Adventures of an eBay Storekeep

WPN Boy (Part 3)

2012-01-05T19:12:00.000-05:00

[This is part 3 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1 and Part 2 (not to mention the entire Road to WPN series, which begins here)]

Q&A Session

I'm afraid no-one has sent me any questions (via email, or comments on the blog), so there's no Q's for me to A this time :( I will say that the comments from last time about having a Draft-training session some time sounds like a mighty fine idea. Lord knows I could use it!

DIARY OF A WPN KID

December 27, 2011: I'm a little frustrated with WotC's Customer Service right now. I emailed trying to find the answer to a question that I just can't seem to get an official answer on. Namely: how many booster packs of Innistrad and Dark Ascension are used to do a Sealed Deck event? My thinking (and I don't know where this comes from) is that at the prerelease it's 3 packs each, then for regular events it would be 4 packs of Innistrad and 2 of Dark Ascension.

When I posed the question via the WotC Customer Service interface (remember: I can no longer directly email my WPN "handler", Brian), I got a VERY speedy reply (even though it was around 9:30 pm my time) which was pleasantly surprising. Less so, however, was their response, which directed me to the sales announcements for Dark Ascension. These documents did not have the answers I needed, so I wrote back and thanked them for the quick response, but stated that I didn't get the answer I needed.

The reason I need this answer is so that I can advise Patrick and Jon as to how much product of the two sets they need to order for the events coming up.

December 28, 2011: Got another reply from WotC Customer Service:

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, we do not have any other more specific information for the Dark Ascension Prerelease. Often the specifics (like how many of each booster to be used) will be included in the event kit and it's occasionally posted in an article on our website (http://www.wizards.com/Sales) as soon as that information is available. For questions about how much to order, you may want to contact (or have the store owners contact) their Distributors for help with recommended quantities or limits for purchasing products for the prerelease.

I'm sure it will be in the event kit. Unfortunately that will be too late for ordering purposes. Plus, it will not answer the question as to whether regular events use a different ratio of booster packs than the prerelease.

A quick Twitter discussion today indicates that I am off my rocker, and the whole 4/2 booster split is a figment of my imagination. It seems that the split is 3/3 always. I have no idea where the 4/2 thing came from (maybe I just assumed it, since once the third set of a block comes out it's usually 2/2/2 - so it seemed logical that the big set would get more representation until then?). Anyway, unless I somehow hear/read/see something official that says differently, I will operate under the working assumption that a Dark Ascension sealed deck event will use 3 packs each of Dark Ascension and Innistrad.

[SIDE NOTE: A Dark Ascension Draft, on the other hand, will be 1 pack Dark Ascension and 2 packs of Innistrad, drafted in that order. Just FYI in case you didn't know.]

Meanwhile, in much more exciting news, Casual Magic Night had 10 people tonight - including 2 new DCI members, which helps Novel Places' bottom line towards staying at the Core Level. My Green-White Tokens deck ("Tokens of my Affection") proved to be a VERY capable Archenemy deck with the tailor-made Scheme deck I put together to run with it. BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

December 30, 2011: FNM tonight was Standard. We had 8 people, so barely enough to run sanctioned (but, then again, it WAS sanctioned, so I can't complain too much!). Everyone had been there before (one player was the gent who had been "strong-armed" into playing Two-Headed Giant last week).

January 3, 2012: Today I received the nicest note in my email (sent to me and a few of the regular players at our events, from another one of our regulars). I will leave it here with no comment other than: this is EXACTLY why I wanted to start organizing events!

Gentlemen - a quick Happy New (M12) Year to you guys!
Just wanted to say thanks for making all the games at Beyond and Novel very fun this past year!

And a big thanks to Mr. Don for starting up his FNMs and other events - we've got a great group
of players and it has been my pleasure to meet everyone.
See you at Don's events throughout "M12"... ;-)

January 4, 2012: Casual Magic Night. Tonight we tried a new format created by William Davy, who runs events for Beyond Comics' Frederick store. I will include here his report from what he learned after the playtest. Here are the rules for the format (called Political Economics Magic) in case you'd like to read them for yourself before reading his review. Take it away, William!

Let me start off by saying that I expected a lot less of the format. I expected I would have to completely overhaul the rules after a play test. I never expected that it would work as well as it did.

Before the game began, I realized I had not planned for Foil lands in the packs. If they were removed, it would reduce the card pool (admittedly only a little bit) and I didn’t want that to happen. So I added this to the rules:

1.1.2.2 If a foil basic land is opened, that card goes into the Spell Deck.

1.3.1 Foil Basic Lands are shuffled into the Spell Deck.

2.6.1 If a foil Basic Land is played, that land generates 2 mana of the specified type.

2.9.1.1 Even if a Foil Basic Land is exposed, that portion of the card’s effect does nothing.

Even after making this adjustment, we did not open any foil lands and as such, did not get to test this mechanic.

To begin, the card pool was incredible. We used eighteen packs of Mirrodin Besieged and in the process of opening all the cards, I opened a sword of Feast and Famine, Inkmoth Nexus, Contested war zone, Consecrated Sphinx, Hero of Oxid Ridge, Tezzeret, Mirran Crusader, Victory’s Herald, Cryptoplasm, two Galvanoths, a foil Distant Memories, and a Foil Massacre Wurm. Not bad for just eighteen Packs. Anyway… on to the gameplay.

It went much better than I had anticipated. The Face up Land deck made for an interesting mechanic, At more than one point during the game, there was a land that nobody needed sitting on top (a swamp to be exact) and it sat there undisturbed for several turns. And this was not because nobody needed another mana, it was because nobody wanted a Swamp. However, there was much of the land deck that went undisturbed. Because of this, I am changing the land deck construction to include only three of each basic land for every player at the table.

Because we were playing Mirrodin Besieged, there were a lot of creatures being played that had Infect. Right off the bat, we determined that nobody liked poison damage and that, because of our high starting life, fifteen poison damage sounded fair. The starting life total will also be reduced from 40 to 30.

The card pool, while quite valuable, was enormous. Eighteen booster packs for five players seemed like quite a lot. The card pool will be adjusted accordingly. Each player will purchase/supply three booster packs to the card pool. These booster packs will be from any set of the player’s choosing.

The shared mana mechanic was used a lot more often than I expected. Red and Green mana were at a premium (no more than two of each were on the board throughout the game) and as such, the other players often left them untapped in case someone wanted to use them. I remember at one point, another player was swinging with all of his creatures, I think he had three of them, into the biggest threat on the table. He blocked most of the damage but before the damage occurred, I noticed the attacker had an untapped mountain, and offered Rally the Forces. He gladly tapped the red mana and I paid the other two, destroying most of the defender’s creatures in the process.

Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to test the graveyard mechanic extensively, and the milling mechanic was not used at all. I would like to run another game using cards from Innistrad at some point in the future to test the graveyard mechanic more thoroughly.

Overall, I think the game was a success. Many of the mechanics I devised for the game worked much better than anticipated and only need minor tweaking. Below are the modified rules. Italicized sections are still subject to change, bold sections are new additions and changes.

[TO BE CONTINUED...]

WPN Boy (Part 2)

2011-12-25T11:17:00.001-05:00

[This is part 2 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1 (not to mention the entire Road to WPN series, which begins here)]

Q&A Session

Behrooz 'Bezman' Shahriari checked in last time with more Q's for me to A!

- What's the most rewarding part of being a WPN event-organiser?
- What's the most difficult part?
- Do you enjoy magic more or less? How has your relationship with the game changed since a year ago?

Most rewarding part: To be completely honest, I get a blast out of seeing people having fun playing Magic, and knowing that I had a hand in arranging that experience for them. Also, I love the fact that if I want to play Magic myself, I'm never more than a couple days away from another opportunity to do so!

Most difficult part: The time commitment is quite more than I thought it would be. Between logging the events in WER, keeping the event calendar up-to-date, getting a decent newsletter out every week, keeping the stores apprised on what booster packs they need to have on stock for any given event, advertising the events, writing the blog - and all of that is on top of the time I put in at the actual events themselves!

Enjoying Magic: I think there's give and take here. I was disappointed to learn just how many people go to the 'net for deck ideas (sometimes with minor tweaking) for constructed events. I would SO much rather see a bunch of home-brewed decks battling it out, like kitchen-table Magic at an epic level :) As it stands the events often end up being won by those who can afford the cards needed for the "best deck" (whatever that may be at the time).

On the other hand, I definitely find myself having many more ideas for decks, and build a lot more (and enjoy playing them) than I used to. They're unlikely to win too many of my own events, as they are not the "best deck" (nor am I a world-class player) but I have a blast with it.

DIARY OF A WPN KID

November 25, 2011: Tonight we held FNM at Novel Places instead of the usual location, and was a Standard event. I knew we'd have trouble, it being the night after Thanksgiving. Adding in the fact that it was at an unusual location, I was worried. Unfortunately my fears turned out to be founded. Only 2 players showed up, so I joined in to make it more interesting. We played three rounds, round-robin style.

The idea came up tonight of running a casual Magic night (since this was essentially that). Something to pursue later?

November 26, 2011: Innistrad Draft at Novel Places. Patrick had another event taking place on the main floor of the store, so we surreptitiously held the event upstairs. That area is used mostly as storage right now, and is filled with antiques and curios. The open rafter design of the old building made for a rather spooky setting, just perfect for an Innistrad Draft. We had 11 players, and (despite my having to rush back home to get my basic land box which I had forgotten), the event went off rather well. I owe a HUGE thanks to Craig, who had come out to help me run the event so he could make sure he knew what would be needed to run WER for the Dark Ascension prerelease events he'll be running at Novel Places at the end of January.

5 players had never played at Novel Places before, which helped with our bottom line for maintaining Core Level. Thanks go to Serg for helping arrange for so many new people to come out!

December 2, 2011: Standard event FNM at Beyond Comics. 8 players, so we ran a sanctioned 3-round event. Also tonight I picked up a used netbook to use as a back-up, especially when we'll have multiple Dark Ascension prerelease events going on at once.

One player was new to the DCI at this event, and two of the players were brothers who attended together. Hopefully some or all three will become regulars!

December 9, 2011: FNM was Innistrad Booster Draft tonight. All three of the new-to-us players from last week made it, along with another new DCI member and 6 others for a lovely 10-person Draft. The event itself ended up rather oddly, as the prize distribution was originally set based on the "perfect" result which would have had 2 players at 9 match points (we only run 3 rounds for limited events due to time constraints). But after round two, when I expected to have 3 players at 6 points, we instead had only 1 (the player who won round one but got paired down in round two didn't win as the model predicted, and two other round 1 winners ended up in a draw). I made adjustments to the prize distribution (increasing the pack payout at each level, since there'd be fewer people at the very top), and STILL had 3 packs left over at the end to randomly give out amongst 4 players who hadn't won a pack.

Strangest moment of the draft was possibly the situation where a player who had mulliganed down to 5 cards had an early board state of 2 copies of Blazing Torch and 2 copies of One-Eyed Scarecrow (in addition to his lands). So bizarre!

December 10, 2011

Bigger news is that Patrick has agreed to give the Casual Magic night a try, so the first one will be this coming Wednesday (December 14). He'll keep the shop open two hours later than normal, and the official posted times will be 6-9 pm.

December 14, 2011: The inaugural Casual Magic Night was tonight. My sons have karate on Wednesday nights, so we showed up late (~8:30) but there were three other players there (including one that had never been at Novel Places before). Not too bad for the first time out. I'll continue to advertise it in my weekly email newsletter, and try to drum up interest at FNM.

December 16, 2011: FNM at Beyond Comics, Standard Constructed. 10 players again tonight (this time I did not need to play!). We ran 4 rounds, and I think it went quite well. Next week is Two-Headed Giant, Innistrad Sealed. I'm looking forward to it, and hope we have at least 4 teams!

Tonight I scheduled the FNMs for February. The first week we'll sacrifice FNM to run a Friday night Dark Ascension Launch Party. Second week will be Innistrad/Dark Ascension Draft. Third will be Standard, and fourth will be my first ever Block Constructed event. Haven't 100% decided if it will be Scars of Mirrodin Block (allows cards from Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin Besieged and New Phyrexia) or Innistrad Block (which will allow cards from Innistrad and Dark Ascension). Leaning toward the latter.

December 21, 2011: 7 players for Casual Magic Night at Novel Places tonight. Much insanity ensued when we combined my deck of Plane cards from Planechase (1 copy of each Plane in existence, including promos) with EDH/Commander. Turns out that a 5-player EDH game with Planes takes a LONG time. We called it (with no-one really clearly in the lead) at 9:30, a good half-hour after the event was supposed to end. Lucky for us Patrick seemed to be enjoying us being so goofy!

Also tonight, Patrick gave the thumbs up to extend the Casual Magic Night through January at least.

December 23, 2011: FNM at Beyond Comics was Two-Headed Giant Innistrad Sealed Deck. We had (barely) 4 teams, so an official FNM. One player (Josh) had just shown up to observe, but he was convinced to team up with one of our regulars, Dan, who had shown up without a partner. Dan was willing to pay for both of them, provided he got to keep all the cards at the end of the event. Josh was happy to get to play for free.

Team "Last Minute" (myself and Craig) played pretty well together, winning Rounds 1 & 2, and were only 1 land drop away from winning Round 3.

I take issue with the WER on something, though. I had decided that the 12 prize packs would be distributed as follows:

1st place: 5 packs
2nd place: 4 packs
3rd place: 2 packs
4th place: 1 pack

That way everyone wins something. But in this case what happened was that two teams had identical scores at the top (win %'s, opponent win %'s, in every way identical) and the same for the 3rd & 4th slots. For the top two slots one team (myself and Craig) had beaten the other team, so you would think that the 1st place slot would be given to us. But instead it was given to the other team. And in the lower two slots the same thing happened. The team who ended up 4th place had actually beaten the team that was put in 3rd place. I don't know what criteria the WER bases places when the stats are identical (random would seem logical?) but in this case it seems to me that there's clearly a way to determine ranking: if the two tied teams played each other, rank the one that won that matchup higher than the other!

I'm worried about tomorrow's event at Novel Places. Despite this incredibly awesome flyer Craig came up with:

Santa Garruk wants YOU for the Draft!

Still it is on Christmas Eve, and with folks on vacation or with family obligations, we may have a hard time hitting at least 8 players. We'll see!

December 24, 2011: Well, it was not as bad as it could have been! 5 players showed up for the Innistrad Draft at Novel Places today. I joined in as well so that there'd be an even number (although, as my 0-3 record will attest, we might as well have just given a Bye to everyone who was paired up against me). I proved once again that I am absolutely hopeless when it comes to drafting, and my deck was just God-awful. But, the players seemed to enjoy themselves nonetheless, and for that I am grateful.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 3]

WPN Boy (Part 1)

2011-11-19T11:36:00.001-05:00

As I said at the end of The Road to WPN Part 27, I feel like that series had served its purpose. I set out to document the process and struggles involved in getting a store set up as a Wizards Play Network site, and bringing that store up to Core Level so that it could run Friday Night Magic, Prereleases and other such events.

A lot of oddities happened along the way (not the least of which was picking up a second store to run events at), and the series was overall very well received and developed a rather large following. Still, however, I felt that it had run its course (especially given that its name, which implied a trip to a destination which I feel has already been reached).

So, that brings us to this: the inaugural "issue" if you will of a new series. "WPN Boy" (pronounced "whippin' boy"*) will chronicle my further adventures in TO'ing for Novel Places and Beyond Comics. My intention for this series is to act as two functions:

A simple diary of events after they occur (which will mostly consist of date, type of event, attendance, and then anything noteworthy that happened);
A vehicle to answer questions from you, the audience, sent in either as comments to these posts, or via Twitter (I'm @TheSundry over there) or email (TheSundry at gmail dot com). So PLEASE feel free to ask away - it will give me something to write about!

*For those who are unaware, a whipping boy was a boy who would be punished instead of a prince when the prince had done something wrong. In this analogy, I will be taking the beating for you as I stumble through the always tricky process of being a TO, so that hopefully you can learn from my mistakes. I guess that makes you the prince - so make of that what you will :)

I will publish these basically as they fill up and seem a reasonable size for release out into the wild, so there will likely be no regular schedule to them. I hope that these posts continue to amuse and entertain, as well as (hopefully) shed some light on what happens behind the scenes at events you attend (for you non-TOs out there) and even offer advice and assistance for those of you who are TOs (or wish to be some day).

Q&A Session

The first question I want to answer came from Behrooz 'Bezman' Shahriari in the comments to the last Road to WPN entry:

I suppose one interesting point that you haven't really gone into would be what kind of advertising you do. Do you leave flyers at BC or NP? Have they had much success? Do you use FB to advertise events? How do folk tend to find out about it?

We do have flyers that each store uses, most of which are put together by my rather talented friend, Craig. Here's a sample, for the Innistrad Draft that I'll be running at Novel Places on November 26:

I thought the celebratory art fit with the fact that this event will be the weekend after Thanksgiving.

Craig usually makes full page flyers as well as smaller ones that cam be printed out 2x2 on a sheet and cut down to size. The stores post the larger ones on their door or in prominent locations in-store, then have the smaller ones out by the cash register as take-aways. For FNMs I make up a simple monthly list as a 2x2 for Beyond Comics to have sitting out by the cash register. It looks like this:

Not pretty, but functional. The Comic Sans can be forgiven - it's a comic store!

I used to get a pile of the event flyers (large & takeaways) and post them up at local community centers. I found, however, that when I asked folks how they learned about the event, not once did they say "I saw a flyer at the community center." so I stopped. I also used to post ads in Craig's List (different Craig), but found the same to be true.

I have found that the biggest source of new players (besides word-of-mouth, "come with me to this event run by this guy called Don" type referral) actually is the Wizards of the Coast Store & Event Locator. For those of you who don't know about this amazing resource, any officially sanctioned and scheduled event is in a large searchable database, complete with map, location info, etc. (you can see it for yourself here). You can search for specific types of events, like a prerelease or FNM. It's really quite something. I've lost track of the number of people who told me they found our events using this system, so I'm VERY grateful that it exists!

DIARY OF A WPN KID

November 11, 2011: Not a very auspicious FNM on 11/11/11, I'm afraid. The format was Innistrad Draft, and only 3 players showed up. I joined in to make it 4. P1P1 for me was Bloodline Keeper, and I managed to get some good support. Lost Round 1 horribly, tightened up the deck, and won rounds 2 & 3 to take 2nd place in the event (this guy took first).

November 12, 2011: Standard constructed event at Novel Places. Two regular players brought friends (3 between the two of them) and a few other regulars showed up (plus someone who had been meaning to make it to an event for a while now). When the dust settled, we had 8 (without needing me) - so we could actually run it as a sanctioned event. Hooray! This was my first event with a "super promo prize pack" for the 1st place player (who was regular-attender and big supporter of our events, Roger). He took home, in addition to his prize booster packs, all of the following promo cards from my ever-growing collection:

WPN Promo Maul Splicer;
WPN Promo Vault Skirge;
WPN Promo Auramancer;
WPN Promo Tormented Soul;
WPN Promo Bloodcrazed Neonate;
WPN Promo Curse of the Bloody Tome;
Innistrad Prerelease Promo Mayor of Avabruck;
Innistrad Prerelease Promo Wolf Token;
Innistrad Launch Party Promo Ludevic's Test Subject;
Innistrad Game Day Promo Diregraf Ghoul

I plan to offer the same prize pack for the next three Saturday events at Novel Places (Nov 26, Dec 10, Dec 24). I figure I need some sort of extra draw, especially if I want people to come out the Saturday after Thanksgiving and (even worse), on Christmas Eve (that wasn't on purpose, I swear! It just happens to be the 4th Saturday in December this year!).

November 18, 2011: FNM at Beyond Comics. Format: Standard Constructed. 10 players made it (sanctioned!). One of them was new to DCI, and two others had never played here before. The former was invited by a friend, and is unlikely to make it regularly as he lives a good deal away. But they latter 2 (brothers) seemed to really enjoy themselves and I think will come back for events here as well as at Novel Places. We played 4 rounds, since it was a Constructed event and that would have us end about the same time as 3 rounds of Limited (once you factor in draft/build time), and we were still done around 9:30.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2]

The Road to WPN (Part 27)

2011-11-11T12:05:00.002-05:00

[This is part 27 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 14.5, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, and Part 26]

October 28, 2011: FNM tonight went reasonably well. We had 8 participants for a Standard event (and I didn't need to sign up to make it 8!).

It turned out that the FNM&Ms that we received last week were supposed to be used TONIGHT (which I found out from the WPN newsletter this past Wednesday). It would be nice if the instructions on use of these promotional items went out in advance of their arriving at the store so that we know these things! [Side note on these: the reverse side does not have the Planeswalker symbol as I had previously reported, but instead the symbol of Avacyn from the Innistrad set.]

Anyway, the majority of the players had been here last week as well, so I handed out FNM&Ms and deck boxes to those who hadn't been. We ended up getting the ideal distribution after three rounds (1 player with 9 match points, 3 players with 6, 3 with 3 and one with 0).

This was, in a way, to be a test night for me. If, as I was concerned, the issue was one of format in competing with Dream Wizards, then (I hoped) running Standard more often at FNM would lead to larger turnouts. But last week's Draft actually had more players. Not sure what to make of this.

This is the beginning of a Magic intensive weekend for me, as I have not one but two Game Days to run tomorrow. And there's a rare October snow storm forecast for tomorrow, so I'm a bit nervous.

October 29, 2011: The weather this morning was mostly cold and rainy, not snowy. We ended up with 7 other players at Beyond Comics, so I joined in to make it 8. This meant that everyone got not only the participation promo (non-Foil full art Diregraf Ghoul) but also the "Top 8" foil full-art Elite Inquisitor promo as well (turns out it's easy to top 8 an event when there are only 8 players - who knew?).

I played my "Tokens of my Affection" deck, which does not have a sideboard at the moment. It played okay, but not great. I only won one match (Round 1), but, as mentioned before, still managed to Top 8. We had the same match point distribution as last night's event.

The afternoon Game Day at Novel Places was not so rosy a story. By the afternoon, the snow had really started coming down. We ended up with only 4 players (1 of whom was me). This meant that I had to cancel the official Game Day and run things as a casual event instead. The good news was, though, that all four of us got both of the promos!

I played the same deck, and defeated two of my opponents. One of the players lost each match, while the other three of us won 2/3 matches. Strange ending record.

This makes two events in a row at Novel Places that only had 4 players show up (and I was #4 in both cases). I'm really not sure what to do about this. I had seriously thought that having a Saturday Magic option was going to be attractive to folks, and it may simply be that I'm not doing a good enough job getting the word out that we're doing them.

So, mixed results on my first experience running a Game Day. My hope is that the weather was a major factor and things would have been different attendance-wise if we didn't have the snow.

November 3, 2011: Stopped by Novel Places today to pick up some books I had ordered, and discussed with Patrick some conflicts that will be coming up on some of our Saturday events. The 4th Saturday of November and the 2nd Saturday of December he had to schedule some other programs that will be set up in the space we normally run the events. We think we have a solution moving into an alternate space. I think it's important that we maintain our "2nd and 4th Saturday" schedule so that folks get used to it and know that if it's one of those Saturdays they can come out to Novel Places and play Magic.

November 4, 2011: FNM tonight was Innistrad Sealed Deck, and we only managed to get 6 players out (not including me - if a seventh had shown up I would have joined in to make it 8). This, of course, means cancelling the official event and running a casual instead. I am, to be quite frank, getting sick and tired of having to do that.

The other big news tonight was that John asked if it would be possible to cancel the FNM scheduled for November 25. Here in the US, the Friday after Thanksgiving (Nov 24 this year) is known as "Black Friday" and is, historically, the biggest shopping day of the year. It's the unofficial beginning of the holiday buying season, and a day that most retailers depend on for a huge influx of revenue.

As could be predicted, then, Beyond Comics plans to have a huge sale, and will need some of the tables we would ordinarily use for an event to set up special sales items. Also, whoever is on duty that day (and they're down an employee at the moment) will likely be wiped out by the end of the day, and not really looking forward to having to stay late for a FNM. Add that to the fact that I had scheduled that night to be Innistrad Sealed Deck (the most expensive of the formats we run) which would likely reduce the potential number of players....yeah, you can see why he'd want to let this one go.

BUT, I had already received the FNM promos for that week. And there was always the possibility that Patrick would be interested in running an FNM for once (if the event could be transferred from one location to another). So I resolved to check with Patrick and find out.

November 6, 2011: Turns out he would, so I contacted Brian (through the new interface system with WotC customer support) to ask if it was possible. He told me it would be possible - I needed to create an event at Novel Places for that evening and send him the sanctioning number. He would change that event to an FNM, and I would then need to cancel the scheduled FNM for Beyond Comics.

We got that all cleared up, and now Novel Places will host its very first FNM on November 25. I decided to make it a Standard event, in the hopes that it will be more attractive to folks (a Constructed event is the cheapest of the events). We have an Innistrad Draft event scheduled there for the day after that as well. It is the Thanksgiving weekend, and many folks will be away. But, on the other hand, a number of college students will be back home for the holiday, so maybe those two will cancel out?

ON ANOTHER NOTE: This will likely be my last regular update to The Road to WPN. As many regular readers already know, it's rather overdue anyway. Things have become a bit more routine lately, and simple reports of FNM attendance does not for riveting reading make.

If something of note should occur (like the FNM transfer mentioned above, or an especially large event, or some random big-name Magic celebrity showing up - something like that) I will be sure to post an update on it.

I want to thank everyone who has made this journey with me, both by attending events and reading about it. Without the former, neither store could have made it to Core Level, and been able to run FNMs, Prereleases and Game Days, not to mention that I've had a blast meeting new people and playing more Magic than I've been able to play in years. And without the latter, well - this certainly would not have been as easy a trip without the support and well-wishes I have received from readers.

[TO BE CONTINUED, EVENTUALLY...]

The Road to WPN (Part 26)

2011-10-22T18:36:00.001-04:00

[This is part 26 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 14.5, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, and Part 25]

October 14, 2011:Tonight's FNM (another Innistrad Sealed Deck event) was, unfortunately, as sparsely attended as last week's was. Only 5 players signed up, so I again joined in so there'd be an even number. Since we were under 8 I had to cancel the actual FNM and run the event as a casual one.

I found out one big strike against us is indeed Dream Wizards. As mentioned before, they are the "big fish" in our local gaming pond. They are at Advanced level in the WPN, allowing them to run two FNMs each week. As of this week, in response to the new Planeswalker Points system (mainly, I believe, although some expressed the opinion that this is perhaps to help market against us - I'm not quite that paranoid yet), they've changed their policy to make one of the two ALWAYS a Standard event, and will let it run extra long if they've got a large enough attendance (they used to run only 3 rounds, regardless of how many people show up). To quote their calendar description:

Weekly FNM Standard Format Tournament: • Best Chance to Rank up Planeswalker Points: 3X Multiplier • Participate in the proper Number of Swiss Rounds: • 9 - 16 players = 4 Rounds • 17 - 32 players = 5 Rounds

I can't really ask whatever store employee is running Beyond Comics to stay any later than they already are with a 3-round FNM (although since Standard doesn't have a deck-building time, I could probably squeeze in a 4th round now that I think about it).

Several people have commented that they would prefer to play a Standard FNM with us than with Dream Wizards, so I have decided that I will start alternating weeks with FNM. Every other week we'll do Standard, and on the "off" weeks we'll do Limited formats, other Constructed formats, Two-Headed Giant, etc. The big test will be October 28, as that's the next Standard FNM we have scheduled. I won't be able to start the new schedule until December, since November's FNMs are already scheduled, and you have to declare the format when you register the event.

October 21, 2011: What a difference a week makes! In all honesty I left Beyond Comics tonight feeling like I had just had the most fun running an event that I have had so far in my (granted, short) WPN career.

The evening started off with presents! I arrived at the store to find several boxes awaiting me. I started cracking them open and found that they represented two things. The first was a promo kit for the Innistrad Game Day on October 29, including a big advertising poster and the promos for the event:

My first Game Day promos :)

The second item (which was in two boxes) was a FNM promotional kit. WotC is really playing up the Innistrad/Halloween synergy and has pulled out all the stops with items to help promote FNM (especially the FNM on the Halloween weekend, next week's Oct 28 event). These included:

Big 3D promotional poster.

Planeswalker M&Ms. How freaking cool is THAT?!?!

Quotes of the evening came from these M&Ms (I handed them out between Rounds 1 & 2):

"Should be dark chocolate."
"Hmmm....Tastes like Liliana...."

Garruk deck boxes.

These deck boxes are really cool if you can figure out how to assemble them properly!

Liliana shopping bags. My boys will be using some for Trick-or-Treating!

Also included was a gigantic door-cling (like a window-cling, but MUCH larger) with the same Liliana art as the bag above. Yes, they are milking that Liliana art for all that it's worth. I can only hope Steve Argyle (the artist of the piece) gets royalties for every time it gets used!

So, anyway, when the event was ready to start I already felt like a kid in a candy store, excited to get going.

And then tonight's FNM (Innistrad Booster Draft) had 11 people at the start! SO much better than only 5!

There was no need for me to join in (I don't mind Byes if there's over 8 people, as I can play against whoever has a Bye if they're interested so they don't have to sit around bored for the round).

Of the 11 players, 6 had never played at Beyond Comics before. Of those, 4 were new to the DCI entirely, and needed to get cards. Always cool to have new faces.

