. Playing 3-round flights with a Booster Box for 3-0, 3/4 Box for 2-0-1 and 1/2 box for 2-1 was sweet. I have so much Lorwyn Block lying around from that.

Jeez booster box for 3-0?

Last time I got a Booster Box was like Urza's block - in Texas they used to have huge PTQ/small GP size Pre-releases with like 9 rounds and top 8 would get 1-2 boxes each.

We had a great Event Organizer in the DFW area for like a decade plus (Ed Fox, think he did a lot of midwest stuff too) and Wizard's changes have pretty much killed off events in Texas.