After the Draft was over, one of the players dropped (he knew he had to leave early, he just wanted to sit in and draft some cards he was looking for), leaving us an even number of players for Round 1. Then after Round 1, someone else had to drop as he needed to get ready for the SCG Open tomorrow in Baltimore (more on that later). This left us with an odd number of players for Round 2. One of the DCI newcomers got the Bye, so I played a variety of my constructed decks against his drafted deck, as well as against a constructed one he had brought along. As he described it, he was here to learn (he had never seen any Innistrad cards before tonight, which gave the Draft an extra degree of difficulty for him, I'm sure!).

Everyone stayed in for Round 3, so I got to play one of regulars who had gotten the Bye. He had a Zombie deck he wanted to playtest, which seemed a good match against my Humans deck. So we had an epic Humans vs. Zombies showdown.

Random extras from the evening:

A girl in her teens stopped in and asked if she could watch, as she's never seen Magic played and is interested. That was fine with all involved - unfortunately a Draft is not the most exciting thing to watch at the beginning (especially if you don't know what's going on) and she had to leave before Round 1 began. I gave her a copy of the Magic 2012 Rulebook, and hope she may be back in the future.
One of the oddest "small world" scenes I've seen in a while happened. A guy dropped into the store because one of the women he was with knew Johnny, the guy running the store this evening. While he was there he happened to look into the back room and recognized one of the players. He came back to say hi, and realized he knew a second one of the players. After chatting for a moment, he called the 2 ladies back (as they had met these two players before) and one of the ladies realized that ANOTHER of the players was her cousin! So amazingly random.

Anyway, as I said - I had an absolute blast.

Tomorrow we have a Modern Constructed event scheduled in the afternoon at Novel Places (this months "4th Saturday" event). I'm a little nervous because:

It's a relatively untried format (and therefore not as popular as it could be);
Star City Games has their Open series in Baltimore this weekend, and many of our regulars will be heading up for that instead of coming to us.

I'm hoping we have enough folks who aren't interested in the big guys' tournament to run a decent event tomorrow, but we shall see...

October 22, 2011:Yeah, that didn't happen :(

Only three players showed up today, so I joined in to make it four. This meant, of course, that I had to cancel the sanctioned event and run a casual one. We played three Rounds, with each of us playing each other player at one point or another.

I don't really have a Modern deck, so I used my Blue/White Humans deck, which is Standard-legal.

To say it sucked would be an understatement.

I managed to win only one game all day with the deck. After losing in Round 1 and 2, I played my Mono et Mono deck against that opponent (as my matches were over much quicker than the other match each time). And even THAT deck just did not get the job done. I am just not cut out for the Modern world, I'm afraid. The decks I faced were just too nasty and fast.

Unless I get a sizable clamoring from my player base, I'm not sure we'll be running Modern again any time soon.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 27]

"Cool Metal Life-counter?"

2011-10-14T23:57:00.000-04:00

Just a quickie, here. In case you're wondering what I mean by "cool metal life-counter" as one of the options you can vote for in the current Blog Poll to pick the next email newsletter giveaway prize, here's what they look like:

Bask in the awesomeness!

They're a bit heavy and will cost more to ship than my normal giveaways, but that's okay. Please note: I get to pick which one gets given away if this prize is chosen in the poll!

The Road to WPN (Part 25)

2011-10-08T19:51:00.001-04:00

[This is part 25 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 14.5, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23 and Part 24]

Astute readers will have noticed that I abandoned the "WPN Report Card" a few installments back. Truth be told, it became too big a headache to keep track of the "unique players" at each site. Before we made it to Core Level, it was relatively easy. Had the person ever played here before? Easy to answer. But now it becomes "have they played here since we made it to Core Level?" and that's somehow a good deal more difficult to determine. I kept track long enough to tell that unless something VERY wrong happens, we will have no trouble maintaining Core Level by running our regular events.

I have never really mentioned before what is involved in making it to the NEXT level in WPN (yes, there's more beyond Core!) because realistically I don't ever seeing us making it there at either store. But, in the interests of being complete for those not in the know, here's the details on Advanced Level...

At Advanced Level you get these extra benefits:

The ability to run extra events (like 2 FNMs each week instead of just one)
"Advanced Support Kits" (whatever those are)
More special events (such as Premium Tournaments, Grand Prix Trials, WPN Championship Qualifiers)
Extra From the Vault product
The ability to schedule events up to 7 days after they happened

To make it to Advanced Level you need to do the following within a 12-month period:

Report a minimum of 20 tournaments
Maintain a delinquency rate of less than 10%
Have a minimum of 100 unique people playing in your reported events
Run and report a single tournament with 32 players or more
Introduce 20 new players to WPN events

The first two are no problem. Even if you just run FNM for 5 months you've got the first one, and there's REALLY no excuse for having a delinquency rate over 10% (or over 0%, IMHO!). But given the difficulty we had getting to 30 unique players to make Core, I'm not sure how well we'd do at making 100. Also, unless we rent out some larger space, we'll never be able to run an event with 32+ players. The last one could actually be doable (although doing it once a year would be tough unless we got big and STAYED big).

So, realistically, I think we're at Core and will stay at Core and I'm okay with that!

October 7, 2011: Today's FNM was a rather odd affair overall.

First of all, we only had 5 participants, so I joined up to make it an even number so we wouldn't need to worry about Byes. This meant cancelling the scheduled FNM and scheduling a casual event instead, as we didn't meet the 8-player threshold.

I'm not completely sure what caused the problem, but I'm guessing there were two major factors:

The event was Innistrad Sealed Deck. This carries a $25 price tag, and a lot of folks have shelled out a lot of money on Innistrad lately (between Prereleases and Launch Parties and even buying whole boxes) so there's a drop in interest in spending $25 for an event right now. Unfortunately this is what I've scheduled for next week as well.
Dream Wizards (the "big fish" in our local pond) was running a Standard FNM (in addition to a Sealed Deck - THEY are at Advanced Level, and have the space, so they can run 2 FNMs). I think that was more attractive to folks.

I'm coming to the realization that despite my personal dislike of Standard events, I need to run more of them. The lower price tag (only $8, since players are only paying for the prize pool packs) is just more attractive on a regular basis.

But, back to the odd FNM. In an ideal distribution, after 3 rounds of Swiss we would have had 1 person undefeated (9 match points), 3 people who had won 2 rounds (6 match points) and 2 people who had won 1 round (3 match points). We had 12 packs in the prize pool. So I set up the prize allocation as:

9 match points = 4 booster packs
7 match points (2 wins & 1 draw) = 3 booster packs
6 match points = 2 booster packs

This would, theoretically, leave me with 2 boosters to randomly distribute among those who got under 6 match points (which under ideal circumstances would have been just two players, so effectively you would have had 1 booster pack for earning 3 match points).

To say the match turn-out was not ideal would be an understatement.

In the first round, we had two matches play out as expected, but one ended in a draw. So instead of having match points of 3, 3, 3, 0, 0, 0 as expected, we instead had 3, 3, 1, 1, 0, 0.

That in and of itself wasn't too bad. But then in round two we had two of the matches end in draws (including the match between the two winners from round 1). As a result we were left with no-one undefeated at the end of two round instead of the theoretical 2 players we should have had (point distribution after round 2 was 4, 4, 4, 2, 1, 0 - for the record, I was the 0 at this point).

Round 3 went as one would expect, with three winners. But while the 4 pts vs 4 pts match ended up with someone getting 7 match points (and therefore in the prize range), the 4 pts vs 2 pts went to the 2 pt person, leaving neither of them in range, and the 1 pt vs 0 pt went to me (bringing me to 3 match points). But neither of us was in the running at this stage. Final point distribution was 7, 5, 4, 4, 3, 1. Only 1 of the 6 players ended up in the prize range, and he wasn't even at the top point level!

After giving him his 3 packs, we were left with 9 more in the pool. And I had always sworn that I would give out every pack in the prize pool (I don't want to end up with "the house always wins"!). So each of the remaining 5 players got 1 pack each, and the final 4 packs I distributed randomly among the 6 of us.

Like I said - VERY strange outcome!

October 8, 2011: Today's event went quite smoothly. It was another Innistrad Sealed Deck event, this time at Novel Places. This was the first of what will be our regular 2nd and 4th Saturday events. I want to establish a regular pattern for players who are looking for events on a Saturday (something that, outside of special events, is lacking in our area - see a need, fill a need!).

I was worried that we may not get our 8 players, as we only had 2 preregistered (and prepaid) and one person (Darren) who had told me they were likely to come out, even though he didn't think he could play more than 2 rounds. When I arrived, Patrick told me that he had had someone call and ask about the event (confirming the time), and a local guy (Ian) who has been buying some MTG product from Patrick told him that he'd try to make it as well. So we had 3 for sure, and 2 possibles at this point. Then Serg arrived (I figured I could count on him!) although without Vish (boo, Vish!). Then Craig called to say he was coming up (wasn't expecting him - BONUS!). Ian did indeed make it. And then the gentleman who had called earlier turned up, with a friend along for the ride. Suddenly we had 8. Awesome! No need to cancel and run a casual event, and no need for me to jump in to make the minimum.

Some sick pulls were made. We had a Liliana and a foil Snapcaster Mage (two of the most expensive cards in the set) and several other Mythics (including Olivia Voldaren, who is an absolute beast in a Limited environment).

Round 1 and two went as an ideal distribution would predict. Then Darren, as he had forewarned, needed to drop after round 2 so the only person who was at this point winless got a Bye. This put everyone into prize range (I give out booster packs for the highest levels, but use WPN promos even down to only 3 match points [1 match win]).

Five of the eight players had never played at Novel Places before, and 1 of these was completely new to organized play and needed a DCI card. So all-in-all it was a great event for us as far as maintaining Core Level status is concerned.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 26]

The Road to WPN (Part 24)

2011-10-06T20:08:00.001-04:00

[This is part 24 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 14.5, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, and Part 23]

September 28, 2011: Today I heard from the DCI that last week's FNM (the Two-Headed Giant event that only had 6 players) had also been invalidated.

Brian got back to me later in the day to confirm my suspicion that this event (as well as the second prerelease event from Sunday) were both invalidated due to being under 8 players. Fortunately, he was able to allow me to submit two casual events in their place, and at least get people credit for having played.

The answer, it turns out, to how do you create a casual 2HG event is: you don't. I have finally managed to get this fact through my thick skull: for a casual event the DCI and WPN does not give two hoots about who played against who, or how many games each player won/lost/drew. They only care about who was present. That's it. In fact if you submit a casual event, you're supposed to check the box labeled "player list only" to make it even easier. To me that seems rather sad, but there you have it.

September 30, 2011: Tonight, instead of running an FNM, we had the Launch Party for Innistrad at Beyond Comics. Throughout the day I was keeping tabs on our preregistrations. We had hit 14 early in the day, but two wrote to me to let me know that their circumstances had changed and they needed to cancel. We had planned on capping at 18, since that's the number of chairs we have available normally (extra tables and chairs had been brought down from the Frederick branch of Beyond Comics for the prerelease last weekend). So, I figured with 12 signed up in advance, that only had us at 66% capacity, and we should be fine.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

I arrived at the store at around 5:40 this evening. The posted start of registration was 6:00, with the event scheduled to start at 6:30. I always try to get in 15 to 30 minutes before registration even begins to get set up. I arrived to find that John had already started processing people in - without knowing who had preregistered and who didn't (or even how many preregistrations to expect). He was asking folks if they had preregistered, but as we weren't requiring prepayment for this one it didn't really matter.

This proved to be a bit of a problem, however, because there were WAY more people waiting to sign up than I had expected! By the time the dust settled, we had 15 present and paid for, 2 still on the preregistration list, and 5 more who wanted to sign up! We waited until 6:30, the posted start time, for the final 2 preregistered people to show up. One was a name I didn't know (and who reported in their signup that they needed a DCI #) and the other was Roger, a regular. I felt bad giving up both slots. Roger had proven to be a solid supporter of what I'm doing, even advertising the events among his play group. As for the other person, I would hate to have their first experience with us be showing up despite preregistering only to find that his seat was gone.

However, we needed to start, and we had 5 eager people willing and ready to pay (some of them even willing to STAND for the event) there in-store. So I finally made the decision to sign up the 5 people waiting in the store. That brought us to 20 people, 2 more than we had chairs for (and making it the largest event I've run to date). Many of these had never played an Beyond Comics before, and 4 were attending their first event (and needed DCI cards).

While the 5 were paying John, Roger did make it (traffic was awful, it seems). It wasn't a total wasted trip for him, as he had placed an order from me he was going to pick up that evening, but I still feel bad that there just wasn't room to fit him in. If you're reading this, Roger - my sincerest apologies yet again!

The lessons to be learned here are:

I should have contacted the store and let John know how many sign-ups we already had (and sent him a list, so he could check people off);
John should not have started processing people in until I had arrived to give him said info.

So, we finally got started around 6:45 or so, and after 4 rounds of play we ended at around 11:30. My warmest thanks to Jawhara, who had to stay that late on a Friday night to man the store (her shift would normally have been done at 9!) - I don't think anyone had warned her that this particular event would go extra late (FNMs usually run at most an hour later than normal closing time).

So, why was this event so well attended? I'm not sure. My best guess is that since Friday is the first day one can hold a Launch Party, and (to the best of my knowledge) none of the local places were doing so, we were the "only game in town" for anyone who wanted to attend a Launch Party today. I had originally thought this would be our only Friday night Launch Party (since we run FNMs now) but now I wonder if it may be worth sacrificing an FNM each time to do this instead.

On a side note, I'm a bit concerned. The FNM promos for October I would have expected to arrive by now, but everyone at Beyond Comics reports that there have been no such deliveries. We need those promos starting next Friday, so I hope they come early next week!

October 2, 2011: Today was Novel Places' Launch Party for Innistrad. It was scheduled to start at 1:30 (with registration to start at 1). We only had 4 people signed up in advance (two had gone through Patrick's website and gotten the 10% discount; 2 had signed up through my web form just to reserve a space). And two others (Serg & Vish, who have become regulars) were there when I arrived.

I actually got there a bit frazzled today, as when I was packing up this morning I discovered that my netbook was missing. The only thing I could figure is that I somehow left it at Beyond Comics on Friday night. Unfortunately they don't open until 12 noon on Sundays (unless they're opening early for a prerelease!) so I couldn't call them to check. And if I was going to head south to Gaithersburg to pick it up, and then head back north to Clarksburg for the event, I would have to leave at 12. So, I left (my two sons along with me for the afternoon), hoping it wouldn't turn out that the computer wasn't there after all.

Fortunately it was sitting there right where I had left it, so I grabbed it and skedaddled, and arrived at Novel Places around 12:30, when I had planned to get there anyway.

When the time came to start the event, we had no others show up, so my two sons joined the 6 we had to make it 8 for the event so as to allow it to run as a competitive event. With only 8 players, I set the event for 3 rounds and the playing began.

While the event was running, I borrowed Patrick's camera as our household one has been acting up, and I needed to get pictures of the cards from Innistrad from my store. Thankfully my netbook has a built-in card reader so I could extract the photos from his camera card for processing later. I didn't get everything photographed (the commons and uncommons will have to wait for later - I'm just going to buy a new camera to use exclusively for store work).

October 5, 2011: I called in to Beyond Comics to check and see if the FNM promos had arrived as yet, and was told that nothing was there. So I used the WotC customer service system to ask if they had been delayed, or could be tracked (past experience has taught me they ship these things with tracking numbers).

Later I heard back from them, with a FedEx tracking number. That shows the package having been delivered last Thursday, signed for by "CCOHEN". Now Jon Cohen is the owner of Beyond Comics, and usually works in the Frederick store. But last week on Thursday he was manning the Gaithersburg one (where I TO events - the Frederick store has since started running events of their own). Unfortunately he is on vacation this week, and no-one else has any clue where he may have stashed the package of promos after he signed for them. I'm going to have to get there extra early on Friday and help tear the place up looking for them...

October 6, 2011: Today I got the weekly WPN newsletter, and it linked to an article detailing some changes they're making to prereleases starting with the next set (Dark Ascension, releasing the first weekend of February next year). There are some interesting changes, namely:

Sites at Core Level will be able to run THREE events now (up from two for Innistrad);
Booster Draft will no longer be an allowed format at prereleases (only Sealed Deck and 2HG Sealed Deck).

So that removes the question of whether to run a Draft event next time (if you recall, that was the event that only had 6 attendees). But it adds in a complication factor. Can I realistically run 3 events at each of 2 sites in 2 days? Single-handedly, I don't think so. But, my good buddy Craig may be willing and able to help. We'll have to figure out if there's a way to schedule events such that he can run two of the 6 events for me (I think I can pull of two each day that weekend, so if he can manage the other two I'll be set).

The only questions that remain are:

Which store gets which events on which days? Since Beyond Comics is closer to the "big fish" store (who runs the HUGE events on Saturday), it would make more sense to let Novel Places get the Saturday events (especially since we will have established a pattern of Saturday events at that location by then).
Just because we CAN run three events at each store, does this mean we WANT to do so?
What format(s) to do? Two-Headed Giant didn't work so well as an FNM, but there were many mitigating factors, and perhaps the prerelease would be different.

The two possible schedules I have come up with are:

Novel Places runs two events on Saturday (am and pm), and Beyond Comics runs just one. Craig runs the one at Beyond Comics. Then, on Sunday, Beyond Comics runs two events (am and pm) while Novel Places runs just one. Craig runs the one at Novel Places.
Each store runs two events on Saturday (am and pm). Craig would run both events at one of the stores. Then each store runs a single event on Sunday (one in the morning, one in the afternoon). I'd run both of these, going from one store to the next like I did for Magic Celebration.

The first option requires Craig's help on two separate days, but only for part of each day. The second option requires his help on only one day, but for the WHOLE day.

And, of course, I'm not so sure how his wife Misty will feel about this!

On another note, Patrick got the new batch of WPN Gateway promos in today (and Beyond Comics got theirs later) and he kindly took photos and sent them to me. So, starting with his event on Saturday, I'll be able to offer these lovelies as additional prizes:

I actually prefer the promo Neonate to the original!

So cool! I just love getting new promos in!

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 25]

The Road to WPN (Part 23)

2011-09-27T20:24:00.003-04:00

[This is part 23 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 14.5, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, and Part 22]

September 25, 2011: Today was the Innistrad prerelease, my first experience running such an event. And it has its ups and its downs.

First a recap of what we knew going in to this:

We were running two events: an a.m. Sealed Deck event (to start at 10:30), and a p.m. Draft (to start at 3:30);
We were limiting the event to 18 players as those were the # of seats available
A signing from comic-book creator Kurt Busiek was scheduled for the same day (to run from 1 to 4)
We were also going to allow Open Dueling during the event

I was dropped off at the store around 9 a.m. (as my family needed to continue on to head to church for the morning). John had kindly agreed to meet me there at that time (a full 3 hours before the store normally opens on a Sunday). I found that at this point in time we had 17 people registered for the morning event, but only 4 for the afternoon. A quick look at the list revealed that someone was on there twice (clerical error), so we really only had 16.

As I was setting up, John received a phone call asking if there was still space. He said there was, and registered the player for both events. Now up to 17 and 5. Then John showed me something nice - they had brought some additional tales down from the Frederick store to help out (what with Kurt needing a table for his signing, and us potentially needed to exceed 18 if possible). With those set up, we expanded our potential to 22.

I asked John to hand the little white registration slips I use to everyone as they checked in with him, as a way to double-check that they were in fact paid & registered (and also a clue to me that I needed to give them their promo cards).

I finished setting up, and John opened the doors at 10:00 (we already had some players gathering outside). I grabbed the signup sheet and started getting folks registered into the system. Everything worked well - the majority of the players were folks who had played at one of my events before, and therefore were in the Local Players section. Those that weren't had provided DCI numbers, and were easily entered in, with the exception of the gentleman who called up that morning. His DCI number was not recognized. I hypothesized (and later had it confirmed) that he must have just gotten his DCI card the day before, and it hadn't gotten into the system as yet. I entered him in as if he were someone I had just given a DCI card to, and I hope that things work out properly there.

Two players (Serg & Vish) came in last-minute and joined the morning event, bringing us to 19. They had both been to events before, and John just quickly sent them back without the little registration slips. They flashed me their receipts and I handed them their promos.

I made my usual announcements (where's the bathroom, who I am, free shipping option at my store, etc) and then explained how the DFC's work (using sleeves or checklists, how they interact with copy cards like Evil Twin, etc). And then I handed out product and we began to open our packs (I myself was registered for the event). I gave 50 minutes for deck-building, which is longer than normal for a Sealed Deck event, but I figured as the cards were mostly new to most people, the extra time was not a luxury. That proved to be correct as some folks were still sleeving up their cards when time was called.

During deck building I collected up empty wrappers and spare token, rules tips, and checklist cards. We ended up with a big stack, as most players seemed to be opting for the sleeves instead of the checklists (I went with checklists myself). So that fear of not having enough checklist cards did not bear any fruit, I'm happy to say.

Personally, I couldn't decide on a single deck, so I ended up building two. Deck #1 was Blue/White/Black, heavy on Humans and Equipment (along with the Angelic Overseer). I was really looking forward to equipping the Invisible Stalker and running rampant on my opponent. The deck also had a slight mill theme, as I had a Trepanation Blade and two copies of Curse of the Bloody Tome. My second deck was a Werewolf/Vampire hybrid in Green/Red/Black. Two copies of Curse of the Pierced Heart (one in foil) along with great Vampires like Rakish Heir looked like a nice quick aggro build.

My first opponent was one of the young women from Clarksburg who had attended the Magic Celebration up there. This is an example of how nicely my "cross pollination" attempts have gone. We've had several players now who have found events at one site, then come to events at the other since I can advertise for both. It's nice to see that working. I think the family from Clarksburg would much rather have attended a prerelease IN Clarksburg (that makes sense), and they'll probably start coming to ones at Novel Places starting with the next set.

Round one went fairly well for my deck, despite not ever really getting the Stalker/Equipment combo thoroughly working. We had near mirror decks, each having a lot of Humans and Equipment (she even had a Curse of the Bloody Tome and a Trepanation Blade!). And we nearly used up the entire 50 minutes for the round getting two games in. I won both of those games by milling - a strategy I don't particularly enjoy winning by. I decided then that I would try the other deck in Round 2.

That deck proved to be MUCH quicker. I won against another Red-heavy aggressive deck in two games fairly quickly, which was good because one of the drawbacks of taking long in Round 1 is that results slips started to build up. A quick round meant I was available earlier to start processing those. It also gave me an opportunity to quickly eat the sandwich I had brought along for lunch.

Round 3 proved to be much worse for me (understandably - since, with Swiss pairings, you're put up against another player with the same record, if you keep winning, your opponents, theoretically, get more difficult). Despite getting an early Curse of the Pierced Heart out, I just couldn't get enough Creatures going in Game 1. I decided to switch to the first deck for Game 2, since my opponent was playing more White/Blue. Didn't matter, and I lost that game fairly quickly as well (although I did enjoy getting a Bonds of Faith on his Hanweir Watchkeep - on one side it was buffed up but has Defender; on the other side it loses the buff and can't attack or block!).

Round 4 I swapped back to my quicker deck, and hoped for a fast Round so that I could be available to distribute prize packs as people finished their rounds. This proved to not be the case, as the first game dragged on a long time (I almost had managed to defeat him, but a judicious life gain spell combined with a clever Butcher's Cleaver wielding gained him enough life to survive my onslaught and launch one of his own). The second game took almost as long, but I managed to win it. At this point there were only 5 minutes left, and several people were standing around awaiting their prize packs. I knew I needed to quit then and there, so I conceded game 3 (and therefore the match).

Lesson here: Don't sign up for your own event if it's this big unless you've got someone to assist with the administrative stuff. I thought I'd be able to handle it, but I ended up inconveniencing some folks (since the event ran longer than expected, some like the Clarksburg family really needed to go, but were awaiting their prizes). I should not have made them wait like that.

While all of this was going on, a few other things were happening as well. My two sons had shown up and bought their decks to start Open Dueling. A few folks from the Sealed Deck event also joined in, and side games were being played while folks who had ended their rounds early (or the one each round who had a Bye) played those who needed to get in 5 games to collect their bonus booster pack. One person paid four times for Open Dueling to get 1 copy of each deck, but then never joined the group to play. I've heard of such things before (like people paying for the Sealed Deck event, then taking their packs and immediately leaving before Round 1 even starts) but it was the first time I had it happen at one of my events.

The other thing is one on a personal level. I started getting a low-grade headache and having a very odd feeling in my chest starting around Round 3. I think it was part tension, part dehydration. But it led to me feeling very uncomfortable for the rest of the day, and it was a LONG day. Lesson here: make sure to bring PLENTY of water (my Klean Kanteen was empty long before the first event was finished) and pain relievers just in case.

So Round 4 was finishing around about 3:15 or so, and 3:00 was the published start time for registration for the Draft (to start at 3:30). Needless to say, things were tight. I was juggling folks' prize packs, and awaiting the last couple of matches to end, and dealing with folks finish up their Open Dueling, and trying to get my sons out to the car where my wife was waiting to take them home, and also dealing with a situation where someone who had paid for the afternoon Draft had decided he was too tired to continue (he had done a few events the previous day), so his friend was going to take his slot (not a problem as I had not yet put anyone into the system)...in short, it was just a wee bit chaotic. Somewhere in all this Serg asked if there was time for him to go get something to eat. I answered "yes", not fully registering what the question implied. This would come to haunt me later.

We finally got things settled from the Sealed Deck event and got ready to launch the Draft. Vish had decided to sign up for the Draft as well, and that put us at 6 players - 5 on the signup sheet and Vish. Five of them had been in the Sealed Deck event, so I just checked with player 6 to see if he had any questions regarding the DFCs, and he seemed pretty comfortable with them. I told him to feel free to ask if something should come up. I explained to everyone how drafting would work with the DFCs. Then we got ready to start. But wait, Vish said - wasn't Serg going to Draft? I didn't think so - he wasn't on the list. Vish tried to call him, but got no answer. We were already running late, so I started the event, and everyone cracked the first pack and began to draft.

After the first couple of picks, Serg came back. He had indeed been planning to Draft (which is why he asked me if there was time before he went to eat - this is what hadn't clicked with me). He had, in fact, already paid for the Draft (he paid for both when he arrived). But, at this point, it was too late since the event had already been started in the system, and in fact the first pack of the Draft had been opened.

What we had was a complete cock-up of a situation which could have been avoided if almost any of the following had happened:

I had left the Draft portion of the sign-up sheet with John when I went to put people for the Sealed Deck event, so he could add names to that list if people paid later;
John had given Serg two Registration slips to indicate that Serg had paid for both events;
Serg had said something more definitive like "don't start the Draft without me" or answered his phone when Vish had tried to call him

And there's probably many other ways it could have been avoided. But to my mind the lesson here is that EVERYONE absolutely MUST fill out a registration slip when they pay and give it to me. There can't be any exceptions, that's got to be the way it goes. Otherwise, there's this possibility of missing someone.

To make matters worse, Serg was Vish's ride home, so he was stuck and had to sit around and watch a Draft he couldn't participate in. I felt horrible about the situation, and hoped I could find a way to make it up to him. As it happens, at the end of the evening he expressed interest when I jokingly offered the giant Garruk advertising thingy for the prerelease, so I gave it to him. Hopefully that helps to make amends. And, in case you're concerned - Serg was, of course, given a refund for the registration fee for the event.

The Draft went relatively well. They only played three rounds, as there were only 6 in the event. One player did drop after Round 2 (which is the first time I've ever had anyone actually check the "drop" box on the results slips) which led to someone getting a Bye for Round 3.

Other than the delayed prize packs at the end of the first event, and the snafu with Serg's registration, I think everything went well, and everyone was happy with how the event went. I'm very curious as to the discrepancy in attendance between the two events. A bit more than 3x the number of players in the morning event vs. the afternoon. I don't know if it's Sealed vs. Draft, or morning vs. afternoon. But we may be better served running two Sealed Deck events next go round. I need to come up with some way to poll the players and see if I can find the answer to why the numbers were so different.

Another lesson learned: Prerelease events take longer than normal ones. Since the cards are brand new to everyone, deck-building is slower, drafting is slower, and games go slower (as players often need to read what cards do when their opponents cast them). I scheduled the two events figuring on normal times, and that proved to be a mistake.

September 27, 2011: Today I was very disheartened to receive the following email:

The DCI has invalidated the following event:

Event name: Prerelease - Innistrad
Sanctioning #: 11-09-2989605
Coordinator: Don G. Wiggins, DCI# xxxxxx
Brand: Magic
Event type: Magic Prerelease
Game: Booster Draft
Location: Gaithersburg, MD, United States
Date: 2011-09-25
# of players: 6
# of matches: 9
Former status: Received
New status: Invalidated

I can only assume that the problem is that the event was registered with under 8 players. To be honest, I wasn't sure if I should cancel the scheduled prerelease and create a casual event instead. It would seem that this may have been the right thing to do. I've got an email in to Brian (my WPN Rep) asking what I should do at this point. Hopefully it's possible to resubmit this event as a casual one after the fact, but I don't know.

Even worse, I'm worried about what this may mean for future prereleases. My understanding is that your allocation of product for a prerelease is based on past performance. And essentially I've managed to prove to WPN that we can only successfully run a single prerelease. Let's hope that they're a bit forgiving in this department!

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 24]

The Road to WPN (Part 22)

2011-09-24T12:35:00.002-04:00

[This is part 22 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 14.5, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, and Part 21]

September 20, 2011: I have decided that we should offer Open Dueling at the prerelease next Sunday. For those of you who don't know, in Open Dueling a player purchases an Intro Pack from the new set (which includes a preconstructed deck and a booster pack). They play games against each other, against players from other events between rounds, or between events, etc. We will also run it such that after they have played 5 other games they can report their games and receive another booster as a prize pack (I'm modeling this after how Dream Wizards runs their Open Dueling).

I tried and tried, but I would not figure out how to report an Open Dueling "event" using the WER. So, I decided it was time to try out the fancy new interface (actually it's not - it's just the WotC customer service system) we will have to start using after October 4 to get WPN answers (we will no longer be able to email our WPN reps directly - something I have mixed feelings about*). So, today I sent in this message through the system:

It is my understanding that we are allowed (even encouraged) to offer Open Dueling at our prerelease event.

I know from past experience (through my son playing Open Dueling at other prereleases) that it is possible to report the results of Open Dueling (these past events show up in his history).

My question is: how does one report Open Dueling? I have tried to figure out how to use the WER to schedule such an event, but nothing in any category seems to mention Open Dueling. And if I try to schedule a casual event, I need to specify a pairing method, which isn't how Open Dueling works (as I understand it).

Any help/instruction/advise on running Open Dueling and correctly reporting it would be greatly appreciated.

We'll see how long it takes to get a response. I got an auto-generated email letting me know my "incident" had been reported (how ominous does THAT sound?), and that I can expect a response within 24 hours.

*On the one hand, it's nice that we can get answers more easily from another rep if ours is unavailable for some reason. But there's no way to tag the message "first try Brian, then next available rep" so there's no guarantee you'll be getting a reply from your actual rep, and dang it I like my rep very much, thank you!

September 21, 2011: I got this response from the WPN system today:

This email is to inform you that we have received your incident and have escalated it for further review. A representative should be contacting you concerning your incident in 24-48 business hours or less. We apologize for this delay and appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this.

While it may be unkind, what this says to me is: we folks on the front line of customer service can't answer your question, so we sill kick it up to a WPN rep. So, I wonder, why can't I just directly correspond with a WPN rep? Do you think me incapable of determining whether a question is a general WotC Customer Service question, or if it is indeed a WPN-rep-worthy one? Le sigh.

I later got a second copy of that same email. Weird.

Then, about 6 hours later, I got this response:

Thanks for writing in! You can indeed sanction Open Dueling as a Casual Event. You can put the format as Casual Constructed and the pairing method as swiss, but as a casual event, the program will not ask you for match results. You can reference this snippet we have on our website about Open Dueling:

Open Dueling: Open Dueling players each receive 1 Innistrad Intro Pack and 1 promo card (Mayor of Avabruck/Howlpack Alpha, while supplies last). Open Dueling players use their Intro Pack to play against each other, as well as Prerelease tournament players who are between matches. All players should be encouraged to help teach Open Dueling participants how to play Magic.

If there is anything else I can do for you, please let me know!

That second paragraph appears, almost verbatim, on the Prerelease info sheet included with the promo cards that I mentioned in Part 21. I'm pretty sure I have reported an event as a Casual one before, and it did indeed ask me for match results. So, I will give this a try, but I'm not 100% confident. Also, as I said in my initial email in to them, I know for a fact that my son's DCI info said "Open Dueling" in his record, so it seems to me there should be a more specific method for reporting this type of event. Maybe there used to be and isn't now? I don't know. I guess we'll find out on Sunday.

September 23, 2011: Tonight's FNM was both a disappointment and an awesome time.

When I arrived, I found there were two WPN-related packages for me (along with all of the Innistrad booster boxes for this weekend's prerelease - yeah, I may have geekgasmed a little at those). One package was the Buy-a-Box promos for the store to hand out to people who purchase a full booster box of Innistrad. The second contained these beauties (the Launch Party promos for next weekend):

I can't wait to Proliferate one of these! (Yes, I know you have to pay for the first & fifth).

As of late last night I only had 4 people registered for the event (a Two-Headed Giant M12 Sealed Deck event). I had many things working against me here:

It's the night before prerelease weekend; many people are probably skipping FNM and instead going to midnight prereleases;
Two-Headed Giant is a somewhat obscure format and not everybody loves it.
A lot of folks are just tired of M12 already.

I'm still not sure whether to run a 2HG event in November. The jury's still out. Maybe in December.

So, anyway, I contacted my main man Craig this morning and asked him if he wanted to be my partner so that we'd have a third team, and I hoped and hoped that a fourth would show tonight.

Craig was indeed available, and agreed to come out and sling some spells (HUGE thanks to his family for letting him have the evening free!). We formed team "Last Minute" (the WER has you enter a Team Name as well as the individual partners in the event - and pairings, rankings, etc are done by the team name) and prepared to face off against "The Raging Goblins" and "Blue Balls". I kid you not. Unfortunately, since there were an odd number of teams, there would be a Bye for each round.

Side note here: It was my understanding that if I had fewer that 8 people at an FNM, I would have to cancel the registered event, then create & sanction a casual event in the WER. Try though I might, I could not for the life of me figure out how to create a casual 2HG event in WER. At one point in the process I was able to click on a "Team" checkbox, and select 2HG in the "type of team" drop-down box that came up afterwards. But then once I clicked on "Create and Sanction" I lost that option. Obviously I was doing something wrong, but I simply could not figure it out. So I decided to go with the "it's easier to get forgiveness than permission" philosophy and run the event as scheduled (thankfully some foresight told me to not cancel the already registered event until I got a new one put together). Foreshadowing: the event ran fine, and WER even allowed me to submit the results. I don't know what that means as yet - I guess we shall see what happens.

Craig and I opened a fairly decent pool. I built a BR build with lots of removal, a Bloodlord of Vaasgoth, a couple copies of Child of Night and a Bloodrage Vampire. Craig piloted a WG deck with lots of defense to let my deck build up to what it needed. I talked him out of including his 1 Naturalize. This would prove to be a mistake (that he will almost certainly never let me live down).

Round 1 we got paired up against The Raging Goblins (and Blue Balls got the Bye). It was going great at first: got the Bloodlord out (after hitting the opposing team in combat, so he was a 6/6), used Gravedigger to get back a Child of Night and cast her with Bloodthirst 3 thanks to the Bloodlord. Things were looking pretty good despite a turn 2 Jace's Erasure on their side of the board (which had effectively milled a lot of my removal away).

Then the blue mage played a Mind Control on the Bloodlord. "Wish I had my Naturalize!" says Craig. Arggghhhh....that was pretty much it. The Raging Goblins took the match (2HG matches are single-game, as they can take a LONG time).

Round 2 found The Raging Goblins facing the fury of Blue Balls ("maybe that's why their raging!"). Craig and I chatted about some potential business plans during our Bye, so I can't tell you much except that Blue Balls took the round.

In Round 3 we again came to the battlefield, this time against Blue Balls. This game took FOREVER. It was EPIC! Huge amounts of creatures on the board. Craig's deck played excellent defense while I built up an army (and used Goblin Fireslinger to slowly whittle away their life ["I hit you with a flaming rock."]). Blue Balls got 2 (TWO!) Swiftfoot Boots out, but thankfully that player didn't have many creatures (and you can't equip things to your team-mate's creatures!). At one point they also got our Sorin Markov and got him up to 6 (thankfully my 6/6 Bloodlord took him out after Craig's Stingerfling Spider took out their one flyer). It all ended with Craig and I attacking all in (after taking out one defender with my Grim Lavamancer and hitting them with another flaming rock).

When the dust settled, they were left with 5 life, and we had 14. All our Creatures were tapped out. Things looked bleak for us...

But I had enough mana for a final Lava Axe for 5. Go team Last Minute!

So we ended the evening with each team having 6 match points - all equally set. I took the prize packs (3 per team were in the pool) and distributed 3 to each team. The FNM promos were randomly assigned to Blue Balls and The Raging Goblins. All agreed that the night was amazingly cool (and we all wondered why not more people had shown up - 'cause IT WAS AWESOME!).

Okay, the geeky fan boy in me will now shut up.

September 24, 2011: Confirmed with John at Beyond Comics that we are still at 11 (out of 18) preregistrations for tomorrow morning's Sealed Deck event, and only 2 (out of 18) for the afternoon's Booster Draft event. I expect we will have a number of walk-ins in the morning. I hope we don't have to turn anyone away.

John told me he had already had one person walk in asking when the prerelease was going to be (thinking it was today) and another call in with the same question. My guess is that folks find us on the Wizards Event Locator but don't really look at the details (like what day it's on), they just see the store name and head there or call.

Less than 24 hours until I run my first prerelease!

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 23]

The Road to WPN (Part 21)

2011-09-18T14:28:00.003-04:00

[This is part 21 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 14.5, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, and Part 20]

September 14, 2011: I hadn't seen any indication that the original event I ran at Novel Places had been cleared up yet, so I sent in an email to Brian to check on its status. Hopefully that whole situation will be resolved soon.

September 15, 2011: Brian emailed me back to let me know he was going to ask the data crew to get the event reported properly, and would let me know the results. Later I got the automated email from WPN that is sent when an event is successfully reported. Brian followed up with an email letting me know that all should be well now.

I can't wait until tomorrow when I can open up the WER and see "Core" next to Novel Places!

September 16, 2011: FNM tonight, so I opened up the WER to get the preregistered players into the system. And, of course, I had to check on the Novel Places status. I think "Core" may be my new favorite word :-)

Tonight's FNM is Standard. I'm thinking of entering myself tonight with Mono et Mono. It doesn't have long before it's no longer Standard-legal (in its current form, anyway), and I wouldn't mind winning one of the FNM promos myself!

Had a bit of a scare today, as Jon (owner of Beyond Comics) contacted me to say that the distributor was only allowing him to purchase Intro Packs for the prerelease of Innistrad, not booster boxes. WHAT?!?! He was going to email the guy again and try to get the full details, as we absolutely need booster packs of product for the event.

I jumped on the phone to Brian to see if I could get any details from him. As this is my first prerelease, I have NO idea what the ordering process is (and since I don't do the ordering for the store, I'm even further out of the loop). I needed to know what the normal operating procedure was.

While I got his voice mail, Brian was very quick to get back to me (under 10 minutes, I believe). He had a copy of the spreadsheet with him that the distributors are given to let them know how much product any given venue can order. It turns out we're eligible to order up to 10 boxes of booster packs, PLUS WPN throws in two full boxes to be used as additional booster packs in the prize pool. This explains why (most) of the prereleases I've been to have been more generous in their prize distribution than ordinary events. I look forward to having an extra-generous prize hand-out at ours!

In addition, he let me know, we could order 1 Into Pack display for folks to buy and play open dueling if they wish. That cleared up a point I was confused about. I had distinctly remembered seeing text that said prereleases could no longer have side events, and yet the store where I had typically been going for prereleases was still advertising open dueling at their events. How could they do that, I had wondered. It turns out that the WPN does not consider open dueling to be a side event, and it is in fact allowed. Good to know! My older son will be pleased (that's his preferred way to prerelease).

Finally, Brian let me know that we should expect to receive two kits with 24 prerelease promo cards each in them. He said they'd probably arrive today, and if we hadn't gotten them by Monday I should let him know.

And, sure enough, when I arrived at the store tonight for FNM, I found the prerelease kits awaiting me. And oh are they loaded. Each of the two kits contained:

A point-of-sale stand up to advertise the prerelease and Launch Parties (since Beyond Comics doesn't need two I'll take one to Novel Places with me tomorrow so Patrick can advertise his Launch Party);
2 packs of 12 foil prerelease promo cards that look like this:

So exciting to hold my first batch of prerelease promos as TO!

2 packs of special Wolf token cards that advertise the Judge program on the back;
Special Innistrad "achievement cards"
An Innistrad-themed life pad.

By special request in the comments, the back of the promo DFC.

In addition to these two packets was a large cardboard box which, upon opening, I found to contain a folded-up display to advertise the prerelease. After unfolding, and snapping open (with some rubber-band assistance inside it), it proved to be a rather large 2-sided stand alone ad that shows the art for the double-faced Garruk in the set (one face on each side of the promo). This thing looks so cool. I forgot to take a picture of it, but I will get one for the next update, I promise!

I was, however, disappointed at the lack of checklist cards among the prerelease goodies. For those of you who have not followed along with the drama of double-faced cards (DFCs) in Innistrad, here are the quick salient points:

Innistrad introduces the first ever DFCs to Magic
In order to play with a DFC in your deck, you must do one of two things:

Use opaque backed sleeves;
Substitute a checklist card for the DFC while it is in your deck, hand, exiled faced down, etc (anywhere that the card's identity should not be known)

There will be one DFC in every booster pack of Innistrad
There will be one checklist card in approximately 3 out of every 4 booster packs of Innistrad

You can, I hope, see the potential problem. Eventually, I imagine, the supply of checklist cards will exceed the need (not all DFCs printed will be used, and many will be used with sleeves). But at the prerelease, the very first time people are getting their hands on these cards, it seems to me likely that someone will want to use every DFC they get in their pool, but not have a checklist card for each one.

I thought for sure that WPN would be sending TOs a small supply of extra checklist cards, just in case, to help avoid this problem. Unfortunately, they did not appear. I feel like the ball was dropped on this one.

There ended up being 8 players at FNM tonight, so I bowed out rather than have 9 players, and have someone with a Bye every round. Maybe I'll play in tomorrow's event at Novel Places instead. Otherwise the event ran smoothly. There were some folks there who had never played at Beyond Comics at all.

The language was a bit rougher than I like to have at my events (and I even asked one player if he would cut back on some of the language he was using, as it just makes me uncomfortable). I would hope that such things would be moderated had, for example, my sons been present, but you never can tell.

I gave the November FNM poll to this group as well as last week's, and here's the final breakdown of the formats chosen, ranked from most votes to least (14 ballots total were cast, voters could pick up to 4):

Innistrad Sealed Deck (11 votes)
Standard (10 votes)
Innistrad Booster Draft (9 votes)
Two-Headed Giant Innistrad Sealed (7 votes)
Modern (5 votes)
Two-Headed Giant Standard (3 votes)
Legacy (1 vote)
Two-Headed Giant Vintage (1 vote)

Not sure if I should run the top 4 in November, or double up on the Sealed Deck. While there seems to be support for the 2HG, I've only got one team signed up for next week's 2HG M12 Sealed event. Perhaps I will register for the first 3 weeks in November tomorrow (going with the top 3 picks) and then wait for week 4 until I see how next week's event runs.

September 17, 2011: Today's Standard event at Novel Places went pretty smoothly. We only had 7 folks show up, so my younger sun threw his hat in the ring so we could run it sanctioned. We had a about a 5/3 split between experienced, rough-and-tumble MTG players and relative newcomers (more what I'd consider in the "casual" group - a term I absolutely do NOT use with any derision, and a group I in fact included myself in). As a result I think the three more casual types were a bit disappointed with their performance.

This is something I really hate about the standard environment. Anymore you rarely get anyone who brews their own decks, it seems. It seems to be mostly copies or modifications of big-tourney winning
decks. It would be impossible to enforce, really, but I'd love to run a standard event where the deck HAD to be a home brew. Entirely your own creation, no netdecking allowed. Yeah, it would never work, but a man can dream.

For me the personal highlight was seeing my older son finally get a hold of the Silvos, Rogue Elemental (in foil, no less) that he's been wanting to be the Commander for his mono-green Commander deck. Silvos is actually on my Needs List, meaning not only do I not have any in stock for him, I've never even owned a single copy of the card. So I was very happy for him, and grateful for the gentleman who traded it to him.

There were two players who had never attended before (brought along by someone who's become a regular at my FNMs) and also one of the fathers (along with one of his daughters) who had attended last week's Magic Celebration came back, which is always nice to see. Hopefully they will become regulars, as they live in Clarksburg, so the store couldn't be much more convenient for them.

Now my focus is on next weekend, and my first ever prerelease as TO. I'm looking forward to visiting the plane of Innistrad with folks next Sunday!

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 22]

The Road to WPN (Part 20)

2011-09-11T11:04:00.001-04:00

[This is part 20 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 14.5, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, and Part 19]

September 10, 2011: Today was Magic Celebration - a promotional event sponsored by WotC (and/or WPN - I'm not sure how to properly assign the praise) to thank the players for making the game great. It was also a clever way to try to get newer players (especially ones who found the game through Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012) into stores where they will, hopefully, come back to play in future events.

What WotC did was provide stores with three booster boxes worth of Magic 2012 (already opened and with labels reading "Mini Master Product ONLY NOT FOR RESALE" slapped on them*. Also included in the kit were four T-shirts (2 XL and 2 L, WotC apparently depending on the stereotypical hefty gamer crowd, which - for the record - we did not have today) to be given away as bonus gifts for purchasing a Deckbuilder's Toolkit (an awesome starter-kit product that WotC makes for new players). The final addition were cards with promo codes on them to unlock some bonus items on the various platforms that run Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012.

*Am I the only one who wonders who had THAT job? That's a LOT of boxes to rip open & label! Or maybe they were special ordered from the factory without shrink-wrap? Ugh - I think about this stuff far too much!

The event was intended to be free of charge, and run as a Mini-Master tournament. Players are given 1 booster pack of M12 and 15 basic lands (3 of each type) to be shuffled together and played as a deck of 30 cards. Every time a player wins a match, they get another pack of M12 and can start customizing their deck (as long as, after winning a pack, the deck maintains at least 40 cards). And given the size of the event, 4 rounds were played (at my locations, any way), so players could, theoretically, leave with 5 free booster packs of M12 by the end of the event.

Fortunately, I had recently purchased a collection from someone on eBay that included among the thousands of cards a HUGE batch of Tenth Edition basic lands that look like they've never been played. Yesterday I took those and made up the batches of 15 lands to be used in the event:

Ready to rumble! (Booster pack required, not shown).

So, how did the event work for me, personally? Ideally the intent of the promotion was to run this event all day long, adding in additional tournaments into the WER as necessary, until the product ran out. Unfortunately it was intended to be a world-wide (as far as I know) event all played on one day. This meant for me, with two locations, that I couldn't run it as intended at two stores (unless I successfully cast Clone on myself). And due to space limitations we really didn't think we could run more than 16 at each store (18 at a pinch, if John at Beyond Comics procured two more chairs, and if Patrick at Novel Places put together two small cafe-style tables in between the two comfy leather book-store chairs). So I had intended to cap preregistration at 16 at each location, and maybe try to fit in a couple of extra walk-ins if necessary. Anyone beyond that we would give a free booster pack to, and offer that they could watch the event and see how it goes if they were curious.

Beyond Comics had the morning shift today. In the late afternoon yesterday, we reached our 16 preregistrations for the event. I modified the sign-up sheet to warn that all slots were filled, but that folks were welcome to come by in case of no-shows, and could add their name to a waiting list just in case. That night at FNM one of the players told me he had registered, but would not be able to attend, so we were then down to 15 signed up. When the time actually came, only 11 of the 15 registered had arrived. One of the no-shows was someone who had signed up for the first FNM on September 2 and didn't show (he's also registered for this coming Friday's FNM, and he's supposed to be picking up an order from me!). The other three seem to have registered together (based on the time-stamp on their registration), and had never been to an event at Beyond Comics before, so I expected that they would be arriving together, and maybe were having trouble finding the store. So, I decided to delay the beginning of the event for about 10-15 minutes to give them time to find us.

In the meantime, we had 2 more folks come in who had, I learned later, initially stopped in to Novel Places looking for the event. Patrick kindly directed them down to us. The other 4 registered people never did show up, but if I had not delayed the event, the 2 new players wouldn't have made it in time, and would have made the long haul down for nearly nothing, so I'm not sure delaying was a complete mistake. These 2, by the way, are the only players from the whole day that I know for a fact learned about the event via Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012.

So, we ended up with 14 players for this event (I signed myself up so that we would have an even number and could avoid any byes). We had an eclectic mix. Some of the players are older, but relatively new players. Some (like Craig and myself) have been playing for years. We had 4 who were 11 years old or younger (the youngest was 8), and we had the two who used to play paper Magic years ago from what I gathered, and had recently only been playing it via DotP2012. But we all had one thing in common, at least - we all had a blast!

For Round 1 I manually created the matches, as I wanted to get the 4 young boys playing against each other initially to ease them into the tournament (2 of them, my two sons, already had participated in at least one before, but the other 2 were completely new to the scene). After Round 1 I let the computer pick the match-ups using the Swiss pairing method. I'm personally very proud of my players for taking the younger players in stride, helping them out with game play [making sure they didn't skip their Draw step, which seems to be a common young player mistake], etc. Even the language was (mostly) kept rated PG.

For those interested in such things, here's my quickie tournament report for my Rounds:

Craig thoroughly flattened me in Round 1, despite my Aegis Angel protecting my Swamp (I had no other permanent in play for its protection).
In Round 2 I faced Logan, aged 10, Craig's guest. This was his first ever event (he reportedly had only played 5 games before today!). Like me, he had lost Round 1 and he was disappointed in not having another booster pack to add to his deck. I won Game 1, due at least in part to some misplays on his part. In game 2 I had the opportunity to win again, as he attacked me all out with his creatures for lethal damage, but I had Fog in my hand an an untapped Forest available to cast it with (and enough Creatures on my side left to take him out on my next turn). We only had about 7 minutes left in the Round at this point however, and it was far more important for him than for me, so I kept the Fog to myself, losing Game 2. Then, due to the lack of time, I conceded Game 3, letting him have the match (and the booster pack).
In Round 3 I finally managed (barely) to win a match, despite being "paired up" against someone who had previously won a match and therefore had a larger deck (at this point there were only three of us who had not won a match, so one of us had to face someone who had and I drew the short straw).
After I got the Round 4 pairings posted, the 2 gentlemen who had found us through DotP2012 let me know that they actually needed to leave, and therefore conceded their Round 4 matches. One of them had been paired against me, so I easily defeated my non-existent opponent.

At the beginning of Round 4 I gave the person who had lost all three Rounds at this point the opportunity to swap out his deck (the booster he got initially only had 3 creatures in it!). As he put it: "I got some good cards - they just aren't good together." After that swap-out he was able to win Round 4, so everyone left the day having won at least one Round. The Mini-Master format can be wacky and crazy fun, but is extremely disappointing if you get a horrible initial booster pack. As the whole point of today was to have fun, letting him swap out just seemed the right thing to do.

I had forgotten to point out the T-shirt promotion until Round 4. Shortly after that, all the T-shirts were gone. They were a big hit, and I'm sure the store was happy to sell those 4 Deckbuilder's Toolkits!

Because we had extra product available still, I also awarded everyone a "thanks for coming" pack at the end of the event. Any packs still left I handed off to the store staff to hand out to anyone who might come in later in the day asking about Magic Celebration. Any left after that we will use as prize packs for future events, so that at least the intent of them (to reward players who come in for events) is still met (worry not - the leftovers at our stores will NOT be put out for sale!).

At this point in time it was 2:30, and my event at the next store was scheduled to start at 3:30 (with registration staring at 3:00). I knew there was no way I was going to make it for 3, as I had to still take my boys home and deliver them and my wife to their afternoon obligation (volunteering at a local CSA farm's Harvest Supper fundraiser) so I called Patrick to let him know I was running late. I also invited him to view the Google document that was the preregistration sheet so he'd have some way of checking off people as they arrived. At this point in time we had 14 registered. These included: a couple of folks who had come to Beyond Comics as well; two fathers and their (combined) three daughters; a regular attendee along with two of his friends from University of Maryland. Many of these people had never attended an official MTG event before, and would need to fill out DCI cards. Conveniently I had recently ordered another batch for Novel Places and they had arrived, so Patrick had some on-hand to have them fill out. I have now learned that it is a very good idea to leave some DCI cards with the store for situations such as this, so I'll need to make sure to leave some with Beyond Comics as well.

Lesson learned here: If scheduling two events on the same day at two locations make SURE you schedule with enough time to comfortably finish the first AND get to the second location! I had originally scheduled the afternoon event to start at 4:30 (4:00 registration) but somehow talked myself into moving it an hour earlier.

When I finally arrived at Novel Places (at 3:20) I found just a few more players than I had expected! In addition to the 14 we had registered, Patrick had checked in an additional 4 more for a total of 18. I couldn't believe it! There was a stack of 8 DCI cards filled out already waiting for me, and Patrick's printout of the preregistration sheet along with the four additional names added. I quickly booted up my netbook and started getting players registered into the WER for the event. Normally I try to get players registered into the event beforehand, but so many of those who registered either needed DCI #'s, or chose to give it at the event instead of the online form, I didn't bother (I could have only entered about 3 of those who preregistered - hardly a savings).

Adding in new DCI players is the most time-consuming version of putting a player into the WER. For players you've had in one of your events before, the software saves their information in a "Local Players" section. All you need do is check the box next to their name in the list, hit enroll, and they're in. If the player is new to one of your events, but already has a DCI #, you just enter the DCI # and click "Find Player" and their info is brought up. Click enroll, and they're in. But for a new DCI #, you have to enter the #, which then (after a moment of searching) brings up the "DCI # not found" message. Then you need to enter their first & last name, and hit "Find Player". This brings up the find player window, where you click okay, then finally enroll and they're in. An extra step or two, and the wasted time while it searches for a DCI # that you know it's not going to find.

A couple of people had turned in the full DCI card (including the part they're supposed to tear off and keep for future use) so I got those back to them and kept plugging away at the entries (this is why I try to get to the events early, so I can get people into WER as they show up and not have to do them all at one time). I finally had all 18 names entered, printed out the round one pairings, and started handing out product (with Patrick helping by passing out the land packs I had put together).

I had only handed out boosters to two players when "Wait!" was shouted out. Turns out there were 19 players at the event, not 18 (I didn't have time to do a head count, and had trusted Patrick's list to be accurate). What seems to have happened is that three brothers showed up together. Two already had DCI #'s, and just put their names on Patrick's sheet (only one of those two wrote their DCI # on the sheet). There was also a new DCI card for brother #3. Since the last name on the new card matched the last name on the sign-in sheet that didn't have a DCI # written down, I assumed they were one-and-the-same, and that the person had just used a nick-name when he put his name on the sign-on sheet. So, unfortunately, one of the brothers had not been included.

This meant that we had an odd number of players, so someone would have a bye each round. It also meant we had more players than we had seats for. And, unfortunately, it also meant I had to cancel the event since I had already started Round 1 in the software, and it wouldn't let me end the event, add the 19th player, then start the event again.

So, I canceled the event, quickly sanctioned another one, added 18 people quickly from the Local Players section (thank goodness there IS a Local Players section!), then added the 19th. I started THIS event, printed up new pairings (which annoyed a few folks, I'm afraid), and got things going finally. This incident drove home for me the importance of the registration slips that I usually use. Ironically it was the size of the group that stopped me from using them this time, and it was the size of the group that allowed for the mistake to happen (I doubt many of use can take a quick look at a group and tell if it's actually 18 or if it's 19 - I sure can't - where the difference between 8 or 9 is more obvious).

So, finally, Round 1 got underway. As seems to be the case in this format, the majority of the matches were over quickly, but there are always one or two that go to time (or close to it). At the end, I collected up the results slips, entered the data, and printed pairings for Round 2.

"WAIT!" was called out before folks could start. Another problem! This time a person who had lost the first match had been paired up against someone who had won the first match. And what was worse, the pairings printout showed that the one who lost had 3 match points - as if he had won. Had I entered in something wrong? I pulled out the results slips and found the one in question. No, I had entered what was written. Turns out the player who filled out the slip filled it out incorrectly, and marked the two wins next to the wrong name. So, I had to cancel Round 2, delete the results from Round 1, re-enter the results from Round 1 (with the correction), and print new pairings for Round 2.

UGH. Two Rounds in a row and I had to print new pairings. With 15 new people at the event! I'll be lucky if they don't think me a complete incompetent and never come to one of my events again!

I guess the lesson to be learned here is to either have a quick tutorial on how to fill in a Results slip when you have new players (especially a group this big) OR to quickly go over the results before starting the next Round (which is what I did after Round 2 to make sure I had the standings correct before having WER create Round 3).

The other thing I did between Round 1 and 2 was collect funds for a pizza run. The event was likely to run until 7:30 or 8:00, and I knew some (including myself) would be hungry. There's a pizza shop all of 2 minutes away that we use when we have later events at Novel Places. $4 gets you 1/4 of a extra large family size cheese pizza. I collected enough orders for 2 pies, and Patrick phoned in the order during Round 2. I went to pick up, and got back with 5 minutes still left in the Round (although most of the matches were done by then).

The mother of two of the competitors (and the ride for a third) had shown up at that point, as she thought they'd be done around then (eep!). She took it good naturedly, and bought the remaining 1/4 of the last pizza (I'd only had 7 orders). Also, after threatening that her three charges would have to leave early, she relented and let them stay "a little longer" while she left to take care of some other things. Ironically, they ended up being the last to leave, as she didn't get back for them until much later than she'd planned, I think!

Thankfully Rounds 3 and 4 went off without a hitch, although a few players had to bow out at Round 4 as it had gotten later than they had planned (we had advertised 3 to 7, and it ran a bit later). Again I provided each player a "thank you for coming" booster at the end, and we will use any leftover packs as prizes for future events at that store.

Patrick had only slightly less success with the T-shirt promotion, only selling 3 Toolkits during the evening. I think he'll still give the remaining T-shirt to whoever buys the next Toolkit (although I would have been happy to take it off of his hands, as it was just my size :-).

All in all I think I can call the Magic Celebration a successful endeavor. I hope that WotC feels it worked well everywhere, and that they even consider making it an annual event. I certainly can attest that it helped bring players in. At Beyond Comics 4 of the 14 participants had never attended an event there (2 of whom didn't even have DCI #'s yet) before, and at Novel places a whopping 15 of the 19 had never played there (8 of whom needed DCI #'s). Many of them told me they plan to come back for future events (and some expressed disappointment that Novel Places won't be running an Innistrad prerelease since we didn't hit Core Level in time to register for one).

Which makes a great segue to bring you the WPN Report Card!

No more Red X!

That's right - you're reading that correctly! Novel Places has met the requirements for reaching Core Level!

A few things have me bothered and/or worried, however:

As of right now, the issue with the very first event I ran (described in Part 19) has not yet been resolved. Until it does, the system only has us at 3 events, not 4. We still have all the other requirements, though - so worse case scenario the Standard event we're running there on Saturday (Sep 17) will count as our fourth event, and we'll officially be Core then, still with enough time to register for the Innistrad Game Day.
If my understanding is correct, the clock on jumping through these hoops again to STAY at Core Level begins after you've made it to Core Level. If so, that means the 8 new DCI members from today's event will not count towards our 6 new players we need to maintain Core Level, which kinda stinks.
For some reason the new Magic Celebration event I had to make shows up on my netbook's version of WER (and I got the email telling me it had been reported successfully), but after synchronizing my desktop PC's version of WER it doesn't show up there. I will assume that has something to do with it being the weekend, and it will show up eventually. But we all know what they say about assuming...

This coming weekend I have back-to-back Standard Events: FNM at Beyond Comics, and then a regular sanctioned event on Saturday at Novel Places. It won't be quite as busy as this past weekend, and will soon become the regular 2nd and 4th weekend pattern, so I'd better get used to it.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 21]

The Road to WPN (Part 19)

2011-09-09T23:22:00.001-04:00

[This is part 19 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 14.5, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, and Part 18]

September 6, 2011: Today Wizards of the Coast dropped a bit of a bombshell in the form of a whole new ratings system called Planeswalker Points.

I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time discussing how the system works. If you're reading this and somehow haven't yet heard all about it, and wish to, I will direct you to the official announcement (written, by the way, by Mike Turian who you may remember from his role in Part 18), as well as a great article by Trick Jarrett from gatheringmagic.com on the subject.

What my takeaway from all of this is the following:

I may actually start caring about my rating. I never did before, as I never planned on having any kind of pro career as a Magic player. However, these Levels one can rise through over one's career I can see as kind of cool. My current standing is rather sad, and could definitely stand some improvement:

Not exactly a stellar performance.

This will, hopefully, draw more players in to events, ESPECIALLY the Friday Night Magics, as they get a x3 multiplier to points towards these levels.
However, part of the point system awards points based on the attendance level of the event. It is entirely possible that this will COST me players, who will choose to go to another store that can run larger FNM events.
I fully plan to spread the word about the system, especially to newly signed up DCI members who can follow their progress from the very beginning this way.
If the WPN is smart, they will send out to us TOs a small pamphlet giving the briefest of explanations of the system and the URL to check their records. Get these people excited about the program (as I say, especially the newbies!).

In other news, I had a bit of a panic today that came as a result of checking my Planeswalker Points standing. I had played in my very first event at Novel Places (described in Part 9), as we only had 5 people show up, so I had to cancel the sanctioned event and run a casual one instead. I played in that event (and actually won it), so it should have shown up in my overall detailed point break-down in the system. And it did not.

So, I fired up the WER on my desktop computer (not the one that I ran the event on - that was my netbook) and checked the completed events section. It didn't show up. Uh-oh.

Quickly booted up the netbook. In case you're unaware, a lot of information gets stored locally from the WER (like a list of "local players" composed of everyone who's played in one of your events, so you can easily grab their info and register them for another event). I pulled up the completed events on that version of WER, and there it was. Without a Sanction #, and not marked as reported.

Now, what had happened was this. I must have somehow clicked "Create" to make that event, not "Create and Sanction". Probably because at the time I thought only Sanctioned events get sanctioned (makes some sort of sense, right?). I think this is a problem in the WPN terminology. To sanction an event is to create it in the full-fledged system. Even Casual events can be sanctioned, not just Sanctioned events. I'm not sure what word should be used instead of "sanction" but that obviously confused me that first time.

Since it was my first time doing this the lack of a Sanctioning Number didn't bother me for the same reasons I just discussed. It wasn't a Sanctioned event, so why would it need a Sanctioning Number?

The problem here, of course, is that we need to report 4 events to reach Core Level. I have been operating under the assumption that I had so far reported 3 at Novel Places. BUT, it turns out, I had in fact only ever reported 2! Eep!

Now I was putting this all together at around 8 pm my time, which is around 5 pm Seattle time, so I was worried that Brian may be already gone for the evening. But, in desperation, I started writing an email to him explaining the problem. Then in a wonderful bit of serendipity, as I was writing the email an email from HIM popped into my inbox! He was writing to answer my question regarding FNMs if under 8 people show up*. Huzzah! He's still in the office! I quickly replied telling him I was writing up a problem, would he be around a few more minutes. He quickly replied back: why don't I just call him?

So, that is what I did, which was useful as it's much easier to explain over the phone than via email. I explained the situation, and he offered a quick fix that we tried out (very not kosher, and not to be tried without express permission of your WPNWPN Rep. I seriously owe this guy the frosty beverage of his choice should we ever meet in person, at the very least!

So, we should still be in position to possibly attain Core Level status on Saturday at the Magic Celebration event. We so far have 6 people preregistered at Novel Places, 5 of whom have never played there before. This will give us our 4th event (so that hoop is jumped through) and if we can get 4 more new players that day, we'll have the 30 unique players which is the final hurdle (if I can mix my metaphors).

*The answer is, by the way, that if under 8 show up you need to cancel the sanctioned FNM and Create and Sanction a casual event for the evening. It won't count as an FNM for Planeswalker Points purposes, but you can still hand out the FNM promo cards as normal.

September 7, 2011: Well, this is weird. Patrick tweeted to me today to let me know that he received a SECOND box of the Magic 2012 Rulebooks. Perhaps the original box that was supposedly sent just took forever to get to him? Whatever the case, the Frederick branch of Beyond Comics is also starting their own journey to WPN Core Level, and I'm sure could use a batch of them, so (at Patrick's suggestion), we shall pass on this set to them to use. Spread the love!

September 8, 2011: Two things of significance today:

I settled (finally) on what the regular schedule of events will be for Novel Places. We (John, Patrick and I) had settled on a split of time slots between the stores. Beyond Comics will get the FNMs (which Patrick is less interested in, as he sometimes has other events scheduled on Friday evenings) and Novel Places will get Saturday afternoon events (barring special events like this weekend's Magic Celebration, etc, where Beyond Comics can/will get a Saturday event as well). The question had been whether to run every other Saturday, or 1st/3rd/5th Saturdays, or 2nd/4th Saturdays. The final decision is to run on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays of every month. So, I hopped onto the WER to register an event for October 8 and another for October 22, which is when I happened upon significant thing #2...
When I went to run the WER, there was an update waiting to be installed (no surprise, WPN had sent us an email warning of the downtime & update). When I read the Release Notes (yes, I do read them), I discovered that Modern has been added as a new sanctioned format! Hot diggity! I wasted no time, and registered an Sealed Deck event for October 8 (we'll do Innistrad) and a Modern Constructed event for October 22. Can't wait!

September 9, 2011: Today saw an interesting Twitter clamor, another nice plug for the blog, and of course FNM. Here's what happened...

Fridays are my "day off" from being a stay-at-home homeschooling dad (my main job, believe it or not - the Magic store and TO gig is a sideline!). My MIL takes the boys for a day to let me get caught up on whatever projects I've been unable to get to the rest of the week (usually Magic related). So, that's the one day of the week where I'm available to tweet more than usual, and today was no exception.

One question I had, and posed to my twitter followers, was this:

Hypothetical Q: If 10 show up for a draft, what's better: 1 pod of 10, 2 pods of 5, or 1 pod of 6 and 1 pod of 4?

I had read somewhere (in some DCI document) that the expected pod size for a Booster Draft would be 4 to 8 players. This is why in the first Draft event I ran, with 12 players, I ran 2 pods of 6. Either lots of people were available to tweet right at that moment, or I really struck a nerve with the question. Either way, tweets started flying fast and furious.

There was nearly 100% agreement with the following:

A 10 player draft should be just one pod.
Pods with odd numbers of players are to be avoided (to minimize byes). So if one were to divide the 10, a 4/6 split would be preferable to a 5/5 split.
The dividing line for when to split into 2 pods is 12 players.
If you do run more than one pod, you should NOT allow for cross-pod matches (that is, players should only play against players from their own pod, not the other one); only exception: winner of each pod against each other if a Grand Champion is desired for some reason.

That third point, however, was interesting. Because while all agreed that 12 was the dividing line, there was some controversy over whether it was the highest number at which one should run a single pod (that is run one pod of 12 players) or the lowest number at which one should start splitting (into two pods of 6). At this point it was recommended that perhaps a quick poll of the players to see which they would prefer would be in order. After all, they are the ones who paid to play, right?

Speaking of asking for player opinions, I decided that at tonight's and next week's FNM I would poll the players as to what format(s) I should run the FNMs in November. October is already signed up and advertised, so I don't want to switch them, but I figured I'd get some input on November. What brought this on is that fact that as of right now I don't have a single person preregistered for the 4th week of September, which is scheduled to be Two-Headed Giant, M12 Sealed Deck. That makes me nervous. I certainly don't want to be running formats that no-one has any interest in!

So, I put together this ballot for the players to use to voice their opinions:

Original version had a typo: "Sead Deck". What?

The results tonight favor the top three choices with Modern and (surprisingly) 2HG Sealed getting almost the same # of votes. I'll poll players next week (Standard event) and see what happens then.

Somewhere in the flurry of tweets back and forth, I agreed with KYT of manadeprived.com to write at least one article for him, and maybe do so biweekly. I'm still not sure how that happened.

This blog gained another point of notoriety, making it into This Week in Magic on gatheringmagic.com. That's the second time this blog has made it (the first being for my controversial piece "A Case Against Speculation (of Any Volume)"). Very cool to be there again.

And tonight we had FNM. In a strange happenstance, I had 10 players show up tonight (as in the hypothetical question I had posed on Twitter), so we ran 1 pod. After 3 rounds of Swiss, prize packs and FNM promos were awarded. My "ideal distribution" got derailed as the third 2-0 player who got paired down against a 1-1 player in Round 3 lost, meaning I ended up with only one player going 3-0, and 5 players going 1-1, instead of 2 and 4 as I had planned for. So, we ended up with extra booster packs in the prize pool again. Everyone who ended with 1 or fewer match wins (4 players) got 1 booster each, and I randomly assigned the last one.

This was the first time I've run one of these where I had players afterwards immediately asking me if I wanted to buy their cards. I need to come better prepared for this eventuality in the future (more cash on hand, easier access to the prices). A lot of folks who draft aren't interested in the cards afterwards - they're there for the experience of drafting, and that's it. And among those cards looking to be sold were Gideon Jura and Primeval Titan, two very nice cards.

There were many return customers, but among the 10 were 3 who had never played at Beyond Comics before tonight at all, and several who haven't played since we made Core. So, of course, the Core Level Report Card needs an updating!

That red X will be gone tomorrow, I swear it!

Tomorrow is Magic Celebration, and we're running it at both locations, so I will be CRAZY busy all day. 10 am we start at Beyond Comics, then 3 pm we start at Novel Places. The format is M12 Mini-Master and it should be a blast. We have 15 preregistered for the morning session (there were 16 but one dropped) and we can only seat 18 (if John gets two more chairs in the morning!) so that will be packed. That will give us our event with 12+ players. Also, we'll have at least 2 players getting their DCI numbers tomorrow there, so that last goal will be met as well. And, since it's the fourth event, the first goal is taken care of also. That leaves only the "30 unique players" goal (and many tomorrow will count towards that as well).

Meanwhile, Novel Places may well finally hit Core Level tomorrow. It will be the fourth event, taking care of goal #1, and we have 9 folks registered so far, 7 of which have never played there before. So if we get at least 2 more walk-ins who have never played at that location, we've got it made. And that will be in time to register to run an Innistrad Game Day (deadline being October 2 for that).

I'll probably have an update posted tomorrow after the insanity. It will be a good test for how the Innistrad prerelease day with two events will go (although for that one at least both events are at the same store!).

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 20]

The Road to WPN (Part 18)

2011-09-05T22:51:00.001-04:00

[This is part 18 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 14.5, Part 15, Part 16, and Part 17]

I don't recall ever discussing one aspect of advertising for my events before this, so I thought I should add this in, as it's a great way to help get the word out. Mail Chimp is a free online service (there is a paid version, but the free one is all I am likely to ever need) that I use for generating to email newsletters. One is for Store News (like announcing sales, letting folks know when cards for the new sets are available, etc) and the second is a weekly newsletter to find out about my events. The most recent one (send out September 5) can be seen here if you're curious: eepurl.com/fBMMo. I have a signup sheet with me at registration so folks can add their email on if they so wish (and there's a signup form on my calendar page of my store as well).

Which reminds me, I've never described our registration procedures either. What I have taken to doing is giving the guy at the register (who has so far been John at Beyond Comics and Patrick at Novel Places) small slips of paper for folks to fill out, giving their name and DCI #. When the person comes in to register, they pay at the cash register, and are handed a slip. They fill it out and bring it to me, and I add them to the event in the WER on my netbook. No slip, back to the cash register. That way I know they actually paid for the event. At Beyond Comics I handle preregistrations (through a Google Docs form like this one), and I give John a small pile of colored slips (prefilled out) to hand to the pre-registrants when they arrive to pay. That lets John know how many preregistered people we're still waiting for.

September 5, 2011: Yesterday something extraordinary happened. If you don't to read me gushing about something that isn't really directly related to my work as a TO, then you may want to skip the rest of this post and just come back for Part 19 after the Magic Celebration this coming Saturday. But I have just GOT to write about this.

To get the full picture, though, I need to head back almost a month. On August 8, when I posted Part 13 of this series, Mike Turian (MTG Hall of Famer and WotC employee) retweeted my announcement of its posting. I thanked him, and he responded:

I was rather pleasantly shocked to learn that the blog had somehow become noticed by anyone at WotC. Not only that, but it was being well received! I smiled to myself, enjoyed a moment of basking, and went on with my life...

Then, on August 17, Elaine Chase (Brand Director for Magic: The Gathering at WotC) made this Tweet, which was then promptly retweeted by @wizards_magic (the official Twitter account for MTG):

Okay - this was getting a bit more serious! This blog got more hits in a single day than ever before (hitting 335 page loads). Again, very, very cool - and I was humbled that this thing was being read by folks who help make this game that I love so much.

A few days later (August 19), I got an email from Twitter saying someone had started following me. Not a completely unusual occurrence, except that the person following me was Aaron Forsythe - Director of R&D for WotC! He only follows ~275 people AND I WAS ONE OF THEM!?!?!?! Needless to say, I needed to Tweet my shock, and he responded...

AARON FORSYTHE READS MY BLOG!!?!?!?!?!?! Okay, no pressure or anything.... Another bump in page loads followed this (not quite as large as after Elaine Chase's, but he wasn't specifically pushing people towards the site, so that's understandable).

Even at this point, crazy ecstatic though the attention (and praise) was making me, I decided to not make a big deal bout it here. Be cool, I told myself. Be cool.

On August 31, in an email conversation with Brian (my WPN rep), I asked him if there was any way I could give feedback for the great job he does (turns out the best I can do is write to his supervisor, which I still need to do). As part of his response he said:

I keep reading your blog and many here in the building do so. One of the Magic brand managers tweeted your blog out a couple weeks ago for people to read as they were talking about it in meetings. It is really good.

They were talking about it in MEETINGS!?!!? What??????

Okay, really, relax, it's just a couple of WotC people (yes, in some cases some highly placed people), but that doesn't mean it's really anything noteworthy over there, right? Right?

But then, yesterday, this Tweet popped up in my stream:

OH. MY. GOD. Mark Rosewater. I cannot believe this. For those of you who don't know (and, really, if you're reading this you probably do), Mark Rosewater (or Maro as he's affectionately called by MTG folk) is the Head Designer for MTG. He is probably the best known mouthpiece for the game, and is very prolific both on the Daily MTG website (where he has a weekly column on Mondays) and in social media circuits (Twitter, tumblr, Google+ at the least). He is arguably the most read figure in Magic, I think. At this writing he has nearly 12,000 Twitter followers, all of whom would have received the above Tweet in their feeds. He also linked to the blog via his tumblr feed.

Needless to say (but I will anyway), the blog had a few more page loads that day. In fact, the Tweet was made around 9 pm EDT. In the next 3 hours my page loads went from 26 to 1710. So far today (I'm writing this around 10 pm) I've had 2863. I don't think I'll hit 3000 by midnight, as the loads have slowed down considerably, but that's on the order of 4500 page loads that I can almost 100% thank Maro for.

Some of you reading these words are almost certainly only reading them because he (and Mike, and Elaine, and Aaron) took the time to Tweet about this blog. I am extremely awed, humbled, and thankful to them for doing so. And to Mike, Elaine, Aaron, Brian, Mark (and anyone else at WotC) - if you're all still reading - thank you from the bottom of my heart. I hope it continues to live up to your expectations.

I can't say that I have seen any appreciable increase in business at the store from all of this attention, and it's too early to say if the WPN events will show any results (although I certainly hope that we'll gain some new players who happen to read this and live in the area). But even if that shouldn't happen, it's still amazingly cool to know that maybe, in some small way, I'm giving back to the people who literally make the Magic happen.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 19]

The Road to WPN (Part 17)

2011-09-02T23:29:00.001-04:00

[This is part 17 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 14.5, Part 15, and Part 16]

August 29, 2011: Today I learned, much to my embarrassment, that the non-foil basic land cards in the booster packs are supposed to be removed (along with the Token or Rules Tip card), and the players only draft from the remaining 14 cards. When I ran my first two draft events, I had had the players leave them in. Whoops! I'll get it right the next time!

September 1, 2011: I just noticed today that the logo promotional kits from WPN for Innistrad are already available (not sure when they got put up - if there was an announcement shared with TOs I missed it). That's MUCH better than the Magic 2012 ones that went up after the Launch party and so were mostly superfluous. I was VERY happy to see those up already!

Getting excited and nervous about tomorrow night's FNM. Really it shouldn't be so daunting. I've already run several M12 Sealed Deck events - so why should this one be any different?

September 2, 2011: Got word from Patrick today - Novel Places has FINALLY received their Magic 2012 Rulebooks. I had contacted Brian (my WPN rep) earlier in the week, and he assured me they would arrive on Friday, and they did (shipped 2-day mail - I'm afraid SOMEONE may have gotten in trouble over this). But I'm very pleased we got our shipment. We have several players who are new or returning, and these rulebooks have been great giveaways to those who are a little rusty and unclear on the rules. I split the one shipment we got at Beyond Comics between the two stores, but that left both stores with a short supply.

Tonight was my first ever Friday Night Magic as a TO. I've attended several in the past, but this was our first opportunity since making Core Level to run an event. I picked Magic 2012 Sealed Deck as the format, as it's a simple one to run, and I've done it at least three times before.

We had 4 folks preregistered (although one of those didn't end up attending) and had 5 just show up, so that gave us exactly 8 in the event, which is a nice number. Three rounds of Swiss style pairings were played.

Bomb of the evening (money-card wise at least) was a foil Jace, Memory Adept (around a $65 card at the moment). That player can easily make back his $25 entry fee! Also seen were a Grave Titan and a Gideon Jura.

Quote of the night was: "The rest of my pool was crap, but at least I got the rare token." (Referring to the Wurm creature token created by Garruk, Primal Hunter - the rarest token creature card in M12). Said player ended up with 4 match points (1 win, 1 loss, 1 draw) so his pool couldn't have been THAT bad.

The ideal distribution of match points would have had a single person at 9 points, 3 at 6 points, 3 at 3 points, and 1 at 0. I therefore planned on distributing 5 prize booster packs for first place, and 3 packs for those with 6 match points, which would leave 2 left over in the prize pool (2 packs per player = 16 pack prize pool) to be randomly assigned among those who got below 6 match points.

Because of a draw in Round 1, however, the ideal did not get met, and we ended up with only 2 players at 6 points, meaning only 11 packs were used up in the regular assignment. That left me with 5 packs still in the pool, and five players with under 6 match points. PERFECT! So everybody left with at least 1 prize pack. The top two players got the FNM promo (Teetering Peaks is the FNM promo for September) and two other players were randomly selected to each get another (one of whom didn't even know there WERE such a thing as FNM promos - so it was even more special for him!).

Three of the players were brand new to WPN events, and had to fill out DCI cards (one of whom went on to be the second place promo winner!). That means we're only 2 events in to our first year of Core, and already have 5 of the 6 new-to-WPN players we need to maintain our Core Level status. Awesome! Several of the players indicated this will not be their last FNM, and many of them are also planning to come out for the Magic Celebration event on September 10.

One of the new players found us because he subscribes to the store's email newsletter. The other 2 we can thank the Wizards Event Locator for. This is an amazing free service that WPN provides whereby a player can enter their location (city/state or postal code) and select the type of WPN event they are interested in. It generates a map of nearby locations for said events. I've had several people tell me that this is how they found us, so I'm very grateful that it exists!

During rounds I discussed some plans with the store manager, John. We decided to go ahead and open up preregistrations (with prepayment) for the Innistrad prerelease. I quickly signed myself up for the morning event (Sealed Deck) as I try to always go to one prerelease per set - why not attend my own this time?

One outstanding question that I have emailed to Brain (who has not yet had a chance to respond) is what happens if the FNM ends up with under 8 participants. FNMs are sanctioned events, and sanctioned events need at least 8 players. If there's under 8 I know I can cancel the sanctioned event and schedule a casual one, and run that. The question is: am I allowed to assign the FNM promos if it isn't an official sanctioned FNM? Realistically I know there's no way the WPN could ever find out if I did so (unless some one ratted me out, or I happened to mention it in this blog), but I'd like to know what the official policy is. I do know that if there are any leftover FNM promos, we are allowed to use them as additional prizes at FNMs as long as they are no longer the current FNM promos. Maybe this is how you could end up with leftovers (since it seems they send you only 4 per event you signed up for).

Anyway, I will leave you withe the current WPN report card. It's looking like we will have no problem maintaining the Core Level status at Beyond Comics at this rate. I still look forward to getting Novel Places up there as well. I hope the Magic Celebration event gets us out final 9 unique players!

The red X. It tasks me!

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 18]

The Road to WPN (Part 16)

2011-08-28T09:30:00.000-04:00

[This is part 16 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 14.5, and Part 15]

August 20, 2011: Well, this is embarrassing.

When I signed both stores up for the Magic Celebration event to be run on September 10, I knew that WPN would be providing 3 boxes of M12 boosters to be used during the event. I figured that meant that we should charge only some small amount to maybe cover ancillary costs associated with running such an event. I recommended a $5 entry fee to the stores, and that was all right with them.

Well, today I discovered that the event is supposed to be free of charge (while supplies last) to the participants. Not sure how I missed that. I went back and reread the description of the event, and sure enough, here's the first paragraph describing it:

Magic Celebration on September 10^th is made to satisfy the players driven to your store by Duels of the Planeswalkers. This event is a great way for your store’s entire player community to celebrate Magic – at no charge to the players!

Somehow I missed that last part!

Wondering how I found this out? I beat Gideon's deck in Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 last night, which invited me to "join Gideon" at wizards.com/joinGideon. When I checked out that page, it described the Magic Celebration event, and mentioned that it would be free. Who says playing video games can't be educational?

August 26, 2011: I've been doing a lot of agonizing over the last couple of days, trying to figure out exactly what to do with the Innistrad prerelease(s) we are now signed up for. Here's the issues/questions that I've been battling with (in no particular order - it just goes to show how jumbled all of this is in my mind right now):

We are signed up for 2 prereleases on Sunday (September 25), both Sealed Deck format at the moment;
Brian (WPN Rep) indicated we could change the format of one of them to Draft if we wanted to;
The store can only hold 18 people in the back room;
If we run the event outside of business hours we could clear out the front part of the store and potentially fit more in;
Prereleases are very popular events, and generally draw more players than any other type;
Our largest event so far (a random M12 Sealed deck) was 15 players, only 3 short of capacity;
A comic-book author signing has been scheduled for the store on the same day;
The local "big fish" store (Dream Wizards in Rockville - I believe I have mentioned them before) has their huge prerelease on Saturday, which is why we chose Sunday to run ours;
Off-site events cost a lot more due to renting the space (obviously);
We might be able to have a space free of charge, but it's several miles away from the store - adds logistics problems (plus creates the potential last-minute "I'm here for the prerelease!", "sorry - that's another 10 minutes away from here" scenario);
If I cap the event at 18, I will have to require preregistrations WITH prepay, since it's far to easy to just throw your name on the list and then not show;
Normal store hours are 12-6 on Sunday - enough time for one event, but not two;
It's our first prerelease - will that bring fewer people because we're unknown, or more people because of the novelty?
Are there many people who would actually prefer a small prerelease like ours vs. the HUGE prerelease offered by the Dream Wizards?

What we've finally settled on, after a great deal of thought, is that we are going to run 2 events - 1 Sealed, 1 Draft, on Sunday September 25. We will run them in-store, with a cap of 18 players, and require preregistration with prepay (it may only be a "deposit", not the full amount, but players will need to put some money down to reserve their spot). The store will open 2 hours early, and plan to stay open ~2 hours late (so, tentatively, 10-8 instead of their normal 12-6). And we will just hope and pray that running these at the same location as the comic writer signing will not cause a complete train-wreck.

What we're thinking is: this is our first time doing this. Let's start small and see how it goes. If those 18 slots are filled up extremely quickly, then we know that in the future we should look for ways we can run a bigger event. If, on the other hand, we never even get 18 - then we know that we've hit upon the way we'll probably run them for a while.

Now my great fear is that I've got my first Standard event scheduled for tomorrow, and Hurricane Irene is getting ready to smack us. Latest forecast suggests we'll be finished up before the worst of the weather hits us, but it may impact our attendance nonetheless. We'll see!

August 27, 2011: Today was my first Standard event (both as organizer, and as participant). I came prepare with my Mono et Mono deck, ready to sling some spells, and lose miserably (as my deck was mostly designed to be fun for me, and not really be tournament worthy).

When I arrived at the store, I found a package awaiting addressed to me care of the store (so something from the WPN). I cracked it open to find these guys:

My very first FNM promos!

This really brought it home to me: I will run my first FNM in under a week! Yikes! For those who are wondering, these come in packs of 4 (since you're supposed to give away 4 per FNM - 2 to the top 2 winners, and 2 randomly assigned), and you get 1 pack per FNM you have signed up for (or at least I assume that last part is correct - I only signed up for 4 FNMs in September, and I received 4 packs of promos).

We had 7 people preregistered by the time the event came up (including myself), and two others who showed up. So, 9 players total. Not bad, not great - a nice sized group (especially given that we were under a Tropical Storm Warning from Hurricane Irene heading up at us!). Of those 9, 5 had never played at this store before (and 2 of those had never played in any WPN event before, and therefore had to fill out DCI forms).

This both pleases me, and distresses me. On the one hand, it's great that new players are finding us. On the other hand, I'm a little worried at the relative lack of returning players. I hope that there is nothing I'm doing that's chasing them away (we've had many people show up once and then never again).

I gave my usual announcements: who I am, why I'm running the events, the free shipping option for event pick-up, the fact that I run events at two locations, etc. Then I described what the Standard format was, just to make sure everyone came prepared with the correct deck (I didn't want to have to disqualify anyone for having cards that weren't legal in the format).

That's when we hit a snag. The two players who had not preregistered had been told by a store employee when they stopped into the store yesterday that the event was going to be a Draft event (he even went so far as to describe how booster packs are opened, and passed to the next player, etc), and were told that the cost would be $15. They figured something was odd when they were instead today only charged $8 as an entry fee - and now they knew. They had come without any decks at all.

Fortunately, I and one of the other players (Serg) happened to have some extra Standard-legal decks on hand. I loaned one player (Jennifer) one of mine (a casual deck I call "Chandra's Burning"), and Serg loaned the other player (Gavin) one of his (a copy of the U/B Control deck Ali Aintrazi won the 2011 US Nationals with). I created the matches for the first round, and miraculously pulled a Bye for myself (which was VERY useful, as that gave me time to figure out the prize pool, as well as go talk to John, the store manager, about the misinformation problem). I got the other 8 players going for Round 1, then went to talk to John.

What most likely happened is that the employee remembered what the last event we ran was (which was a M12 Booster Draft), and made the assumption that this was what all the MTG events would be. John asked me to come up with a "glossary" for him to share with the employees, so that they can speak more knowledgeably with customers about the various formats. Here's what I came up with. (comments welcome - but keep in mind it is not meant to be all-inclusive, but just serve this specific purpose of giving the store employees a working vocabulary). And I have asked him to make sure that the employees know, from week to week, what format the events we will be running are in (since pretty much every week the FNM format will be different).

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my deck was failing poor Jennifer miserably in her match vs. Serg, so it was decided after game 1 that she could give it up in favor of another of Serge's decks (he brought several Tier 1 Standard decks with him). This one was a Birthing Pod brew (don't know if it's a specific named deck like Bant-Pod or anything like that).

Also during Round 1 I worked out for myself what the prize structure would be. I realized as I was doing so that this is something I've not yet shared in any of these entries so far, so I think it bears some detail. I realize that this is not the only way to do this, but it's worked out well for me so far, and I find it a refreshing mental exercise.

I use something akin to Pascal's Triangle (and if anyone knows if what I do use actually has a name please let me know) to figure out the most likely distribution of match points after each match. For example, if there are 8 players, then after Match 1 the most likely result is 4 players win (gaining 3 match points), and 4 players lose (gaining 0 match points). While a Draw (in which both players gain 1 match point) is a possibility, I assume an ideal distribution. If there are an odd # of players in the section I am dividing, I put the odd player on the higher bracket in the next level (I figure if I'm going to err, I'd rather err on the side of having too many high-match-point players than not enough). Once I've done this for each of the matches we will run, I break up the prize packs (2 per player in the pool is what I've been running). Here's what the chart looked like for today's event:

First number is # of players. Numbers in () are match points. Bottom most are prize packs.

After this, I put together a prize list, filling in the possible other scenarios (if Draws are involved) and get a document like this, which I try to post early (during Round 1 in this case since I had the Bye):

The "promos" are from among any WPN promos I have left in stock.

In this particular event (to jump ahead for a moment), we ended up slightly off from ideal, and only had 2 players with 9 match points (and 4 with 6 match points), so I ended up with 3 extra prize packs at the end, instead of 1. My plan had been to assign the left-over pack randomly to a player who ended up with under 6 match points. Instead, each player under 6 got one pack, and the last pack I assigned randomly to one of the 8 players in the event (I took myself out of the running for that last pack).

So, anyway, I know you are dying to know: how did I do for the rest of the event? The answer is: surprisingly well. Here's a quick breakdown of my performance by round:

Round 1: Bye (3 match points)
Round 2: Faced Gavin, playing Serge's copy of Aintrazi's UB control. His deck performed very slowly, allowing me to get a lot of damage in very quickly (highlight of Game 1: Turn 1 Grim Lavamancer; Turn 2 Teetering Peaks, Lavamancer swings for 3; Turn 3 Teetering Peaks, Lavamancer swings for 3; Turn 4 Teetering Peaks, Lavamancer swings for 3. I kid you not). Won the match in 2 games, and ~30 minutes. (6 match points)
Round 3: I faced Serg. He was (unfortunately, as I don't really like winning this way), mana screwed in Game 1, and only had 1 land for the first 5 turns or so. He just couldn't recover, and I won despite only have two lands of my own. Game 2 his lands performed better, but he finally fell to Shock, Shock, Lightning Bolt. Won again in 2 games. (9 match points)
Round 4: Faced another Red deck. This was my toughest match, and I was really worried at times. But despite his Shrines of Burning Rage, Koth (in Japanese no less), and Chandra's Phoenix, he just couldn't answer the horde of creatures (and burn to the face) I was producing, and I clawed my way to another 2-0 victory. (12 match points)

That's right - you read that correctly. I went 4-0-0, with not a single game loss. I could not believe it. I was absolutely certain when I got the Round 1 Bye that those would be the only match points I'd get all day, and
instead I took the whole enchilada. Unbelievable.

The final freakout of the day? At Pax, it was revealed than in Innistrad they are introducing (for the first time ever in Magic), double-sided cards. A completely new and bizarre mechanic AND IT'S IN THE SET THAT I WILL RUN MY FIRST PRERELEASE FOR! SHOOT ME NOW!!!!!!!

And, finally, I will leave you with this. It is my understanding (which I should confirm with Brian just to be sure) that in order to maintain Core Level status, a store must, within a year, jump through the same hoops it had to jump through to get to Core Level in the first place. Now, theoretically, this should be much easier since you can run so many more types of events now (FNMs, prereleases, Game Days to name just three). So I am going to adjust the WPN Report Card accordingly. As of this moment, Novel Places still needs to reach Core Level, so their column will remain as it was before. But Beyond Comics' column will now be the status of their hitting the goals again in order to maintain Core Level (I am assuming that the clock starts immediately after one attains Core Level, so the event today would be the first event to count towards this).

So sad to see that red X again :-(

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 17]

The Road to WPN (Part 15)

2011-08-19T17:03:00.002-04:00

[This is part 15 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, and Part 14.5]

Random WER advice: Run the WER on your computer the morning of the event, well before it is scheduled to start. You never know when an update to the software may be coming, and you don't want to have to deal with that while you're trying to get set up for your event!

August 15, 2011: Major plot twist!

So, today I called my WPN rep Brian (after emailing him last night to ask about the Core Level situation). As I am leaving a voice mail for him, I also was opening up the WER. I notice that Beyond Comics is now noted as a Core Level store. IN THE MIDDLE OF MY MESSAGE! Talk about embarrassing! Let this be a lesson to all: get your facts completely straight before making a whiny phone call!

He got back to me very soon via email (he's much better with email than phone, which is absolutely okay with me), and explained the following:

The system takes time to process events and update your level so you can schedule the “next level’s” events.. rated events are updated once per week but casual events update immediately. Your statistics update nightly for casual events, but only update the night after events are processed for rated events. I answered your question based on your email which said you were going to run the event by 8/13 which then on 8/14 your statistics would update so you could be scheduled for a prerelease.

So, it seems, if the Saturday event had taken care of things, then on Sunday we would have shown as Core Level, and I could have registered for the Innistrad prerelease (my initial question to him had asked if the Saturday even would count, so he was answering based on that information). The overnight processing thing was the crucial missing piece of information.

His next few sentences made me almost dance for joy (not a pretty sight, believe me):

I will see if I can get a late exception made for a prerelease event for Innistrad. You can schedule 2 events. Please let me know which format you would like them to be run as and which distributor you want to purchase your product from. I will then see if I can get this done and let you know how it goes.

Oh, my goodness! There's still a light of hope! I of course sent him the information as quickly as I could (even called up the shop, and had an employee there call up the owner) to find out what distributor they use (I had no idea). I told him we'd like to run on the Sunday (September 25) and would like to run Sealed Deck.

In the meantime, I have registered for Friday Night Magics for the month of September! I can hardly believe it. In under two months of running events at this store I will be able to hold our first FNM, on September 2.

Earlier in this series (in Part 5), I explained the information needed by the WER when one registers for an event:

For those who have never used the WER to schedule an event, here's the information I had to provide: Organization (I only organize for Novel Places so that was easy); Game (MTG, D&D or D&D Miniatures); Sanction Rule (this is where I chose the M12 Launch Party); Play Location (if we were holding it off-site I would have options here); Dates; Format (Sealed Deck in our case); Pairing Method (I chose Swiss as that's the only one I know about - I really need to research what the other options are!); Email (I gave mine); Phone number (I gave the store's); and URL (I used Novel Place's web page).

This could use some updating and additional info. To whit:

I now organize for two sites, so there's a drop-down menu choice when I go to register (and I need to make sure I pick the right organization!);
Depending on which organization I pick, there are different choices now for Sanction Rule. Since Beyond Comics is now at Core Level, more options are available. FNMs are denoted by month (and one can only sign up for one month's worth of FNMs at a time). So when I went to register today, I was able to pick Friday Night Magic - September as a Sanction Rule.
When you get to the Dates field, another drop-down menu is provided. If you're just scheduling a normal Magic sanctioned or casual event, a wide variety of dates await you (at Core Level you can even schedule a sanctioned event the very same day you run it, as opposed to at Gateway Level where you need to schedule at least 7 days in advance; you can schedule casual events the same day at either Level). But when you run a special event (Launch Party, Prerelease, FNM, Game Day, etc) there are only certain dates available. In this case, only the 5 Fridays in September are given as choices. And as you register one FNM at a time, the offered list of dates shrinks with each registration (at Core Level you can only schedule one FNM per Friday).
The Format issue was a challenge. What would be good for FNMs? I settled on:

September 2: M12 Sealed Deck
September 9: M12 Draft
September 16: Constructed Standard
September 23: M12 Two-Headed Giant Sealed

I don't know if these formats will prove popular, but by the time I get to running them I will have run every one of them except the Two-Headed Giant format. As I enjoyed playing it with my son at an FNM before, I figured I would choose to run one of these like that.

Eagle eyes will note that I did not schedule a FNM for the last Friday of the month. This is because we already have an Innistrad Launch Party scheduled for that night, and there was NO way I was going to try to run two events simultaneously (not that we'd even have room for that). The time slot for the Launch Party will be the same as the FNMs, so hopefully we'll get some regulars attending FNMs with us who will just come along for the Launch Party instead on that 5th Friday night.

I don't know how many FNM promos get sent to a Core Level store, nor when I can expect to have them arrive. I'm anxiously awaiting getting my first batch of them in. This kind of thing excites me far more than it probably should :-)

Also exciting: going to the Wizards Event Locator and putting in my zip code (20874) and selecting FNM - and seeing Beyond Comics show up. So gratifying!

While I was at it, I also signed Beyond Comics up for the Buy-a-Box promos for Innistrad. This is another great benefit that only Core Level (or higher) sites can participate in (we were far too late to order the From the Vault product this year, but should be able to next year). In case you're unaware, this promotion gets the store X copies (probably 30?) of a special alternate art promotional card to be given out only to people who purchase an entire box of boosters of Innistrad in the store (or order online for pickup in the store). It is a special promotion WPN does to try to get customers actually physically into the stores instead of just ordering online and having their boxes shipped. The deadline for this promo is next Sunday, but I didn't want to risk forgetting it, so I signed them up.

August 16, 2011: Today was the opening of registration for October FNMs, so I loaded up the WER and got to scheduling. Here's what I settled on:

October 7: Innistrad Sealed Deck
October 14: Innistrad Sealed Deck
October 21: Innistrad Booster Draft
October 28: Constructed Standard

My logic on choosing these is as follows: Innistrad will be brand new (the release date is the week before these begin, remember), and as I understand it, there's a few weeks' grace period where people enjoy Sealed Deck with a new set, but then the itch to start drafting sets in. By a month after the release, people have adjusted to the new Standard environment and hopefully have a good idea what decks they want to use, so I'll hold off on the Standard event until the end of the month.

Finally, I signed them up to run an Innistrad Game Day. Yet another Core Level or higher event, this is a one-day only event (Saturday October 29 in this case), which must be Standard Constructed format. There are special full art (or "extended art" depending on who you ask) promo cards for participants & winners of this event. The deadline for registering for this one is a ways off, and I hope I can get Novel Places up to Core Level in time to run this as well (although that will mean running two events in one day).

August 18, 2011: Today I had a minor moment of panic, as Patrick from Novel Places tweeted the following:

This Magic stuff is getting out of hand!tinyurl.com/3u8gkvh I'll have to talk to Don "The Organizer". Sounds kinda mobster, doesn't it?

As I don't have Facebook (I know, I know) I was unable to use the link. I didn't know what this might be about (I was afraid maybe someone had defaced his wall with anti-Magic sentiment or something), so I called him up. Turns out (for those who haven't followed the above link) that he was just posting a picture of the gigantic stand-up advertising poster that had been sent to him to help advertise the Magic Celebration event on September 10:

Seems a tad out of place in this rustic environment. But cool!

This is all part of the amazing promotional package that WPN has put together for this event. They are also providing T-shirts as giveaways for the first 4 people to purchase a Deckbuilder's Toolkit that day, and special promo codes for unlockable items in the Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 video game. They even provide three boxes of M12 booster packs to use during the Mini-Master format event. An outstanding amount of support for stores who sign up for this event.

While I was on the phone with him, he mentioned that he had not yet received the Magic 2012 rule books that he was supposed to get. So I sent another email off to my Brian to ask if he could dig up any further info on those.

August 19, 2011: Brian got back to me today, and said that he was going to look into the rule book situation, and try to get it resolved today, as he was going to be out of the office next week. I emailed back and thanked him, and slyly added:

Also, just to be certain, I assume from the lack of any positive response that you were unable to get an exception made for Beyond Comics - Gaithersburg regarding the Innistrad prerelease? I appreciate your trying nonetheless.

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I got his reply:

My apologies! I was able to get you the prerelease as we discussed…

You read that right, folks - WE GOT AN INNISTRAD PRE-RELEASE!!!!!!

Absolutely amazing. I was so ecstatic, and fired off a thank-you email to Brian. He sent me further details later. It turns out that at Core Level you can actually schedule 2 prereleases, not just one. So he scheduled both on that Sunday, and both as Sealed Deck. He let me know that if I want to change the format of one he can do that for me.

So now the question (which I have discussed with John at Beyond Comics) is whether we want to run two on that one day or not. He'd be willing to open the store early, and maybe keep it open late (they're normally open 12-6 on Sundays). I think there may be some advantage to running one prerelease as a Sealed Deck event, and one as a Booster Draft event. I'm just not sure. Your opinions in the comments about this would be greatly appreciated.

Later on today I got a call from WotC Customer Service letting me know that the rule books had shipped on Tuesday, so Patrick should receive his shipment of them soon.

On a final note, I'd like to offer a plug on Patrick's behalf. For the first time, he is trying something new: presales on Innistrad booster boxes and cases. If you ever preorder boxes or cases of MTG products, please consider ordering from him. His is a new, small business, and could certainly use the help in these tight times. I think he's offering incredibly low prices for these things. He will be shipping on the day of the release (September 30). Here's what you need to know:

Boxes are $90;
Cases (6 booster boxes) are $500;
Up to 4 boxes will ship via USPS Medium Flat Rate Box (~$12 I believe);
5 boxes or a case will ship via USPS Large Flat Rate Box (~$15 I believe);
In order to fit 6 boxes (1 case) in the Large Flat Rate box he will need to open the cases; but you will get all 6 boxes that came together in a case shipped as a unit;
In-store pickup (free shipping) is available, and you can pick up your order on or after the release date (Friday September 30); Patrick has his Launch Party scheduled for Sunday (Oct 2) so that would be a good day to pick up - Party with us, then grab your boxes! [If you order a case for pickup, it will NOT get opened up in advance - you get the fun of that!];
The page to order is http://www.novelplacesusa.com/magic-preorder

Please, if you know of anyone else who may be interested in preordering boxes or cases, let them know about Patrick's site.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 16]

The Road to WPN (Part 14.5)

2011-08-14T20:31:00.002-04:00

[This is part 14.5 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, and Part 14]

August 14, 2011: A quick report this time, to follow up from yesterday (thus it's only 14.5 instead of 15!)

My brother (John) and his wife (Kathleen) came out to Beyond Comics today to learn (in her case), relearn (in his case) and play some MTG.

I set up a 3-man casual 3-round single elimination event. I taught Kathleen the basics of the game (filling John in on the new terminology they've added since he last played ["Reach?"]), then John and I played round one (conveniently chosen randomly by the computer!).

I just brought some various constructed decks I had lying around. I have a 10th Edition GW common-only deck, my Prolifer8 UW deck, Chandra's Burning, Mono et Mono, and The Charge of the Boros precon from Ravnica.

John and I played a few games to show Kathleen how things work. To make sure the 3-round thing would work with single elimination, I logged us in as 1 win each and 1 draw. Next up the computer chose to put John against his wife, so they played while I advised Kathleen. Oddly enough she tore him apart with my silly little GW common 10E build against the Boros precon (to John's defense, he did get a mana glut that just put the brakes on his deck). So in the final round I got paired against Kathleen and we played the same two decks. With John advising her, she squashed me as well, so she ended up winning her very first MTG tournament.

She was a very good sport about the whole thing, and actually enjoyed the game (which worried John, as he does NOT want to end up having her buy a bunch of cards from me!), and I logged the results with a feeling of anticipation, because here is what the WPN Report Card looks like now:

Are we there, yet?

So, I checked the WER. Nope - still says we're Gateway Level. Maybe it just takes a little while for the system to process. I'll check again when I get home.

A few hours later I checked again. No dice. Still Gateway. I whined about this on Twitter (as I am want to do when I'm not happy about something), and Luis (AKA @AuranAlchemist on Twitter) offered that he had a similar thing happen to him. It turns out that if you have new DCI members in your event, they aren't officially tallied towards your total until their cards are received back at DCI headquarters. Therefore one of the folks who came out Friday night, as well as John & Kathleen, don't YET count towards our 30. They will once their cards have been received, but even if I mailed them overnight mail tomorrow, they wouldn't get there in time for us to register for FNMs in September (deadline is tomorrow, August 15).

So, on one hand I feel a good deal of pride. Our first event at Beyond Comics was July 2. So in just a month and a half I have gotten that store up to Core Level (well, I say "I", but really there were lots of folks working together, not the least of which are the 30 unique players who showed up).

However, on the other hand, I feel a great deal of frustration. I busted my butt, and called in some favors from folks to have them come out at odd hours to play MTG at the store, only to have it be for naught. We probably would have made it at our next event (August 27). Getting to Core Level right AFTER a major deadline just feels like such a let-down.

So, mixed emotions over here.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 15]

The Road to WPN (Part 14)

2011-08-13T22:35:00.003-04:00

[This is part 14 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, and Part 13]

Before I get back into chronology, there are a couple of anecdotes that I meant to share in past issues that I forgot about when I wrote up their respective reports, so I thought I had better catch up on those quickly here.

At the M12 Sealed Tournament at Beyond Comics (covered in Part 12), something happened that I think helps demonstrate how I want to make my events set apart from many other places. At one point during a game, a player sat with his bomb of a creature under an Ice Cage. He also controlled a Kite Shield. Despite reading the text that the Ice Cage would be destroyed if the creature were targeted by a spell or ability, he didn't realize that equipping the Kite Shield to the creature would accomplish that goal. After that game was over (because it would have been unfair for his opponent to point it out in the middle of the game, not to mention against tournament rules), I pointed out the solution to him. A similar thing happened later involving a situation where someone faced off against a Gideon, and he didn't realize he could apply a Goblin Grenade's damage to Gideon after targeting the opponent. Again, after the game was over I explained how Planeswalkers work a bit better to him. This is what I want to foster at my events: a casual atmosphere where people can learn to understand and play the game better.
One of the nice things that WPN does for organizers is put together batches of images from their products, including pre-made banners for prereleases, launch parties, game days and the like. In fact I took advantage of these offers in putting together flyers for Scars Block events early on. M12 was my first Launch Party, and I looked forward to making use of the pre-made flyers for that set. Unfortunately, they were not released until the Monday AFTER the Launch Party weekend! So a large part (the prerelease & launch party parts) of the released items were already useless for their intended purpose by the time they were released! I certainly hope this was a fluke, and not the normal course of events!

August 12, 2011: After a great deal of agonizing, I came to the conclusion that there was no way I could get both stores up to Core Level in time to register for an Innistrad prerelease (deadline August 14). Looking at the WPN Report Card, and knowing that Beyond Comics already had an event scheduled for August 13, I decided that I needed to make a push for Beyond Comics.

So, for tonight, I organized a casual M12 mini-master tournament that included 6 people who had never played at Beyond Comics before. That gave us our 3rd event, and 6 of the 11 unique people we still needed to jump through that final hoop. Craig (who has been mentioned before) brought his wife & daughter out, and I brought my two sons. None of us had played in an event there, although 5/6 of us had played at Novel Places (the main reason why I didn't try to do this at that site - it wouldn't have really helped, unfortunately). We were joined by a 7th player (thanks, Roger!) who has attended events at both sites, and who wanted to stop by and pick up an order that he needed for his deck he planned to use Saturday at the SCGOpen in Richmond, VA.

The mini-master (AKA pack wars) format is fun and wacky. My deck got progressively worse as the evening progressed (I won my first and second matches and got two packs to add to my deck). In match 3, however, Roger creamed me. My biggest mistake was staying in 5 colors. Ah, well :-)

I provided the booster packs for the event, and all the singles were gathered up afterwards to become stock in my store. While the participants didn't get to keep their cards, the event was free of charge, and a fun time was had by all who attended.

We're almost there!

If we can just manage to get 5 new players at tomorrow's M12 Draft, we'll have it made!

August 13, 2011: ARRRRGGHHHHH!!!!!! So close!!!!

At today's Draft, we had only 9 attendees. Of those 9, 3 had never attended an event at Beyond Comics before. That leaves us 2 short of reaching Core Level in time to run an Innistrad prerelease!

So maddening!

The event's attendance was probably low due to many factors:

In (relatively) nearby Richmond, VA, Star City Games was holding its SCGOpen today (and tomorrow). I know of at least one person who probably would have attended today's draft but was there instead.
I foolishly scheduled this event on the same day as the Magic 2012 Game Day. The Game Day is a special event that can only be held on one certain day (always a Saturday as far as I know). The "big fish" local gaming store holds a Game Day event, and that probably drew many potential players away from us. This one is totally my fault - I need to be better about looking out for those in the future. Of course, once we reach Core Level, we can run our OWN Game Day events, so I'm not likely to make THIS mistake again!
The Montgomery County Agricultural Fair started yesterday, and it's actually a pretty big deal in our area. It is conceivable that some people who may have otherwise come to our Draft instead were at the Fair.

Regardless of the reasons, the simple fact is that we missed our goal by 2 people. Every other hoop was jumped through, and we got that last one 93% completed, but we just couldn't quite make it.

The event itself went very smoothly, and I enjoyed myself among the company of the players (and I think they enjoyed themselves as well).

At the moment I am trying a Hail Mary pass, and am concocting a scheme to get my brother & his wife to come out to the store tomorrow for a casual event. She has never played before, so we would be teaching her the game (and he would need a refresher - he hasn't played in years). That would give us our final 2, and should do so in time to register for both the Innistrad prerelease (deadline Aug 14) and Friday Night Magics in September (deadline Aug 15).

I'll post a short update tomorrow to let you know if I managed to pull this off...

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 14.5]

The Road to WPN (Part 13)

2011-08-06T22:47:00.002-04:00

[This is part 13 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, and Part 12]

I forgot to mention one important fact back in Part 11. On the day of our M12 Launch Party, Patrick (the store owner of Novel Places) and I worked out a scheme whereby folks could preregister AND prepay for events through his web store. In order to incentivize this, he will offer a 10% discount to anyone who does so (this deal ending 24 hours before the event, so we don't have someone show up in the parking lot and try to "preregister" on their smart phone before stepping in the store). That website is: http://www.novelplacesusa.com/magic-registration

July 25, 2011: I sent in a question to my WPN rep today asking him about how long it takes for moving up to Core Level (a question I posed to myself at the end of Part 12). It turns out that Casual events are logged automatically, but sanctioned events get processed on Tuesday - so the scheduled August 13 event at Beyond Comics would NOT be processed in time to beat the August 14 deadline of registering to run an Innistrad prerelease.

July 27, 2011: Today our local paper (The Gazette, which is actually a series of local papers throughout the county, divided into sub-county blocks) ran a photo (in the Damascus/Clarksburg version of the paper) taken at the July 16th M12 Launch Party at Novel Places (see Part 11 for that story). Here's how it appeared in the paper:

I hope they don't mind me including this here!

The photo was taken by Patrick at the event. Hopefully this will draw some attention from upper Montgomery county MTG fans who may not have known about events here. Notice how they kindly included the date and time of our next event!

Also today, I contacted by WPN rep, as Novel Places still had not received their copies of the M12 Rulebooks that Beyond Comics had received. Brian got back to me and said that for some reason Novel Places was left off the list to receive these. He told me he would investigate, and get back to me.

July 28, 2011: Brian got back to me, and gave me a phone number to call for customer support. So, I called, following his instructions as to what number to select at the robo-menu, etc. After about 20 minutes on hold being told how important my call was, I got to speak to a WotC customer service person who, upon being told why I was calling, asked "did you try ordering them through the WER?"

"These are not something you order. They were just automatically being sent out."

"Oh. Hold on. Let me check on something." [wait, wait] "Those are being sent out in batches. If he hasn't received them by Monday, call us back and we'll see what needs to be done."

"Okay, but I was told by my WPN rep that this store had been left off the list."

"Wait until Monday."

I emailed Brian to give him the update. He emailed back, essentially telling me to forget what the Customer Service person said. "Don't call back Monday...I will take care of this for you."

It's nice to have someone who has your back, y'know?

August 3, 2011: Brian emailed back to say he has asked that some rule books be sent to Novel Places. Hopefully that request won't take long to be filled!

August 5, 2011: After the deadline passed for the 10% preregistration discount today, Patrick had had three people preregister and prepay for tomorrow's M12 Draft event. I am not ashamed to say that I am a bit nervous. My older son and I can join in if need be to help get us up to 8 (and actually, Sebastian wants to join in regardless of need), but that would still require at least 3 more walk-ins if we are to have enough for a sanctioned event. If need be, we can always run as a casual event as we did the first time, but that would be a bit of a let-down after increasing our numbers for the Launch Party.

One of the preregistrants was someone who has attended my two events at Beyond Comics, so it's nice to see that getting the word out at the events of my other site is working. I try to plug each store at the other to encourage "cross-pollination", and help each site get to the 30 unique participants we need for Core Level.

August 6, 2011: WOW.

Sebastian and I arrived a little later than I had hoped to today. We got to Novel Places around 12:45 or so, for an event where registration was to start at 1. We got there to find 4 or 5 people waiting to join the event.

And not 1 of them was a person who had preregistered for the event!

As I struggled to get my "grab bags", card sleeves, and netbook set up, more arrived. By the time I was up and running, we had 9 people waiting. And that only included 1 person who had preregistered! I processed names (and new DCI cards - 4 by the time I was done) and sold grab bags and sleeves....

and the next thing I knew we had 11 people signed up (including my son). 11. One short of the "12 players or more" requirement for Core Level.

I can't let that happen. Cover me, boys - I'm going in! I signed myself up, and we had 12. I could hardly believe it.

Turns out that photo in The Gazette did better than we could have hoped! A mother whose son plays Magic saw the photo, and told another mother whose THREE sons all play, and one of those told his friend about it...and we had 5 players, 4 of whom had never attended a DCI event before. Outstanding.

We also had someone who had attended my M12 Sealed two weeks ago at Beyond Comics, who brought a friend of his. All told, we had 8 people who had never before played in a DCI event at Novel Places, putting us that much closer to our Core Level goal.

We ran 2 pods of 6 players for draft, with three rounds of Swiss. My drafting is as horrible as I remembered, and by Black/Red/Green bloodthirst deck did horribly in the first Round (although I almost had him in game 2 - I just fizzled and couldn't get in the last 2 damage). After game 1 of Round 2 I cut the Black and tried to strengthen the Red/Green build. It performed better, but still not good enough. In Round 3 I faced off against the other no-win person in the pod, one of the 4 DCI newbies. He won Game 1. I had a rather impressive Game 2. And I would have had him Game 3 - when I had a realization...

Whichever one of us won this match would have 3 match points, which would earn that person 1 DCI promo card by the prize structure I had established. And let's face it - if I want any of the DCI promos, I can help myself from the leftovers. But this guy, in his first tournament experience, does not need to end up 0-X for the day. So, I conceded the game, and therefor the match, so he could end the day with a match win.

Here's where the Core Level Report Card stands as of right now...

We are SO close!

August 14 is the deadline to register for an Innistrad prerelease. August 15 is the deadline to register to run Friday Night Magic in September. If I could somehow run a casual event at Novel Places in the next week that included at least 9 people who have never played there before, and/or 2 more events at Beyond Comics with a total of 11 people who have never played THERE before, then one (or both?) site(s) could have a prerelease and September FNMs.

I don't know if I can pull off either one of those, but I have tentative plans for 6 of us who have never played at Beyond Comics to meet up this coming Friday night and play M12 mini-master with packs of my providing. That would leave us still needing 1 more event and 5 more unique players. Another option is to run the M12 Draft scheduled for Saturday August 13 at Beyond Comics as a casual event rather than sanctioned. The problem (as mentioned before) is that the sanctioned events don't get processed until the following Tuesday. If I run this as a Casual Event, however, it will count immediately. I think I will have to wait until I can see how many we get at that event. If I pull off the Friday night deal, and we do only need 5 more unique people, AND if 5 new people show up on Saturday....

That's a lot of "ifs". I never expected this WPN stuff to be such a nail-biter!

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 14]

The Road to WPN (Part 12)

2011-07-23T21:49:00.001-04:00

[This is part 12 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, and Part 11]

July 21, 2011: Today I got word from Patrick at Novel Places that a package had arrived with my name on it. I popped up there quickly, hoping that it would be the newest batch of WPN promos (every quarter, after a new set is released, there is a new batch of WPN Gateway promos that organizers can request). I wanted to get my hands on these before Saturday, and I wasn't sure if the batch for Beyond Comics would arrive in time.

Once I got there, I was greeted by these guys:

Yeah, this Auramancer is male. Get over it.

As happened last time, we received 30 copies of each of these at the store for use in upcoming WPN events. There also was a pack of D&D promo Fortune Cards, but there was no Archenemy Scheme card like last time. I chatted with Patrick for a time, but had to run for a family obligation.

As of now, there is still no sign of the 2 extra cases of Magic 2012 that we were suckered into purchasing (see Part 11 for that tale). Hopefully that means we won't be stuck with 12 more boxes at the higher price!

July 23, 2011: Today was the M12 Sealed Deck event at Beyond Comics. It was our second event at that location, and WOW did we beat expectations!

When I arrived at the store, we had 5 preregistrations only, so I was a little nervous about how many would be showing up. I needn't have worried. After a veritable rush of people about 5 to 10 minutes into registration time, we had 15 people total in the event. FIFTEEN! We only had 16 chairs in the back - if we'd had any more we'd have had to turn people away. I couldn't believe it!

The event ran very smoothly - everyone seemed to have a great time. 6 of the 15 folks were repeats from our first event, meaning we logged in a full 9 more unique members, 2 of whom were not in the DCI already, so we got our final 2 of the needed 6 "newbies".

Everyone who attended got a copy of the Auramancer promo, and those who preregistered got a Tormented Soul promo as an extra thank-you. Everyone with a record of at least 2-2-0 (6 match points) got at least one booster pack as prizes as well as 1 or 2 additional promos (I have 6 to choose from now between the two Gateway packs and leftover M12 Release promos). After those were distributed, I still had 2 prize packs in the pool (2 per attendee were in the pool), so I chose 2 of the 5 who had records below that to randomly get one of the packs, and the final 3 got to pick an additional promo - so everyone "won" something by the end of the event.

Awaiting me at the store today were TWO packages from the WPN. The promo package (which indeed had arrived Thursday as they had at Novel Places) and also a box of rule books updated for Magic 2012. The WPN sent, free of charge and without even having to order them, 25 copies of these to each Gateway and Core level WPN site (and 50 copies to the Advanced level, if my understanding is correct). This is an amazing resource for new players, and I even gave away a couple to some relatively new players who were there today. I suspect that things like this is where the money that used to be spent on Players Rewards promos is now going, in case you were wondering what that program was discontinued. I left several copies with the manager of Beyond Comics to hand out to people who come in asking how to play the game (a not-uncommon occurrence, apparently). Presumably there is (or will be soon) another box of 25 of these awaiting me at Novel Places the next time I'm up there.

An amazing resource. Thanks, WPN!

Another cool thing that happened tonight was that one of the players had been my Round 3 opponent at the New Phyrexia prerelease. This was good for me, because I had been feeling badly about being a particularly poor loser when she won our match in Game 3 due, at least in part, to mana screw on my part. I had been having an overall bad event, and was in a crappy mood - but that was no excuse for being so surly about losing. Having her attend the event today gave me the opportunity to apologize, which I gratefully took.

Also today I spoke with another attendee who has a group of friends he plays with. We spoke about the possibility of throwing together a casual event with he and his friends, where he would maybe buy a box of M12 and they could draft from it. This would give us our 3rd event, and hopefully help with reducing the number of unique players, as none of his friends have attended either of the two we've had so far. What I am hoping is that we could squeeze this in before August 13 (our next scheduled event - an M12 Draft) and maybe use the August 13 event as #4, and (hopefully) clear out the remaining 30 unique players.

What I'm not sure of is this: the deadline to register to run a prerelease for Innistrad (the next set, released at the end of September) is August 14. I don't know if the move from Gateway level to Core level is automatic (in which case we could even run a prerelease for Innistrad! Amazing!) or if there's something manual that has to be done at WPN to get us moved up, which would happen on August 15th (Monday) at the earliest. I've got an email in to my WPN rep to ask about that.

Here's the updated "Report Card" to keep you apprised of how both sites are doing in our quest to get to Core Level:

Remember when I thought the 6 new WPN members was going to be the hard one to get?

I'm really amazed and impressed that we've accomplished so much at Beyond Comics in just 2 events.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 13]

The Road to WPN (Part 11)

2011-07-19T15:44:00.003-04:00

[This is part 11 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, and Part 10]

July 8, 2011: Had a bit of a panic today. Patrick (of Novel Places) contacted me to let me know that the distributor, who had promised they could have the Magic 2012 product to us in time for our Launch Party on July 16, had let him know when he went to place his order that they would be delivered on July 20 (just a wee bit too late).

Patrick was planning on ordering 3 cases - 2 for my store needs, and 1 for his store, both for the events and also to have some for sale. He knew we needed the product by the 16th, so he changed the order to put in my 2 cases only (figuring he would at least make sure to get mine ordered).

On the email circuit I went, checking with multiple sources I have dealt with in the past to see if any of them could overnight us 2-3 boxes of M12 on Thursday July 14, for Patrick to get on July 15 in time for the Launch Party. Meanwhile, Patrick was checking in with a different distributor (which is a different branch of the same company that screwed us over, oddly enough), and was 100% guaranteed by them that they could get the stuff to him Thursday or Friday July 14/15. He would need to fax in an application form to set up an account for them, which he couldn't do until Saturday (he has no fax machine in the store, and seeing as he's the sole employee of his store right now, he can't exactly shut his store down and pop out to a place with a fax).

All 3 of my sources indicated that they would be able and willing to help out if necessary. I wrote back and told them we would have to wait and see what happened with the new distributor. Keeping fingers crossed...

July 10, 2011: Today I decided to attend a prerelease at the closest "competition" to Novel Places. In the interest of not being unprofessional, I will not name the establishment, as I have some negative things to say about the experience (as well as one or two positives).

The first problem was finding the place. I had an address, and my little GPS function in my smart phone. It took me to a strip mall with a grocery store. I was looking for a certain street address, with unit #201. That address was on some of the storefronts in the strip mall, but they all had unit #'s like F3 - but three-digit numbers.

So, I called the place and found out they were across the street from that mall, in a row of what look like townhouses, but are actually businesses (they themselves are located above a barbershop, for instance). Ah - whoops. My mistake, there.

Once I get over to the right place and head for the stairs up to the store, the first thing I find when I open the door is a Snickers wrapper with one bite of candy left which has been ground underfoot. Lovely first impression. Immediately stereotypes of large, unwashed, unhygienic gamer folk spring to mind. Foreshadowing, anyone?

When I open the door to the place I was immediately hit by a palpable wave of what can only be described as "gamer funk." The space was fairly small, filled with tables (as you would expect) and eager folks ready to play some M12. I must admit that many of the clientele fell into the gamer stereotype I mentioned above [in the interest of full disclosure, I fit the overweight part of this myself - but I daresay I cannot be accused of being unwashed or unhygienic]. The vast majority of the players fit the expected demographic of white males. There was one African-American male, and one white female when I first walked in. We were later joined by a few Asian-American males. So, in other words, pretty much what you'd expect in a typical MTG gaming event (at least any I have experienced).

I registered myself in ($25 flat - either he's not reporting taxes on these, or he has built it into the price) and sat down to wait. When I signed in, the owner showed me his snack & drink section. The fridge had one door held shut by a clamp. There was a drip pan underneath to (I assume) catch condensation from the compressor. Another fridge/freezer had a large toaster oven atop it. In that toaster oven he will pop a frozen pizza for you for $9.75. Yes, someone bought one during the event.

My prerelease itself was rather disappointing. While I think I got a pretty good sealed pool, I just couldn't seem to build anything decent with it (or my opponents just got better pools). I lost Round 1 two games to 1 (and only won game 2 because my opponent got mana screwed). I got a bye Round 2, and popped out to get lunch (I was not going to buy a frozen pizza for almost ten bucks). Round 3 I was readily trashed in two games, after trashing my original blue/black build for a black/red build I hoped would perform better.

Doesn't blue/black seem the obvious build here?

The rares & mythics all screamed "build blue/black!"

And for Round 4 my opponent had to leave as his ride was heading out. So, I ended up with a 2-2 record having only won a single game. Fairly pathetic.

During Round 4, since I didn't want to leave until I knew if I would be winning anything, I watched some other matches, and cleaned up a Coke spill on one of the tables and a chair which apparently the spiller didn't feel they needed to do (nor did any one of the numerous people I saw attempt to sit in that chair). This despite the fact that said chair was right next to the bathroom, where paper towels and water were readily available. I mean, come on people - seriously? Must you live like absolute pigs?

Things I learned about running WPN events today:

Post your winning structure fairly early (Round 3 at the latest, I'd say). People need to be able to make an informed decision on whether to stick with the whole tournament or not. I should not have had to sit through all of Round 4 waiting to see if I would even win anything or not. Since my opponent had left, I had nothing to stick around for except the hope that I would at least win 1 pack (which I did end up doing, thankfully - otherwise I would have been furious).
Encourage and try to promote a clean environment. Thankfully I don't own or run the stores where I organize events, so it doesn't fall entirely on me. But I encourage my players to think of ourselves as guests, and treat the establishment with respect. That uncleaned up Coke spill and the abandoned Snickers wrapper should never have happened.
Encourage better behavior as well. I've brought at least one of my sons to each event I've organized so far. They're 11 and almost-8. They don't need to be hearing F-bombs flying around all over the place. And, frankly, such language is inappropriate and unnecessary. Especially in the case of my events, where we are in a store during normal business hours, where gaming is not the main focus of the business.
One thing that the owner did that I truly thought a good idea: giveaways during each round. As a nice way to encourage people to maybe stick around when they would otherwise drop out, randomly selecting a few players each round to receive some giveaway may work wonders. I think I'd skip Round 1 if my purpose were to encourage people to stay, but otherwise I think it was a great idea. I won a nifty spin-down life counter die with the Planeswalker symbol where the 20 would be in Round 1. Cool.

July 12, 2011: It looks like we are safe on the M12 product. Patrick is quite certain that the new distributor will work. Meanwhile we are trying to get the 2 cases he ordered for me from the other source canceled, as they were charging more for the product than the new place. They have a no cancellation policy, but we are hoping we can get an exception made, since they completely lied about being able to get the stuff to us in time.

Meanwhile, I have asked Patrick to order me two more cases from the new place, as I really can't afford to wait almost a week after the release date to get the new set up into inventory on my site! If the original order can't be canceled, I guess I'll just resort to selling unopened boxes on eBay!

As far as I am concerned, this is even more reason to try to quickly get up to Core Level in the WPN, because then you can set up an account with WotC directly, and not have this distributor nightmare to worry about.

At least, if the new place works out, we won't have this headache to deal with for future sets.

July 15, 2011: Today was the M12 release date, and the scheduled arrival date of the 3 cases (and 3 Fat Packs) that Patrick ordered from the new distributor.

Around 1:45 or so I get this tweet from Patrick:

UPS driver just pulled up. He knows I'm waiting 4 this order. Said a fatal accident closed I-95 & UPS freight truck was stopped.

You have GOT to be kidding me! After all the problems with ordering, PLEASE don't tell me our M12 is stuck in a freight truck somewhere! [And, of course, tragic that someone(s) lost their life/lives in the accident - it does kind of put a little perspective on my whining, doesn't it?]

This was followed by this string of tweets:

Driver scared because they were going to the truck to pull off next days only for delivery. Had 3 boxes in his truck for me.

1st box is @DonnaAndrews13new The Real Macaw, available July 20. I'll have to see if I can get her to sign them on Monday.

UPS driver is looking at the next 2 boxes to see where they came from, and the winner is ... Alliance Games! God Bless you, Tim!

[Tim is Patrick's "handler" at the new distributor, who did a little bending over backwards to get this order to us.]

The boys and I jump in the car and head up to Clarksburg to pick up my two cases so I could start opening packs for my store's inventory. We are a go for our Launch Party!

I had to take a shot of Patrick's MTG display at his store. It looks so professional! You can tell he brings a book store mentality to it: have you EVER seen booster packs displayed so artfully before? Awesome!

I'd almost be afraid to buy a booster pack and disturb the aesthetics!

July 16, 2011: Launch Party!!!!

Today could not have gone better (with the possible exception of a few more players). It was so far improved over the first event held at Novel Places (see Part 9 for that story). We had 9 players in attendance, so we were able to run the event as sanctioned. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and all involved I believe had a great time.

The most impressive (and humbling) thing for me was the fact that three gentleman actually made a road trip down from New York just to be with us for this Launch Party. The trip was spearheaded by Mike Cox (@Burritoman88 on Twitter). He wanted to help out with our efforts to move up to Core Level in the WPN, and I very much appreciate the time and effort he and his friends put into coming down to join us. If they hadn't been there, we would have had only 6 players, and my older son and I would have had to join in the event to have the 8 minimum needed. And to make things even better, this was the first WPN event for one of the three, so we had another new DCI card to issue, helping us along in that portion of the process!

We were also joined by Craig & his daughter (who were there for our first event), another Twitter follower who happens to live in Clarksburg (thanks, Mike!), one of the players from my first event at Beyond Comics (as well as a friend of his, and fellow member of The Hoopy Froods' Amazingly Together, Pan-Galactic MTG League) and a player who found us through the WPN Event Locator (nice to know that thing actually works!).

Four rounds of Swiss were played, with a prize structure paying out to anyone with a 2-2 record or higher. Most of the players chipped in for pizza at registration time, which I popped out during Round 2 to pick up. I'm pleased to say I only know of one spill incident, where a player had tomato sauce squirt out from his pizza, and he immediately went for a napkin to clean up the drops off the floor.

After the event, I decided that for these Road to WPN write-ups, I need a report card keeping track of how we're doing so far in our quest to get to Core Level. So, without further ado:

The WPN Report Card as of July 19, 2011.

My next scheduled event is this coming Saturday (July 23) at Beyond Comics. It will be a M12 Sealed Deck Event. Then in August we have M12 Drafts scheduled for each store (August 6 for Novel Places and August 13 for Beyond Comics).

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 12]

The Road to WPN (Part 10)

2011-07-02T21:57:00.002-04:00

[This is part 10 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, and Part 9]

June 24, 2011: Stopped by Beyond Comics today to meet with the manager, John. He had told me that the store had received some WPN materials, and I wanted to make sure my netbook and smart phone were connected up to the store's wifi network for our event on July 2.

The hook-up to the network went reasonably well (once John was able to locate the correct WEP key for the network), but the WPN materials were a bit disappointing. I was expecting there to be the foil cards from the Gateway support kit, and the banners & posters from the Store Support kit. But instead, all that awaited my perusal was the Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 promo foils and decks (which, granted, are nice - and I wasn't sure they'd be able to get the decks since we had applied after the May 25 deadline, so - yay, there). John told me that these were all the materials with my name on it he knew about (although he had been away the entire week prior).

So I went home and found some emails from my WPN rep who had, apparently, been out recovering from surgery (thus explaining his lack of email responses of late). Since he seemed to be in, I quickly shot off an email asking about the Gateway support kit and Store support kit I had ordered for Beyond Comics. He replied fairly quickly and said he's get the tracking info. A few minutes later I got another email letting me know the items had been shipped, delivered, and signed for. I sent this info to John, who did a little digging and discovered that the items had arrived, but a helpful employee had cleaned up and stashed them in the back room, where John never even saw them.

Also in this email batch from Brian at WPN I was assured that yes, indeed, the casual event I ran at Novel Places (when our first event didn't produce the needed 8 participants to be sanctioned) would count as our first event. So, that's a small load off my mind.

JUNE 28, 2011: Today I stopped by Beyond Comics' Frederick, MD location to pick up some additional flyers for the July 2 event, for posting at some local community centers (I was going to be in Frederick, anyway, so it was not a problem to swing by and pick them up). My younger son and I drove to several community centers and posted flyers on their community events boards.

A Twitter follower recommended I may want to post an ad on Craig's List as well, which I thought was an excellent suggestion (thanks, @studweaver!). So, now, there is a Craig's List ad for the event.

For all future events I think I will use both of these methods to further advertise and hopefully bring more folks in. Every little bit helps, I think!

My final task for the day WPN-wise was to try and tackle the netbook/printer problem. After over an hour (during which I thought I had licked the problem more than once) I have given up. Either I need a newer printer that definitely has a Windows 7 driver, or I need to upgrade my netbook from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Home Edition (I have no trouble printing from my desktop computer which is running the latter). Before I resort to either of those, however, I plan to go to Beyond Comics tomorrow and see if I can print from my netbook to their printer via their network. If so, then that will be one less thing I have to drag with me to events there, at least. I can also go through the other WPN materials this way, and maybe get that vinyl banner hung up at the store.

JUNE 29, 2011: Did make it to Beyond Comics, and was able to successfully print from their printer via their network, so there's that minor crisis solved. Also, I picked up the WPN promos (30x each of the Maul Splicer and Vault Skirge foil promos, as well as 20x more Drench the Soil in Their Blood). I think we are ready for Saturday!

JULY 1, 2011: I decided that instead of lugging my two very large and heavy boxes full of "scratch & dent" cards, I would instead bring several of my "grab bags" - 100 scratch & dent cards in a box for $3. So I spent some time today making up 20 more of those (each one contains 10 basic lands, 75 commons, 10 uncommons & 5 rares/mythics/foils). I also spent a fair amount of time getting everything packed up for tomorrow (WPN promos, card sleeves, grab bags, DCI cards, table number signs, etc, etc, etc).

JULY 2, 2011: Night and Day. That's all I can think of to describe the difference between today's event and my first event two weeks ago.

I think that this event had several things going for it that helped things out:

Beyond Comics has already established themselves as a source for Magic product. At least two of today's attendees found out about the event simply by stopping by the store to buy some booster packs.
They are located in a more central, busy location. Novel Places, while an incredibly lovely historic building, is somewhat "in the middle of nowhere" (which I'm sure the folks in Clarksburg would not appreciate me saying).
There was more advertising done for this one (a lesson I learned from the last one).
We weren't competing against Launch Parties for a popular product (as we were two weeks ago when Commander was released).

All of this lead to a very well attended event, with 10 participants (without the need for any of my own family to join in!). Four of the 10 were new to WPN events, and needed to get their DCI numbers (good news for us towards moving up to Core Level), and the remaining 6 were very nice, laid-back (dare I say "casual") players, who were very welcoming of the new folks, making for an overall very positive vibe to the event.

The event was again a Scars of Mirrodin block sealed event. I believe it was the first time that the 4 new DCI members had played a sealed event, so we made sure to cover how things worked (and some of the veterans even gave the newcomers some deck-building advice, which was great!). We ran 4 rounds of Swiss, had an overall 4-0-0 champion (12 match points), two 2nd-place winners (3-1-0 records; 9 match points) and 4 3rd-place winners (2-2-0 records; 6 match points).

I pulled 20 booster packs to be the prize pool (2 per customer), and had the WPN foil promos to use as well (each participant got a foil Vault Skirge just for signing up). The two people who had preregistered I gave an additional promo to (there's got to be SOME incentive for signing up in advance!). Folks with the following records got these prizes:

4-0-0: 6 booster packs & 2 promos
3-1-0: 4 booster packs & 2 promos
2-2-0: 1 booster pack & 1 promo

In a move that I think surprised most of the recipients, I let the winners choose which set (Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin Besieged, or New Phyrexia) their booster packs were from, and also which of the 3 WPN promo cards they wanted to receive.

Those of you quick with the math have figured out that I've only accounted for 18 of the 20 prize packs. For the participants who didn't place in the 2-2-0 bracket or higher (3 of them in this case), I randomly chose two to each received a booster pack as an additional prize (and the remaining player I let pick another promo for himself).

I think, overall, I couldn't have asked for the event to go much better at all. Several people said they'd definitely be attending more of these events in the future (some even assured me they'd try to come up to Novel Places in Clarksburg for the M12 Launch Party). I overheard a few say they'd rather come to an event here than at some other store I won't mention because the atmosphere is much more friendly, and not as competitive (which is something I really appreciate - I hope we can maintain that open welcoming atmosphere to our events). One gentlemen is part of an entire playgroup and assured me he would be spreading the word about our events. John, the manager was very pleasantly surprised at the turnout (and with the monetary inflow that comes with it as well), so I think it is safe to say that no-one involved was disappointed at the end.

In short, it was AWESOME!

As will become my habit, I am sure, I will give you the scorecard for how this location is doing at meeting the hoops we need to jump through in order to reach the Core Level where we can run prereleases and FNMs:

Report a minimum of 4 events [this counts as our first of the 4]
Have a minimum of 30 unique people playing in your reported events [we have 10 so far - only 20 more to go!]
Run and report a single event with 12 players or more [so close! Hopefully our next one will hit 12!]
Maintain a delinquency rate of less than 20% [no problem - event is already reported]
Introduce 6 new players to WPN events [4 new players already!]

Our next event at this site will be in 3 weeks - a Magic 2012 sealed-deck event on July 23 at 1 p.m.

My next event will be in 2 weeks, however, at Novel Places - the Magic 2012 Launch Party. I have high hopes for this event being MUCH bigger than the first event at this location.

Things I learned from this event (for any out there who may be considering going down this Road themselves):

The WER has a built-in timer that you can display full-screen on your computer. While this may not be large enough to see at a big event, it worked fine for this one today.
I think a 1 p.m. start time worked VERY well. If we hadn't already advertised the M12 Launch Party as starting at 4, I would consider moving it (and may see if Patrick is willing to start earlier in the future).
Be generous with the WPN promos. Attendees love getting the bonus, and WPN gives so many (I got, between the 2 sites, 60 copies each of the Vault Skirge and Maul Splicer promos!).
I wish I had collected people's emails, or had a sign-up sheet for a newsletter of future WPN events. I need to generate this - the newsletter works well for my regular store, so why the heck not run one for the WPN events?

All in all, this was a very pleasant stretch of the Road to WPN.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 11...]

The Road to WPN (Part 9)

2011-06-20T21:32:00.003-04:00

[This is part 9 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8]

Well, to say my first WPN event was a total disaster would be an overstatement, and rather overly dramatic. But, on the other hand, it sure as heck wasn't what I was expecting....

My family and I had a picnic to attend in the morning/early afternoon of June 18, and would need to head straight from there to Novel Places if we were going to make it when I wanted to. So, I loaded up the car with everything that I wanted to have with me for the event, and it was a lot of stuff:

2 5000-count card boxes filled with my "scratch & dent" cards;
A large handled cardboard box with the printer I would use along with lots of other necessities (WPN promos, table number signs, my Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 promo vouchers to pick up my copies of the special foil Titans, my Square credit card reader, etc);
Another large handled cardboard box filled with card sleeves of various descriptions: Ultra Pro, KMC, Dragon Shield, as well as bundles of 45 used (or at least opened) sleeves to be sold cheap; also the MBS and NPH Event Decks to sell;
The 9 boxes of booster packs to be used as the sealed deck pools, prizes, and stock for selling;
My netbook computer & its accoutrement in carrying case;
My Thraximundar shirt from @GriffnValentine (I think my wife would have disowned me had I worn it to the picnic)

We arrived at the store around 2:40 or so (registration was to start at 4) and proceeded to take over Patrick's store getting set up. He helped us clear some counter space so I could set up the sleeves, decks, and scratch and dent cards. I set up the printer & netbook, and got myself logged in to his WiFi so I could report the results of the event via WER right there, rather than wait to get home.

We had 4 people preregistered for the event, 1 of whom said he was bringing his roommate as well (at some point during the setup I realized I had missed a call from him on my cell phone - this becomes important later). One of the pre-registrations was someone without a DCI number, which was exciting because we need to get 6 new players signed up with the DCI as part of our moving up to Core Level. I knew also that one of the pre-registered players was bringing his daughter, another DCI newbie. With all of that, and with my older son & I as emergency backups, I figured it was safe to let my brother off the hook, as he had been ill for the previous week and a half at least. I can use him as a DCI newbie at some future event instead :-)

So, somewhere between 3:30 and 4, Craig and his daughter arrived. Our Special Guest Adam Styborski arrived very shortly thereafter, and Patrick started wheeling his merchandise displays out of the center of the store so tables could be set up.At this point we realized that the "8-person" tables Patrick had would really only comfortably handle 6 players (#7 & #8 would be at the ends of the rectangular table, which would not work for dueling). I figured that with those 12, and another 4 at the counter if need be, we should still be covered.

And, then, we waited. I had tried calling back the person whose call I had missed, but only got his voice mail. Come 4:00 he had still not arrived. Come 4:30 he had still not arrived.

And neither had anyone else.

At this point in time my grand total attendance was 3 people.

In order to have a DCI sanctioned, you must have at least 8 players. I could play, my older son could play, and even my younger son who can't quite read yet could play (he would count as another DCI newbie) and we STILL would be short of that 8.

And that is, indeed, what we did. I signed up myself, older son and younger son, cancelled the sanctioned event and created a new casual event. And the six of us played Scars block sealed.

When I went to print table assignments (just to practice using that aspect of the WER software) I discovered that I had not, in fact, beaten the problem with my netbook-printer connection, and so I was unable to print all evening. Instead, I just had folks sit wherever they liked and handed each player 2 booster packs each of Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin Besieged and New Phyrexia.

I ended up with a very nice sealed pool. Moltensteel Dragon alongside Consecrated Sphinx is pretty nasty - and I didn't even include the Molten-Tail Masticore in my deck! We took around 40 minutes building our decks, then I collected money from all parties interested in pizza to be ordered about 20 minutes into Round 1 (Patrick joined in on the pizza, and graciously agreed to order it for us while we were playing).

Since I couldn't print, I just used WER

Round 2 saw me face Adam, Craig faced my younger son, and my older son faced Craig's daughter. This match was much closer for me (and longer) than round 1, and the pizza arrived shortly after we begun. So while my older son rather quickly beat Craig's daughter, and Craig rather quickly beat my younger son (and they could begin enjoying dinner), it took me a lot longer to finally defeat Adam and allow us to get to our now lukewarm dinner. [I should note that I learned a rather valuable lesson about being a bit more sportsmanlike in my match, and owe Adam a public apology for casting Consecrated Sphinx during my second main phase when I already had next turn lethal damage represented in the form of Moltensteel Dragon]

After wolfing down some slices, we got the pairings for Round 3. Adam faced off against Craig's daughter, I was paired against Craig, and my two sons faced each other ("The Brothers War" I immediately dubbed it). The end of the round found myself, Adam, and my younger son victorious, and the event was over.

Final standings: I had 9 match points, Adam had 6, and everyone else had 3. And I'm sure that not a single person out there believes that I didn't somehow rig my own event.

Anyway, for prizes I gave everyone a participatory promo card (the WPN foil Vault Skirge), then Adam as our winner (since I could hardly count myself as that) received a copy of the foil Maul Splicer AND the Archenemy promo Drench the Soil in Their Blood. Everyone else received their choice of one or the other of those promos. I also let everyone pick an additional booster pack from SOM, MBS or NPH as a thank-you for coming and sticking it out through the end.

So, as I say, a bit disappointing in the turn-out department, but I think it was an enjoyable evening, and it still let us check off a few boxes towards moving up to Core Level in the WPN. As a reminder, here are the goals we have to meet within a 12-month time frame:

Report a minimum of 4 events [If my understanding is correct, this should still count as 1 of our 4]
Have a minimum of 30 unique people playing in your reported events [We're at 6/30 now]
Run and report a single event with 12 players or more [Yeah, still need this one]
Maintain a delinquency rate of less than 20% [As far as I know I got this reported on time, so we're good]
Introduce 6 new players to WPN events [We're at 2/6 now]

My biggest headache WPN-wise right now is figuring out the netbook-printer problem, and being able to print. If we had actually had a 12+ crowd, announcing pairings at each round would have been a royal pain in the tuchus. I have until July 2 (the first event at Beyond Comics) to try and get this working. I think the problem lies in the fact that the netbook is running Windows 7 Starter, and not the full version of Windows 7. I may have to get the full version installed.

We did learn that we should be able to fit a third table into the space we were using, and therefore be able to seat 18 people in the main section of the store should it some day become necessary. Patrick says he'll pick up another table sometime in the future.

Unfortunately neither Patrick nor I thought to get any photos taken, so we missed an opportunity to get a photo in the Gazette, our local newspaper. It would have been nice to get the publicity.

In other news, I have sent in I believe 3 separate emails with various questions in to Brian, my WPN rep, and have yet to receive an answer. Perhaps he's on vacation? Or maybe I've ticked him off with too many questions? I don't know - but I hope I get some soon. My biggest one involved the casual event. When you "close" a sanctioned event, you are supposed to get a "Submit" button to click in WER to submit the results. No such button seems to appear for a casual event when it gets closed, so I am worried as to whether I have in fact done everything I am supposed to do with getting this event properly recognized. I will be much more upset if it turns out I am wrong and this did NOT count as 1 of our 4 events!

Oh, and on a final note: I still have all 12 of the MBS and NPH Event Decks (3x of each deck), and 2x each unopened booster boxes of SOM, MBS and NPH. If anyone reading this is interested in any of these let me know!

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 10]

The Road to WPN (Part 8)

2011-06-14T15:19:00.003-04:00

[This is part 8 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 and Part 7]

June 9, 2011: Today Patrick informed me that his account with his distributor will not be set up in time to order the product that we need for the June 18 event. Therefore I have had to activate my emergency back-up plan and order from another source I have. We'll almost certainly be paying more than we would through a distributor, but should still be able to turn a profit on the venture, and we will at least have the stuff we need! I'm ordering 3x each boxes of Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin Besieged and New Phyrexia, as well as 1 box each of the MBS and NPH Event Decks. That will be plenty of product to cover what we need for the sealed deck itself, as well as give Patrick some stuff to have available for sale should anyone want to purchase some extra boosters, or an Event Deck.

Unfortunately this means that we will NOT be having Commander decks for sale, which I would really have loved to have, since it's the release weekend for those. Patrick should, eventually, have those - just not on June 18. :-(

Also, he will not have sleeves ready and in stock, so I will be providing sleeves for sale at the event itself. God thing I just recently started stocking them in my own store!

June 10, 2011: Today was my scheduled meeting with John at Beyond Comics to discuss what our arrangement would be, and schedule our first event.

As I had suspected, we settled on pretty much the same relationship I'll be having with Patrick at Novel Places. I'll be able to sell my "scratch & dent" singles at events there, and I'll be able to have customers purchase from my online store and choose the free shipping option to pick up at the even. And if, for some reason, Patrick is unable to get the product that I need when a new set comes out, they'll be my secondary back-up resource for that. I will help them organize the events, scheduling them, helping with advertising, and running the WER at the event itself. I advised John on what product we'll need, and what items I recommend they start stocking (right now, for example, they do not carry card sleeves). And we scheduled our first event. So, on July 2 you can join us for our Scars of Mirrodin block sealed deck event. You can also check out the store's Facebook page on the event.

The other big news of the day is that Patrick informed me that getting the booster products into his POS (point of sale) system would be too complicated manually to bother with at this juncture, so he is letting ME be the one to sell the product at our first event. This will be a one-time only thing, as he should be all set up with an account with the distributor in time for our M12 Launch Party in July. This means I will be the one collecting the $25 entry fee, making any additional sales like extra boosters & Event Decks (and the sleeves as mentioned previously). Holy cow! My Square credit card reader in my smart phone is going to be getting a real workout that day. Yikes!

June 14, 2011: - Today the product for the June 18 event was scheduled to come in (my three favorite words "Out For Delivery" showed up on the UPS tracking page this morning!). Yesterday the UPS delivery (some more sleeves I had ordered) came around 10:30, so I had hoped that this would be the case today as well. Unfortunately, come 11:00 or so it had not yet arrived, and we had errands to run. Also, Patrick tweeted to me that he had received another WPN package, which I was pretty sure would be the Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 (D12) promo cards and decks that he will have available to hand out to people who buy the video game. So I wanted to go up to the store and break those open with him, and go through what they were so he was set for the potential onslaught. The game is released tomorrow (June 15) so it was good timing.

While we were running our errands, I wanted to be sure to get the UPS shipment if it came while we were out, so I left a note on our door with my signature, hoping that would be acceptable in lieu of me signing the little electronic pad they have. However, much to my amazement, when we stepped out of the library (one of the stops in our errands) we saw a UPS truck. The driver hopped out of the back, and happened to look over our way. I recognized him as our usual driver so I gave him a wave. I was considering letting him know about the note on our door when he suddenly said "wait a minute. I have a package for you!" He hopped back in the truck, grabbed the package & scanned it, handed me his pad for a signature, and just like that I took delivery of our SOM block product in the parking lot of our local library.

Sometimes life just works out, you know? And this is also an important lesson: it pays to be on friendly terms with your UPS (and USPS, and FedEx) delivery people. If I didn't always make sure to wave a thank-you to this guy when he dropped something off for me, I'm not sure if he would have recognized me today.

So, with product in hand, we went up to meet with Patrick. Sure enough, the package contained the D12 materials. Here's what he got:

The first photo shows the special foil Titan promos (Frost Titan, Grave Titan and Inferno Titan). These are alternate art versions of mythic rare cards from Magic 2011 (M11) (and presumably Magic 2012 [M12], although as of this writing only the Inferno Titan has really been confirmed). He received 20 copies each of these three promos.

The second photo shows the D12 sample decks, 4 copies each of the 5 different colored decks. Other stores have cracked open these decks and spoiled many cards from the M12 set, as that is at least one of the sets used to construct the decks. He got three boxes that look like this, so he has 60 decks total (12 of each of the 5 colors).

So what happens is that when a person purchases the video game (which will be available on PC via Steam, on PS3 via the PlayStation Network, or on Xbox 360 via Xbox Live), they will get a special coupon they can print out to receive one of these promo cards and a deck. The promo they get depends on which platform they buy the game through (PC/Steam gets you Frost Titan, Xbox gets you the Grave Titan, and PS3 gets you the Inferno Titan). Which deck a person gets is entirely up to the store owner. They can let you pick, or assign it randomly - it will vary from location to location. Customers find a location by putting their zip code into a web site that lists the participating WPN locations. Important to note here: a WPN location has to opt in to this program, so your LGS where you play FNM may NOT have these, if they didn't sign up.

Also worthy of note: when the WPN site signed up is important as well. If they signed up after May 25 (which is the case for my secondary site, Beyond Comics), they will not receive the sample decks, just the promo foil cards. So you may or may not get the deck when you go get your promo. Just fair warning.

STILL TO DO BEFORE SATURDAY:

Get sets of 2x each SOM/MBS/NPH booster packs made for easy distribution at the event;
Devise some sort of pricing stickers for stuff I'll have for sale that day:

SOM/MBS/NPH boosters
MBS/NPH Event Decks
various new card sleeves
used card sleeves (sets of 45 for $2)
"scratch & dent" cards

Get plenty of sleep (this may be the hardest of this list!)

I will likely not have anything else to report until after the event itself on Saturday, so I will sign off on this part for now. I hope to see many of you in Clarksburg in a few days!

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 9]

A Struggle with Shipping

2011-06-08T17:37:00.000-04:00

This is one of those posts designed purely to explain to you, the reader, some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that goes along with running an online MTG store. This may be boring for many of you, but it goes a long way towards explaining some of the oddities that happen involving what I list where.

To start with, let me say this: I try, very hard, to not make money on shipping. I think that this is a terrible policy, and I sometimes jump through hoops to make sure that a customer is only paying what it costs me to ship to them. This means the cost of the postage, plus a small materials charge to cover toploaders, cases, bubble mailers, labels, etc. For US orders that materials fee is $1, and it's only $1.25 for non-US (more for them because I actually need to travel to the post office for these, whereas US ones I can print a label from PayPal and hand the package to my mail carrier).

Most online stores have one of three shipping systems:

Shipping is based on total order cost. I just could not do this in good conscience. It costs me the exact same amount of money to ship a single $1 card as it does to ship a single $50 card. Why on Earth would I charge more money to ship the $50 one? It makes no sense whatsoever.
Shipping is based on weight of package. This is the one that I used to use for my eBay listings (before I switched to a "free shipping" model, but that's a story for another post). The problem with this method is simple to understand once it's explained (but probably isn't obvious without it being pointed out): A single MTG card, in a toploader, in a bubble mailer, weighs one ounce (keep in mind the post office rounds up to the nearest ounce for determining shipping cost). So do 2 MTG cards, in a toploader, in a bubble mailer. In other words, it costs me the exact same amount of money to ship 1 card as it does 2. But if I tell my system that a single card weighs 1 ounce (to get the shipping correct for a single card) then it will think that 2 cards weigh 2 ounces, and charge shipping based on that. By that system, 16 cards would weigh 1 pound - absurd! So, weight does not really work in this situation.
Shipping is based on the number of items in the order. This, really, is what I need. I can set up a tiered shipping system, where 1 or 2 cards is charged one rate, then 3-10 cards (which would be 2 ounces) is charged another, and so on. I just figure out how many cards it takes to get to 3 ounces, and I have my next tier. And this is the system that I currently use at my store (and why my shipping scheme is based on the # of cards in your order).

So, you may be asking yourself, what is the problem?

The problem comes when I try to sell anything other than single cards in my store. Take my "Revised Edition Toolkit" product, for example. This product contains 100 cards, and should really already be in the 100-114 card tier on shipping. However, as far as the system is concerned, it is "1 item" for purposes of shipping, and would be located in the 1-2 card tier. I run into the same problem with any sets of cards (my grab bags, complete common sets if I were to offer them here instead of eBay, etc) and any other non-single product (sealed MTG product like booster packs, packs of sleeves, etc).

For items such as these I can add into the listing a shipping surcharge, so that an additional amount on top of the calculated shipping is added in. But let's look at the potential problem here, using my Revised Edition Toolkit as an example. It's 100 cards, but 1 item. So the system would charge a US customer $2.75 for it, but shipping should really be $3.77. So, easy, right - just add a $1.02 surcharge to the item - no problem. But, what if someone in Europe buys a Toolkit? Then the system would charge $2.97 (the 1-2 tier rate for Europe) plus $1.02 (the surcharge to adjust the US shipping) or $3.99. But the Europe rate for 100-114 cards is $10.85! I just lost almost $7 in shipping, on a $10 item. And I can only assign one amount as a shipping surcharge, I can't assign one for each region.

This is the reason I have left my complete common sets, complete uncommon sets, complete basic land sets, booster packs, sealed decks, etc, etc on my eBay store. It's far less of a hassle over there - and when eBay combines orders and overcharges the customer on shipping, I can just send a partial refund and everything works out grand.

What I REALLY, REALLY wish is that ProStores would introduce a new category in the inventory spreadsheet (it seems to me like this would be ridiculously easy to do, but what do I know). This category would be "Counts as How Many Items?" The vast majority of my listings would be 1 for this category. But my Toolkit could be set to 100 - and then when shipping is determined that item would count as 100 items for determining shipping. Elegant, beautiful, simple...and it'll probably never happen :-(

But if it does, I'll likely be abandoning eBay for most of my MTG items and happily moving them all over to my main store instead.

The Road to WPN (Part 7)

2011-06-03T15:49:00.001-04:00

[This is part 7 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6]

Since Part 6 brought us up to date, I figured that from now on I would write things as they happen, and once a post gets long enough, publish it. So, without further ado...

May 30, 2011: Today I put together a flyer for use in the store at the cash register, and any other places that I may need to advertise via such a format. If you'd like to see it, please feel free -just be warned that it takes a while to load (maybe start loading the page, then come back here to keep reading ).

Anyway, while the flyer itself may not be all THAT spectacular, what is very cool is what the WPN makes available to organizers like myself. At their website, they have all sorts of retailer support kits in the form of graphics and pre-made advertisement banners/flyers for prereleases, launch parties, and game days for each new set when it comes out. I used images from the Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin Besieged, and New Phyrexia kits in making the flyer. I really am rather amazed at the stuff that's available for use by people like me who are putting together events.

May 31, 2011: My new friend Craig, whom I met at the New Phyrexia prerelease, happens to be a graphic artist and tweaked the flyer for me, for which I am very grateful - so the flyer that will actually get printed up looks much, much cooler now. But don't take my word for it, see for yourself!

June 2, 2011: My credit card reader from Square arrived today. I will now have the capability of accepting credit cards using my Android smart phone at events, should anyone wish to pay me for cards that way. Pretty darn cool.

June 3, 2011: Today The Road took a completely unexpected turn.

I stop in to my local comic shop (Beyond Comics in Gaithersburg, MD) for my monthly comic pick-up, when John (the manager) says to me "Don! Follow me, sir." and moves out from behind the front desk to head to the back room of the store.

Now, I don't know about you, but I've seen and read enough cheesy fiction to be just a little bit nervous about that turn of events!

Anyway, I follow and he opens the door to the back storeroom and gestures to show me a vast open floor space where before there had been haphazard piles of storage boxes (now either gone or more nicely organized on the shelving units around the walls). "I think we can fit two nice sized 8-person tables in here with no problem. We can hold Magic events back here. So, what do we need first to get started?"

I hesitate a moment, then answer: "a time machine."

As you may recall from Part 1 of this series, Beyond Comics was the store that initially approached me many years ago with the idea that I could help them get MTG events running at their store. They are also the store that was then unable to run events with me in the smaller location they had to move to later.

But, it seems, they are interested enough to go through the trouble of clearing space in their back room. What to do?

I told John that I had already signed up with another store to run events there. However, I continued, as far as I know there is nothing in the WPN rules that prevents a person from being organizer for more than one store. Meaning that, if Patrick at Novel Places was okay with it, I could organize events at both sites. I would need to call Brian at WPN and make sure that this is okay on the WPN side, and then (assuming it was), meet with Patrick and see if HE would be okay with it.

After all, I've made a commitment to Patrick, and also put a lot of time and effort into getting things set up with him. I'm hardly going to drop him just because another store is interested.

"Worst-case scenario," I left John with, "I would be happy to help guide a different person as organizer for you."

So, as soon as I got home, I put a call in to Brian at WPN, leaving a message on his voicemail asking him to give me a call as soon as he could. I think this issue warrants a phone conversation rather than an email back-and-forth.

A bit over an hour later I received a phone call back from one of Brian's coworkers (Brian himself being out of the office today), and gave him the backstory, then - So, can one person be organizer for more than one store? "Well, if you'd just led with that question I could have quickly told you yes, that's fine," said he. So, embarrassed at having wasted his time with the full backstory, I quickly asked my next question, just to make sure my understanding was right: each store would have to reach Core Level on their own, right - it's not the organizer that works on reaching the next Level, it's the store. "That is correct," he confirmed. So, in other words, I would have to organize 4 events AT EACH STORE, and get 6 new WPN players AT EACH STORE, etc, etc. Oy!

So, one last question, out of curiosity - is this something that happens normally - one person organizing for multiple locations? "Oh, yes - it happens quite frequently. In fact, what you can do is you just be the person that schedules the events, but someone at the store enters the results into the WER. You wouldn't necessarily have to actually be present at the event." Ah! He had inadvertently answered another question that had been bothering me. What if I helped both stores get to Core Level, and both wanted to run FNM? Obviously I couldn't be in two places at once on a Friday night!

Well, that confirmed, it was now time to face the more important issue: would Patrick mind if I was organizing for another store which could, of course, be looked at as his competition (at least in this arena)?

I decided that a face-to-face meeting may be better on this issue than phone or email, so I quickly drove up to Novel Places and found Patrick alone in the store, and available to chat (he did have a customer come in towards the end that sort of cut our conversation somewhat short, but that's good for him, so I certainly won't quibble!).

I outlined the situation to him, and assured him that I was committed to the relationship that we had established. If he didn't want me to be working with Beyond Comics, I would completely understand and respect that, and that was all she wrote. However, I pointed out:

When I first met Patrick and explained my long-term goals, he seemed a little hesitant about the idea of weekly FNMs. Today he confirmed that often book signings and other events he may want to do would need to be scheduled on a Friday, and therefore there would be conflict. Beyond Comics, on the other hand, would LOVE to have the weekly influx of people, and don't generally have any events scheduled on a Friday night. So this would be a nice division of focus between the two sites;
I think Beyond Comics would be moving ahead with the idea of holding WPN events, whether I was the organizer or not. At least if I were organizing for both sites, I could try to make sure that they didn't overlap and interfere with each other, by scheduling (as an example) a Launch Party for one store on a Saturday, and the other store on the Sunday.

Patrick agreed that these were good points, and also (as a small business owner himself) he appreciates that helping to keep Beyond Comics going would be a good thing, and he'd like to encourage that as well. So, essentially, I had his blessing to proceed and, at the very least, work with Beyond Comics to get them set up in the WPN and running events.

When I got home, I called John at Beyond Comics and gave him the good news. We briefly discussed how things might work, and scheduled a face-to-face meeting for next Friday to get together and hash out the details (I imagine we'll probably settle on things very much like what I have set up with Patrick). While I had him on the phone I filled out the WPN form online to get them registered as a WPN event site, so that we got that ball rolling.

And that, gentle reader, is how I suddenly found myself the WPN organizer for not just one, but two separate event locations.

Oh, dear lord, what have I gotten myself in to?

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 8]

The Road to WPN (Part 6)

2011-05-28T15:39:00.001-04:00

[This is part 6 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5]

Meanwhile, I still had many things I needed to work on towards getting ready to run WPN events. I had my netbook now, but I would also need a printer that I could bring with me for printing pairings and the like at the event.

Freecycle, hopefully, to the rescue! It has been my experience that quite often people offer printers on Freecycle. They get a good deal on a new one, or just decide they need something better/newer/whatever, and they have an old one sitting around now that they don't need, but still has some life in it. So, I figured, I'd just keep an eagle-eye out for someone to offer one and request it for my purposes.

Lo and behold someone did offer a printer. An HP Color Laserjet to be precise. She couldn't get it to work, but it came complete with new imaging drum as well as new black and yellow toner cartridges. I figured I could probably get it working, and if not I could turn it in to the county's computer recycling center.

When I went to pick it up, however, I learned a very important lesson: check on the model before you accept a free printer. Especially if you need the printer to be easily transportable. This thing is a monster. The only muscles I'd be developing lugging this thing around are called hernias. So, it would definitely not work for my purposes. Feeling a little bad, however, I spent time getting it to work, including swapping out the imaging drum and black cartridge (the yellow one does not seem to be low yet). Now I will turn around and offer it to someone else on Freecycle. That's how Freecycle works.

A few days later another printer, this one a MUCH lighter color inkjet printer (Lexmark 3200 if you care) was offered, this one without any ink cartridges at all. I picked it up, and bought some cartridges at Cartridge World (by an amazing coincidence a coupon for a free cartridge came in the mail the day I was going to head over there). After a great deal of manipulation I finally got the printer to work with the netbook (it worked with my desktop PC no problem). It seems that I need to have the printer on and plugged in when the netbook is booted up. As long as I can remember to do the things in proper order, everything should work out.

While this was going on, a strange thing happened with the WER. I logged in to see how things were looking (and to order another pack of DCI membership cards, as Brian had said one could order two per month), and noticed that somehow I again had the option to order a Store Support Kit and a Gateway Support Kit. It seemed odd that I could order more of these, so I emailed Brian about the issue. It seems that sometimes these things get returned for ordering before they should. The system is set up to stop you if you try to order one that you've already done.

One important thing I learned from my initial email to Brian that I need to pass on to other potential organizers: When contacting your WPN rep, make sure to include the store name and/or your DCI number so they can recognize who you are! They deal with (I'm guessing) hundreds of organizers and, especially when you're pretty new to the whole thing like I am, chances are they won't remember you unless you've done something to distinguish yourself in their mind.

It turns out, I found out from the email back-and-forth, that there is no way to know exactly which Gateway Support Kit you are ordering from its name - only from the date (from now until June 15 the NPH Gateway Support kit is available; starting June 16 they switch to the M12 Support Kit; etc). I also found out that there is no way to track your order of these kits, so you put in your order and then just hope that it went through all right at that your materials will arrive. Brian told me that our Gateway and Store Support Kits had shipped, and should arrive soon.

The next day (May 24 if you're trying to put a timeline together), Patrick tweeted the following: "Some fool just dropped off a bunch of items and left without saying a word. Don Wiggins doesn't work for me! What's up?? *woot*" I quickly tweeted back, asking if he would mind a little company that afternoon. And so, my sons and I made the journey up to Clarksburg to see what the WPN had sent to us.

A great deal, it turns out! Inside the Store Support Kit were:

a large vinyl banner to hang outside the store advertising that it is a WPN site (it, along with most of the generic WPN materials, features images & logos for not just Magic, but also Dungeons & Dragons);
smaller paper posters to put up in-store and advertise event dates;
large and small window-clings to put up in the store;
Number signs to put on tables for labeling seating;
a small stack of DCI membership cards.

Inside the Gateway Support Kit (New Phyrexia version) were:

30 copies of the WPN Vault Skirge foil promo (featuring different art than the NPH version):
30 copies of the WPN Maul Splicer foil promo (also with different art);
20 copies of the WPN Archenemy promos scheme card "Drench the Soil in their Blood";
several copies (I haven't opened the pack to count) of a Tactic card for D&D called "Stay with Me!" [I have absolutely no idea whether this is intended for use in Dungeons & Dragons or D&D Miniatures]

We also got a third package containing several more DCI membership cards, so we should have plenty for our first event.

I'm not sure how, exactly, I will be using these promo cards yet. Partially it depends on what attendance is like at the event. If the event is small enough, I could probably use one of the two foil NPH promos as attendance rewards (you get a copy just for coming). Then I could allow the top X players to choose either the other NPH promo or the Archenemy promo (in addition to the booster pack prizes). On the other hand if things go very well on June 18, maybe we'll want to schedule another event between that one and the M12 Launch party, and I can use the second NPH promo as an attendance incentive for that one. I just haven't decided yet. All I know is that they will get used for the intended purpose - rewarding those players who show up to our events.

And that pretty much brings us to today. What remains at this time?

Patrick will need to order Magic products from a distributor and let me know how much the stuff costs him so I can make sure we charge enough for the events (the price tag I have listed now is based on what it's cost me to attend events in the past; I presume these prices will work for us as well, but I need to make sure)
I'm concerned about attendance. I'm fairly certain from the # of responses I've gotten so far via Twitter, email, and conversations that we will have at least 8 players, so the event will be able to run. However, if many more than expected show up we could have problems. At this point Patrick has space (and tables & chairs) for probably 12-18 players. If more than that come out, we may have to be creative in finding places for them to sit and duel! I have created a preregistration form that I am hoping people will use if they're seriously planning to attend, but thus far no-one has used it.
I am sorting my "scratch & dent" cards by rarity & color to make them more user-friendly to browse through, and will bring at least a subset of them with me to the event for people to look through. I'm currently thinking of charging $0.05 per common, $0.10 per uncommon and $0.25 per rare or foil for these cards. The vast majority are probably in Fine or Very Fine condition, but I wouldn't feel right selling them as singles in my store. However they're perfectly usable in tournament conditions (especially if they're sleeved), so I'm sure that someone will want some of them!
I'm trying to find an optical mouse and cash-box on Freecycle to use at the events. Not sure if I'll have any luck with either.
My sons are helping out by cracking open plastic packs of basic lands and sorting them out. I have literally hundreds of plastic-wrapped sets of 20 basic lands (half 10th Edition, half Lorwyn) that I found on eBay a long time ago (these were originally packed inside 10th Edition Starters - how the seller ended up with hundreds of then I do not know). They will be perfect for making basic lands available for players to complete their decks in sealed-deck events.
I need to do some further advertising of the event to make sure word gets out to the local gaming community. Folks (like you) who read my blog and/or follow my Twitter feed know all about it. But the majority of those people don't live anywhere nearby and therefore, of course, will not be in attendance.

This may be the last installment for a while, then. Unless something monumental occurs, I may not even have an update until after the first event on June 18. In the meantime, I thank everyone who has stuck with me long enough to read to this point, and especially thank all those who have sent well-wishes and encouragement to me throughout the process.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 7]

The Road to WPN (Part 5)

2011-05-25T09:37:00.002-04:00

[This is part 5 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4]

Either the Saturday or Sunday after I met with Patrick and we applied to the WPN (which was Friday, May 6 as a reminder), I tweeted wondering how long it would take to hear back. Someone (and my apologies for not remembering who, exactly) suggested that it may be 1 to 2 weeks. This made me a little nervous, because the deadline for registering to run a M12 Launch Party was (depending on which website at the WPN was correct) either May 22 or May 29. I wanted to make sure that we were able to get that event registered.

To my great surprise, then, it was only 4 days later (two of which were the weekend!) that I received this message from WPN:

"Don,

Thank you for your interest in the Wizards Play Network! I called and spoke to Pat earlier and everything looks good. The only issue is that as the store is not yet officially open for business we are unable to add you into the system at this time. Please reply to this email in a couple weeks, when the store is open, and we'll be happy to get you all set up.

Thank you for your cooperation and patience in this matter.

Ethan
Wizards of the Coast"

Ack! I didn't foresee this problem. I figured since we wouldn't be running events until mid-June at the earliest, the fact that Novel Places wouldn't be open for business until late May wouldn't be an issue.

I quickly followed the link provided in the email to respond to this message:

"My only concern is that I would like to be in before the deadline for registering for the M12 Launch Parties.

There seems to be some confusion as to when the deadline is for that. On this site:

http://www.wizards.com/WPN/Sales/Product.aspx?x=Gather_your_allies

it seems to suggest that May 29 is the deadline for registering for M12 launch parties, but on this page:

http://www.wizards.com/WPN/Events/Scheduling.aspx?category=magic:thegathering

it says that May 22 is the deadline.

Pat is shooting for May 16th to open his doors officially, but may not be able to do so before May 24. We certainly would not be scheduling any events to run before mid to late June. I just want to make sure we can get that M12 Launch party scheduled. Is there anything we can do?

Thanks for your quick response on our application - I was very pleasantly surprised at the turn-around time!

Don"

It was May 13 (3 days after I sent in this note, and 7 days total after applying to the WPN) that I received a phone call from Brian at WPN. He had called and spoken to Patrick, and had gotten us into the system. We were ready to begin signing up for events! Amazing! He was all set to walk me through using the Wizards Event Reporter (WER). The only problem with that is that I hadn't yet downloaded it.

I had realized for a while now that if I was going to be running these events I would need to have a computer and printer setup that I could easily grab and bring with me to the events. I didn't want to have to junk up Patrick's computer at the store with the require software (or be locked into being where he had his computer set up) so I knew I would have to get a laptop or netbook. After doing some research, I had settled on a nice (relatively) inexpensive netbook from Best Buy, but I hadn't picked it up yet. Suddenly I had a new project for the day. Brian asked me to give him a call back the next week once I had the computer procured and the software installed.

So, out to the store I went (after conveniently ordering online for store pickup). After charging it up and taking care of initial setup issues, I downloaded and installed the WER. I opened the program up to take a look...and realized that a walk-through from Brian seemed like a very good idea, indeed!

[SIDE NOTE #1: That night I got to use the netbook to make my very first Skype call, in a meeting with a couple of folks involved in my upcoming MTG Alters project, so it was good timing for that. Keep an eye on this space (and follow me on Twitter, and sign up for my newsletter) if you'd like to be one of the first to know when cards like these will be available!]

[SIDE NOTE #2: I knew that I would be needing a printer as well, and I could have gotten a pretty good deal with a $40-off special the store was running, but I decided to hit up my local Freecycle group instead, as I know that printers are offered there all the time. Be even more frugal and also help keep another piece of electronics being sent to the landfill? Yes, please!]

So, on Monday (May 16) I called Brian in the early afternoon (my time - I'm on the East Coast, WotC headquarters is on the West Coast), and got his voice mail. I left a message letting him know I had gotten set up as was ready for my tutorial. I did not receive a call back from him that day. So, on Tuesday (May 17) I called again. Again, I got his voice mail and left a message. I must have sounded slightly flustered in that message because later that day I got a call from one of Brian's co-workers (I failed to write down his name, and I'm awful at remembering names, so I can't give him credit here unfortunately). Brian had had to leave work early, but since my message sounded like it needed immediate attention, could the co-worker help me?

I opted to wait for a call from Brian the next day (truthfully I felt a little embarrassed that I must have sounded so desperate in my message!). But at this stage I felt (and tweeted appropriately) that WotC (and especially WPN) must have just one of the nicest group of customer service folk around. I was quite amazed. The co-worker asked when would be a good time for Brian to call, and I suggested 12-4 my time (9-1 Brian's time).

And thus, Brian and I finally got back together telephonically on Wednesday (May 18). I sat down with my netbook and fired up the WER, and Brian walked me through ordering the WPN materials that are designed to help a smaller venue attract more players (promos, advertising posters, etc) and also DCI-membership cards for players that are new to the system (remember that we need to get 6 of these new players signed up within a 12-month period to move up to Core Level and be able to run prereleases and FNMs). There was a slight hiccup in the program when I tried to order the Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 promo pack. Brian had me take a screen shot of the error message that came up and send it to him, as well as a copy of a file from the WER folder on my computer. He would forward that on to the tech group to see if it was a bug that needed to be fixed.

Next, Brian walked me through scheduling my first event. I wasn't sure when out first event would be held (I hadn't discussed specific dates with Patrick yet) but I knew that we wanted to run an M12 Launch Party, and there's only a four-day window for running those (they have to be run on the Fri/Sat/Sun/Mon of the release weekend for the set). I figured Saturday afternoon would work best (many people may have obligations on a Sunday, and I know Patrick would prefer that we start later in the day so that we can shut down the store at the end of the event). So I picked Saturday July 16 as the date of the event. Oddly enough, I thought, you don't need to tell the WER system the time of your event, only the day.

For those who have never used the WER to schedule an event, here's the information I had to provide: Organization (I only organize for Novel Places so that was easy); Game (MTG, D&D or D&D Miniatures); Sanction Rule (this is where I chose the M12 Launch Party); Play Location (if we were holding it off-site I would have options here); Dates; Format (Sealed Deck in our case); Pairing Method (I chose Swiss as that's the only one I know about - I really need to research what the other options are!); Email (I gave mine); Phone number (I gave the store's); and URL (I used Novel Place's web page).

After helping me get that one scheduled, we ended our conversation with me saying I would contact Patrick and confirm the date & time, as well as determine the date for our first event to be held in mid-to-late June. I would then get into WER and schedule the June event. If the date of the M12 Launch Party needed to be changed, I could cancel the scheduled event and put in a new one (if a change like that needs to be made after the scheduling window has closed you need to have your WPN handler make the change for you). It turns out that Patrick had no trouble with July 16 for the Launch Party, and we chose June 18 for our first event (a Scars of Mirrodin Block Sealed-Deck tournament).

Later that afternoon Brian called me back and asked me to get WER started back up again. One of the tech guys had gotten back to him, and it was theorized that the error I had been getting earlier was because the tutorial for WER was running. I shut off the tutorial and tried again to order the Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 promos, and lo and behold I was able to do so! This means that when customers purchased Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 and get their code to get a free promo card, Patrick's store will be one of the places they can go to get them. This should bring in a fair bit of foot traffic for him, and possibly turn video-game-MTG-only players into paper MTG players at our events (hey, a man can dream!).

Part 5 has turned out to be quite long, so I'll break here. We're almost caught up in continuity. In Part 6 I'll reveal the contents of the various promo packs that were ordered (they arrived May 24 - just under a week after I ordered them!).

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 6]

The Road to WPN (Part 4)

2011-05-21T23:10:00.002-04:00

[This is part 4 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3]

First things first: Someone (who shall remain nameless) snarkily tweeted to me that I seemed to be keeping the location of the store a secret. So let me boldly state that the store is HERE:

Novel Places

23341 Frederick Road

Clarksburg, MD 20871

There. That should take care of THAT.

Next, I realized after posting Part 3 that I had left out some details that had come before my face-to-face meeting with Patrick, so I need to back up a few weeks...

One issue that I realized we would need to work out was who would be the actual dealer in the MTG items. Did he want to sell MTG in his store, and charge the fee for events, etc (in which case I would act only as the organizer)? Or would he rather just essentially play host to the events, and rent me some space in the store so that I could claim an actual brick & mortar presence for myself, in which case I would suddenly find myself being a much bigger sealed MTG product dealer than I have been in the past.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Patrick opted for the first possibility. He would carry the MTG, and I would organize.

In that same email conversation, he indicated that his landlady was not all that thrilled with the idea of using the space for MTG events. This made me VERY nervous, and I was worried that our fledgling idea would die before it could ever take flight. He assured me that he would work on it on his end, and not to be worried just yet.

So, fast forward now to our face-to-face meeting. I drove up to the store around 11 am and let myself in by the side entrance. After walking through a small area that seemed to be used for storage at the time, I found myself in the main room that was to become the store. Boxes upon boxes (filled presumably with books) sat on nearly every available space, and I found Patrick sitting on a stool behind the main counter.

[Side note on the location. If you'd like to see photos of the place, Patrick has many up on the official store Facebook page. The building is truly historic, being the first building in Clarksburg, MD. It was built by John Clark by around 1780 on the site of an Indian trading post (which was first established ~1730). It has been added to over the centuries, but inside the building you can see into one of the original walls. It's like a bookstore with a built in museum. You can just feel the history when you step foot in the building. It's awesome. But I digress, and I am gushing embarrassingly, so let me move on...]

I had come armed with printouts of various WPN web pages, as I wasn't sure whether Patrick would have a computer up and running in the store as yet (in retrospect, the fact that he will often Tweet from work should have given me some clue, but that could have been from a smart phone, so maybe not). I explained to him how the WPN level system works, and what we would have to accomplish to get up to Core level where we could run prereleases and FNMs.

He let me know that the building is divided into three sections. He's in the main first floor area. The storage area I had passed through from the side entrance is a separate area (that he hopes to expand into some day), and there is an entire top floor as well. The landlady he had mentioned earlier (who, it turns out, should not have a problem with our events, since, as he put it "if I can say yes to a book club, how can I really say no to you?") hopes to rent out those spaces as well. The "green" grocery store that used to be in the building used all three sections, if I remember correctly. There is the possibility that we could use the first floor side area if an event proves to be too large for his main store, assuming it is not yet rented to someone else. Right now he plans to have everything in the main area on wheels, so that it can be moved out, clearing the space for meetings of many varieties (book clubs and book signings mainly, but our MTG events as well).

I won't bore with detail after detail of the conversation. Instead, let me tell you that by the end of the meeting we had filled out the form online to join WPN (it turned out he did indeed have a computer up and running), with me as organizer and he as store owner. We had also hashed out the essentials of what our business relationship would be, to whit:

I will organize the events, including scheduling them with the WPN, taking care of posting results, and everything else that goes into actually getting the space set up, etc.
He will order MTG products and keep them in stock, including enough to run the events with. Therefore, when a person pays to enter an event, s/he will be paying Novel Places, not me.
Patrick will not deal in singles. That will be left up to me. I currently plan to put into effect a free shipping offer once we start running FNMs such that a customer could order from my store and come to FNM to pick up their cards instead of having them shipped if they desire.
I will advise Patrick on what MTG products to order, including quantities thereof (at least initially).
His big benefits: increased foot traffic into the store; additional revenue stream in the form of sealed MTG product.
My big benefits: a nice built-in client base for my singles store; a (hopefully) cheaper source for my cases when a new set comes out; a place that's near my home where I can play regular MTG; the fun and excitement that comes from being a WPN organizer (in case you haven't guessed yet - I am insanely excited about all of this!)

I had also come 99% to the conclusion that I really need to make Don's Magic and Sundry an official legal entity, and become an LLC. I also need to get a trader's license and start to do all the crazy official things one is supposed to do, such as charge sales tax and the like. It kinda sucks, but the store's getting big enough now that this has become necessary. Many are probably shocked to find out it hasn't happened before this, I would imagine!

I left my first meeting with Patrick extremely excited. I could hardly wait until we heard back from WPN as to whether or not we'd be accepted into the organization. That wait, it would turn out, would be shorter than I was afraid it would be...

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 5]

The Official Don's Magic and Sundry Sticker Contest

2011-05-19T18:54:00.003-04:00

This contest is one I've been promising on Twitter to work the detail out on and finally announce for a while now, so it's about time I got on it.

So, here it is: The Official Don's Magic and Sundry Sticker Contest!

Four times a year, right before the prerelease of a new set, I will draw one winner from the eligible pool of contestants who will win $20 in store credit to my store. [NOTE: accepting store credit requires that you establish an account at my store, but doing so is free.]
To become eligible, you must submit to me (via Twitter to @TheSundry or email to TheSundry at gmail dot com) a photo of you in some way sporting one of my stickers at an official MTG event (could be a regular sanctioned event, an FNM, a launch party, a prerelease, a SCG Open event, etc).
The sticker can be on your person (e.g. stuck to your shirt) or on something you are carrying prominently with you (your deck box, trade binder, box of tokens & dice, etc).
~~The photo should include your face for ease of identification~~. There should also be some way of verifying the date & event (e.g. if you're at the prerelease for something, you could hold up your prerelease promo).
The contest resets at every prerelease, so you must re-enter each time a new set rolls out if you want to stay in the drawing. [For reference, the next prerelease would be for Dark Ascension and will be held Sat/Sun January 28/29 2012, so the drawing for the current cycle will be made on Friday, January 27]
Photos become my property, and may be used in advertising campaigns or just for the fun of it on my blog (I probably won't do much with them, but I'm stating that now just in case).
I reserve the right to reject photos for any reason (most likely because I felt they were in some way inappropriate). If yours is rejected, however, I will let you know and give you a chance to submit another.

I reserve the right to modify/add/remove rules to this contest at any time should I see the need arise. [Example: I could easily see a secondary prize for most creative photo coming out of this if people decide to go that route with their pictures!]

If you are not sure what stickers I am talking about, you need to read this blog entry next.

As always, if there are any questions, Tweet to me, email me, or leave a comment here on the blog!

ADDENDUM: Now that I am running my own WPN events, I need to add the following rule:

The official MTG event cannot be one of the ones I host myself. Kinda defeats the purpose of advertising my site for me when I'm doing that myself :-)

The Road to WPN (Part 3)

2011-05-17T20:20:00.001-04:00

[This is part 3 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1 and Part 2]

In my research, I discovered that WPN is set up in a tier system. In case you (like me) have never investigated this, you might want to check out the official WPN site that covers this stuff. In essence, when you join WPN you start off at what they call the Gateway level. At this level you can run sanctioned events (D&D one as well as MTG, but I am only interested in the MTG ones), but the only "special" events you can run are the Launch Parties (sometimes called Release Events by folks like me who don't know all the official terms).

In order to run Prereleases and FNMs (the kinds of events I'd really like to hold), you need to work your way up from the Gateway level to what they call the Core level. To do this, an organizer needs to meet certain criteria within a 12-month period (this is copied straight from their site; I hope they don't mind!):

Report a minimum of 4 events
Have a minimum of 30 unique people playing in your reported events
Run and report a single event with 12 players or more
Maintain a delinquency rate of less than 20%
Introduce 6 new players to WPN events

The first requirement I figure is not likely to be too difficult. I'd like to run some sanctioned event (right now I'm thinking a SOM/MBS/NPH sealed tournament) in mid to late June, and also run a Launch Party for Magic 2012 in July. If I can pull off even 1 per month for the next four months, I will have that covered (and if things go well, we may hold more than that).

The second requirement will depend on how well I/we get the word out about our events. We already have some plans in place for advertising:

Pat will be having an advertisement subscription with a a local weekly newspaper, and has offered that he can tailor it to include word of the MTG event for a week or two beforehand
I have my Twitter following (although few of them are local, I'm hoping those will show, and hopefully bring friends)
I have contacts with a local gaming group (Games Club of Maryland) and hope to be able to spread word through their organization
a Magic celebrity who happens to live locally has offered to show up for the first event at least and have his name used in conjunction [thanks, Adam!]

It may take more than 4 events to get the 30 unique people, but we'll see.

It is my hope that with enough touting and trumpeting we can reach objective 3 on our first event. The spectacle of having a sanctioned event in the area where there hasn't been one in years if ever should bring out a good group. Also, the above mentioned advertising will hopefully get word out and bring people out just to see what it's all about. If not the first, then hopefully the second (the M12 Launch Party) will bring in 12+ players.

Goal #4 should not be a problem at all. From what I understand as long as you get your results posted up within what seems like a very reasonable amount of time, there's no delinquency issue. The store will have WiFi, which means I ought to be able to post results right after the event is over (or even have them updating as the event progresses - I have not yet had my Wizards Event Reporter tutorial - that will be a tale for another day!).

Of all the goals, it's only really the last one that has me a bit nervous. I would need to find (or have show up) 6 people who have never attended a WPN event before. I believe this means no DCI card - not registered with the DCI at all. Most of the people who would come to these things, I think, will be folks who are old hats at these sorts of things. I'm pretty sure I can get my brother (who played MTG years ago) to come out to one and sign up. But what about the other 5? Maybe Pat (the store owner) can be taught MTG and sign up :-) I know that Laurel (the owner of Dream Wizards) routinely has new people show up at the regional prereleases, but those are gone now. Will those people instead start showing up at the smaller local prereleases and the like? But, of course, I can't run prereleases yet....Catch 22?

So, as you can see, there's a bit more to it than simply signing up with the WPN and starting to run FNMs as I had initially thought.

The next step was to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Pat. When we briefly spoke on the phone, we tentatively agreed that I could come up to the store and meet with him in person. Through email and Twitter we arranged that the following Friday (this would now be May 6 for you chronic calendar-watchers) I would come up. Our meeting will be the beginning of Part 4...

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 4]

The Road to WPN (Part 2)

2011-05-16T22:26:00.001-04:00

[This is part 2 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1]

So, I wrote to Pat, owner of Novel Places:

"Hello, Pat:

My name is Don Wiggins. My wife has been following you on Twitter for a while, and has also recently signed up for your newsletter. When I was talking with her about how I would love to be able to do more with my own store, she mentioned you as being a local small business owner that may be interested.

I run a relatively small online business dealing in selling cards for the collectible card game called Magic: The Gathering (I don't know if you are at all familiar with it). Mostly what I sell is individual cards ("singles") from my website - I run the business out of our basement (we live in Germantown).

What I would love to do is start running a weekly Friday Night Magic series. This is an event that is officially sanctioned by the folks who created the game, and is a great way for folks who play to get together on a regular basis, have fun playing, and possible win prizes as well. Right now there are not many places in Montgomery County where FNMs are held. The closest I'm aware of is Dream Wizards, in Rockville - a good half-hour's drive from us if traffic isn't bad. I'd love to have another option for those of us in the northern end of the county (or even southern Frederick County).

The problem I face is, since I do not have a "brick and mortar" store, there's no way for me to get official sanctioning from the folks who do such thing. Without that, there's no access to the infrastructure that is set up to support these events.

So, my question to you is this: would you, possibly, have any interest in collaborating with me on this? I would be willing to do the leg-work involved in registering with the DCI, organizing and advertising the events, etc. What would be required on your end would be use of your store's name, and space for the group to gather on a Friday night (I imagine, at least at first, we'd be lucky to get 12-18 attendees - a well attended FNM at Dream Wizards is ~32, I believe).

"What's in it for me" would be, I imagine, a likely question at this point! :-) At the very least, there'd be increased traffic to your store (at least on Friday nights!). If you'd rather be more materially involved, you can purchase (& sell for profit) the booster packs of product that are used in certain types of FNM events (there are different types one can run - I can give you the gory details if you like!).

There are likely LOTS of questions that would need to be answered, so I certainly wouldn't expect a definitive answer from you at this point. Mostly what I'm wondering is whether or not this is something you would have even a slight interest in pursuing.

Thanks in advance for your reply. If you'd rather discuss the idea telephonically, feel free to call me at XXX-XXX-XXXX

Don"

[You will forgive me, I hope, for blotting out my phone number there!]

After several days, I had still not heard from Pat. I wasn't too terribly shocked by this, because I knew that he was busy getting the new store renovations done, and moving boxes of books and the hardware that comes with a bookstore (shelving & displays and the like). So, on a day that my MIL was watching my sons so I had a "day off", I decided to go up and see him in person at the store location.

I want to say that, in retrospect, I think this was a bad idea. Showing up cold in person, especially when you're expecting the person to be busy, is rather rude. I didn't think it through completely - but I was rescued from my own short-sightedness. Pat was not in that day! One of the folks working on the renovations was present, and the store building was open, so I took a peek in (I had been in several years earlier when the building had housed an Organic Grocery Store).

I decided the next day that it would be safer to give Pat a call on the phone number provided on his website. I got to speak with him in person briefly (as I said, he was busy!), but long enough to find out that he was, in fact, interested in a possible collaboration. I had positive contact!

So the next step was for me to throw myself full into research in what exactly is involved in signing up with the WPN. It was here that my dream of running FNMs (as described in my email to Pat) hit a little snag...

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 3]

The Road to WPN (Part 1)

2011-05-13T23:22:00.002-04:00

So I have been encouraged to chronicle my adventures in going from being simply an MTG online storekeep to becoming an organizer for Sanctioned MTG events. It is my hope that the stories will not just entertain, but also inform. Perhaps there are others out there contemplating becoming organizers, and maybe I can help on that journey, even if only in a small way.

My path to joining the Wizards Play Network (WPN) actually started a couple of years ago when I was approached by the owners of Beyond Comics, the local comic book shop that I frequent (it will be no surprise I am a geek, right?). They were interested in starting to run MTG events at their store, and were wondering if I would be interested in helping them run the events. My incentive, of course, would be having a good potential client base in the attendees (the comic shop sells recent MTG sealed product, but not singles, so we would not be competing).

I did some preliminary research on the subject, but before we could get anything in to place, disaster (in the form of faltering economy) took hold. They were unable to keep up with the rent in their large mall store space, and had to move across the street to a smaller strip-mall location. This smaller location did not allow any extra room for tournament-style events, so the plan was scrapped.

However, this planted the seed of the idea in my head that it would be a blast to run my own Launch Parties, Prereleases and FNMs. And I never really gave up on the idea in my head. While I have enjoyed attending events hosted by a (relatively) local gaming store (Dream Wizards - a lovely group of people!), it's a bit of a hike for me to get to them on any kind of regular basis.

Fast forward to earlier this year. I decided to broach the subject with the folks at Beyond Comics again. While I knew they couldn't hold events at their store, I also knew that many people organize events off-site. They wouldn't even have to be all that involved, as much as give me use of their name as contacts for purposes of WPN. For those unaware, WPN requires a brick-and-mortar store to be at least cursorily involved in these events. Since my store is an online-only one, I couldn't do this on my own. I needed to be attached to a b&m somehow.

Unfortunately they weren't really interested. If the event weren't at their store, what really would be the incentive for them? It wouldn't lead to increased foot traffic at their store, after all.

Then, a breakthrough occurred. My wife has been following the adventures of a local bookstore owner, Patrick, who had been renting space in a coffee shop, and was going to be setting up shop in his own space. This store, Novel Places, would be located all of 10 minutes away from our house! I couldn't resist the opportunity this presented, and I shot off an email to Patrick, introducing myself and giving him my proposal of a joint venture with his store to join the WPN.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2]

So, you say you want stickers...

2011-04-27T17:19:00.003-04:00

Yeah! The stickers are finally here, and I couldn't be more excited. Well, actually, I suppose I could, but then I would explode, and that would be messy. So I will stay at just this level of excitement, thank you very much.

Here's what they look like, in case you never saw them, or you have a poor long-term memory:

Before I say anything else, I need to once again give a HUGE thank you and shout out to Justin Treadway (AKA @GriffnValentine on Twitter). He is a supremely talented artist who has a soft spot for Magic. I proudly sport his shirts (the ones he designed - I haven't stolen clothing from the man) at MTG events. You can find his work at http://othersideoftheplanet.wordpress.com/, and I strongly recommend you do. You won't regret it.

Okay, with that plug out of the way, let's get down to business. You want stickers. I got stickers. How you gonna get 'em?

There's two ways to get stickers! One is to simply place an order with me. From now on I will include a sticker and a business card in each order as a thank-you and a "I hope you feel my store is worth telling others about."

"But," you say, "I don't want/need/plan to order anything in the near future and I want stickers!"

Not to fear! I will ship two stickers, free of charge, anywhere in the world, to anyone who would like them. All I ask is that you promise to use them wisely, like on your trade binder, or your shirt at an MTG tournament or FNM - something like that. Please do not just throw them away, affix them to the neighbor's cat, etc. That would be wrong.

All you need to do is drop me an email: Don at DonsMagicAndSundry.com! Use "Stickers" as your subject line so I know what it's about, and include your snail mail address. I promise that I will do nothing with your address beyond using it to send you stickers. It will not be entered into any kind of database, sold to marketers, or anything even the slightest bit nefarious (unless you count sending stickers as nefarious, in which case why are you reading this?).

Yes, it's that easy. Send me an email, I send you stickers.

Sometime in the not too distant future I am probably going to be setting up a program where you can earn store credit by sending me a photo of you proudly displaying your Don's Magic and Sundry sticker at an MTG event, or something equally devious to actually incentivize people using the stickers as intended. Get yours now in preparation for that day!

A new giveaway option!

2011-03-31T21:41:00.004-04:00

Another quick entry to explain the new choice in the giveaway Selection Election.

I have several of these Citadel Gaming MTG tokens, which look like little plastic tiles. This Magic Librarities entry shows what they look like.

I currently have Caribou (Version 1 and Version 2), Minor Demon, Skeleton (all 3 Versions), Snake (all 3 Versions) and Wolf. I've got 47 of them total at the moment.

I'm thinking of randomly picking 3 different tokens to make up a prize pack. And they could be yours IF:

They are selected in this go-rounds blog poll; and
You are randomly selected from among my email newsletter subscribers.

What? You aren't subscribed to my email newsletter? Well, you'd better pop over to www.DonsMagicAndSundry.com and sign up!

A Sticker Situation

2011-03-21T19:54:00.007-04:00

Okay, here's the deal. For a while now I've been thinking that I need to get stickers made up that I can mail out to people who are interested. They, in turn, would stick these on their trade binders or what-have-you, and BAM - instant advertising campaign! It's worked very well for Yo! MTG Taps, MtGmom.com, and Quiet Speculation (all of whose stickers I proudly own myself).

But what would the stickers look like? I have business cards:

But while they are functional, they're rather boring. I don't think they'd quite grab the eye of someone when stuck to a binder.

So, I floated out the idea to @GriffnValentine, artist extraordinaire (see his work here), who designed the Academy West hoodie I have sported at all recent MTG events I've attended. He seems to have a soft spot for MTG-related pieces, so I thought he may be able to help. And help he has!

Here are the three mock-ups he just shared with me earlier today:

And here are his notes that accompanied the image:

"Here are my 3 ideas to start:

1. A very simple scroll design. It would be simple and crisp, not much going on.

2. A treasure room motif. The idea being that your sundries are basically a room full of treasure. Lot's of color, and lots of stuff.

3. A stylish, stoic angel. Again, clean and crisp, with a designy scroll at the bottom for info."

He also noted that he was up for suggestions should none of these three tickle my fancy.

Now, the problem is that it doesn't necessarily matter which one I like, because I am not the one who theoretically will be carrying this around on my trade binder! It's more important that it be something that people will gladly affix and carry around with them.

So, here's where you come in, faithful reader! Please make comments to this blog with your thoughts (or at least vote in the poll at the top of the page!). Do you particularly favor one of the designs over another? If you aren't particularly thrilled with any of these do you have an alternative suggestion? All opinions are appreciated!

Sell me your cards!

2011-03-18T12:02:00.009-04:00

After much deliberation, and a successful experiment in buying (thanks, @xinpig!), I have finally decided it is time to adopt an official "buy policy". Many people have asked me if I have a Buy List, and this will be the closest I have to that for some time.

So, without further ado, here is (for the moment, at least) Don's Magic and Sundry's Official Buying Policy:

I will purchase any cards from you that I would list at $2 or more in my store.
I will pay 50% of my selling price as cash, 60% of my selling price as store credit (note that accepting store credit requires that you have an account set up at my store).
EXCEPTIONS: If the card is on my Non-Foil Needs List, I will pay 100% of my selling price as store credit. If it is on my Foil Needs List I will pay 75% of my selling price as store credit. These cards are easy to identify in my store inventory: they are the ones that have the silly "No Image Yet Available" Snowman Photo:
NON-ENGLISH CARDS: Chinese & Japanese cards will be purchased the same as English. All other languages I will buy at 85% of what I would pay for their English equivalent.
SPECIALTY CARDS: (e.g. miscuts, misprints, signed, crimped) These will be priced on an individual basis.
CONDITION: If the card's selling price would be over $20, I may be interested in buying it in played condition (Very Fine, Fine, Good or even Poor) but otherwise I am only interested in VF+ to mint cards (some very slight whitening from wear is okay).
WRONG SALE PRICE:Note that many cards in my inventory do not currently have a valid price listed (they are listed at $0). If you wish to see what my sell price would be for these, please let me know and I will adjust the listing accordingly.

So, what do you do if you want to sell to me?

Use my Contact Me form to drop me an email letting me know you're interested in selling.
I will email you back and ask for a list of the cards you would like to sell.
Once I have your list, I will create a Google Documents spreadsheet for you detailing my store sell price, my offer for store credit and for cash, etc. (see this document for an example of what that may look like). I will send you the link for that document.
You review the spreadsheet, and decide which (if any) of the cards you would like to remove from the sale. We then agree on a final deal.
You send the cards to me [you are responsible for any costs involved in shipping the cards to me].
Once I receive the cards, and verify their condition, etc. I will then pay you. If you choose cash, I can pay you either by PayPal transfer or check, whichever you prefer. If you choose store credit, I will credit your account with the appropriate amount.

I reserve the right to...

update my selling prices to reflect proper current market prices. For example, if a card has rotated out of standard and my current selling price is too high, I will lower the price in my store to reflect what the price should be now. Similarly, if I haven't had a card in stock for a long time and the price has gone up, I will adjust it up to reflect what it should be now.
NOT purchase bulk commons or uncommons. Sorry, but I have just too many of them I still need to process right now, I don't need to pick up any more!
purchase cards that may not be $2+ in the store, if I am out of stock of them right now.
refuse to purchase for any reason.

Reflections on the SCG DC Open

2011-02-27T14:15:00.006-05:00

Today I went to Star City Games' Legacy Open tournament in Washington DC. I felt it would be a mistake to let an event this big so close to where I live pass me by. Other plans prevented me from making the first day of the event (the Standard portion) but I wanted to show up and see what it was all like. I've been watching coverage of the SCG events on scglive for the last several events, but wanted to see one live and in person.

The following are random musings upon the experience for your reading pleasure. In no particular order...

1) I am a pathetic fanboy. Just being in the same room with such well known MTG personalities was awesome. Famous players, pundits, writers, podcasters...amazing. I saw @AffinityForBlue and @OMGWTFBHJFTW (the two Joes behind the @YoMTGTaps podcast) who were providing the coverage for scglive:
Evan Erwin (@misterorange), the man behind The Magic Show, was in attendance, himself competing in the tournament:And I got to meet John Medina (@mtgmetagame) in person finally, and watch him in action trading (with no less than Adam Styborski, AKA @the_stybs):

And (without photographic evidence to back it up), I also saw the winner of the Standard event, Gerry Thompson (@G3RRYT), another amazing player named Alex Bertoncini, and everyone's favorite MTGMom, Megan (@LifeOnAuto). To see so many people that I've only read tweets from, or seen on screen from tournament coverage, or heard on podcasts...it was just very, very cool.

2) Medina is a pretty cool guy. It was great to talk to him, and he took a second to Tweet after we got done talking: "Just met @TheSundry in person! He's #Legit" So cool. I've gained a few followers today, and I'm sure some (if not all) I have him to thank for.

3) I wish I had known more about the atmosphere of the tournament so that I could have convinced my wife it would have been fine for my 10-year-old son "c-bass" to attend. He would have loved it, and we both would have loved teaming up in the 2-Headed Giant competition in the afternoon. SCG will be holding Open events in Baltimore twice later in the year (in June and again in October), and I may look into attending one of them with c-bass.

4) It was amazing to see so many people in one place to play this game that I (we) love so much. And from what I understand, the attendance yesterday was twice as much - I can't even imagine!

5) Related to the above, my advice for any who may want to attend for the purpose of entering side events: go the second day. I imagine that yesterday was INSANELY hectic with so many people in attendance.

6) I REALLY need to make a more concerted effort to get more playing of this game in. I spend a LOT of time sorting cards, pulling orders, etc - but nowhere near enough time playing. Maybe if it's even just going to Friday Night Magic more often, I need to get more in.

So, in all, although I was only there about an hour and a half, it was definitely worth heading down for.

New giveaway option!

2011-02-17T21:14:00.004-05:00

Quick entry this go-round: Just wanted to showcase the newest possible giveaway option: the Ravnica: City of Guilds life counter!As you can see, this plastic credit-card-sized life counter features art from the Sisters of Stone Death card from Ravnica: City of Guilds. It has a spin dial for keeping track of your life total, with values from 1 to 30. And it can be yours - if it is chosen for the next giveaway, and you are the lucky one whose email address gets drawn from the pool of subscribers to my email newsletter!

4-0 at the MBS prerelease (first time in my life!)

2011-01-29T16:31:00.008-05:00

Okay, I am just a WEE bit excited today. My older son (hereafter referred to by his nickname C-bass) & I attended the prerelease for the new MTG set, Mirrodin Besieged. And for the first time in my life I went 4-0 at a tournament. Absolutely awesome. What follows is a bit of a tourney report for anyone who may be interested in such things.
Above is a photo of my winnings - 9 Faction packs of Mirrodin Besieged. I was actually given 5 Phyrexian packs & 4 Mirran packs initially, but traded 1-for-1 with someone, because I didn't care that much one way or the other. Below the faction packs are the poison counter tiles that took me to victory (if you'd like to get these yourself, you may find them for sale at Ender's Games here). I should also mention that I sported my Academy West hoodie from @GriffnValentine - info on which is available here.

So, C-bass and I arrived at the tourney site (the Holiday Inn in College Park, MD right next to the Ikea) about 40 minutes before the doors were supposed to open. We got to the main doors to find the owner of the store hosting the event (Dream Wizards in Rockville) unloading her car. Quickly we volunteered to help lug in boxes of product for her along with various members of her staff and Daily MTG writer Adam Styborski (AKA @the_stybs on Twitter). Once that was done, C-bass and I played a couple of friendly games against each other with the decks we had brought, then joined the queue once it was forming to register for the event.

While we waited in line, a group of folks right ahead of us began trading with a group right behind us, so we were privy to the goings on. There was one gentlemen, who I will refer to as the Trade Shark, who obviously studied at the Jonathan Medina School of Trading. Everything was trading for increase in value, he started everything with "what do you value this at..." etc. I've never seen Medina trade in person, but I felt like I got a small glimpse of what it may be like.

For some reason I took an instant and thorough dislike for Trade Shark.

For those not in the know, this prerelease did something never done before. When you register, you picked a faction in the war for Mirrodin - either the defending Mirran group, or the invading Phyrexian group. Your choice would determine which packs you got to open for your sealed pool, and also which foil prerelease promo you received. I let C-bass pick which faction he wanted, and I chose the other, so we'd get both promos.

C-bass chose Mirran, so I was Phyrexian, and off we went with our shiny new cards. After a bit of a wait, we got our packs (each got 3 packs of Scars of Mirrodin, and 3 packs of Mirrodin Besieged specific to our faction). We had 40 minutes to build our decks, and then we awaited pairings for the first round.

Here's the deck I ended up playing for (almost) every game:

8x Forest
9x Swamp
Blackcleave Goblin
Contagious Nym
Flensermite
Flesh-Eater Imp
Phyrexian Crusader
Scourge Servant
Blight Mamba
Blightwidow
2x Rot Wolf
Core Prowler
2x Necropede
2x Phyrexian Digester
Plague Myr
Horrifying Revelation
Virulent Wound
Pistus Strike
2x Unnatural Predation
Untamed Might
Wing Puncture
Argentum Armor
Bonehoard
Grafted Exoskeleton
Strandwalker
Strider Harness

To our mutual dismay, C-bass and I were paired off against each other for Round 1. For me this was the only non-enjoyable part of the day. I really wish I hadn't had to play against my own son in Round 1, because ONE of us would have our hopes of going 4-0 crushed right off the bat. I know he wouldn't want me to play poorly on purpose just to "let" him win, so I played as I would against anyone. Unfortunately, his deck did not prove a match for the Infecting power I brought, and I went 2-0 in that round.

For round 2, I decided to try a blue-black build instead, mainly because I REALLY wanted to use the Consecrated Sphinx that I got in one of my packs. Game 1 of Round 2 was a DISASTER as a result, and I quickly swapped out the blue cards for the Green again for game 2. I then went on to win the next two games. Now I'm 2-0 for the tourney. This opponent was also Phyrexian-aligned, BTW.

Round 3 my opponent was Trade Shark. He plays VERY fast, throwing down cards, tapping, attacking, whooosh. As an opponent I find that VERY annoying. It felt like he was pressuring me to play faster, so since I had already taken a dislike to him I deliberately slowed my play, taking my time and making sure I made the right decision. I think this annoyed him, and that made me happy. He won game 1 (with Glissa, the Traitor and several other REALLY good cards which made me wonder if he was playing strictly by the rules and not including the cards that he had, moments before, been bragging about trading for) and I thought it was over for sure. But game 2 went my way, I managed to kill everything he brought out, and his double Mortarpod on one Creature did NOT allow him to ping for two as he had hoped (or hoped I could be talked into). And game 3 was won by a lovely combo of sacrificing Blight Mamba and Core Prowler to the Flesh-Eater Imp, then cast Unnatural Predation on it to get 5 poison in the air for the last 5 counters. Boo-ya! The only thing that could make going 4-0 feel better was taking down this guy in the process.

The final opponent, one of the other three with a 3-0 record, was Mirran aligned. He handily won the first game in the air although I had him at 9 poison counters (I thought I had him in my last turn, but a well-played Master's Call gave him two unexpected Myr blockers, and prevented that last poison counter from being dealt). I didn't see any of my anti-Flying stuff in that game, and he just soared over my defenses with no problem. Game 2 and 3, however, went much more my way (he had mana problems game 2, never seeing a Mountain, except for the one I made him mill with Horrifying Revelation). Game 3 was more of a nail-biter (especially since whoever won it went 4-0), but I eked it out. I can say that the Phyrexian Crusader, with his First Strike, Infect, and Protection from Red & White were crucial in this match-up. He could only block with his artifact creatures, and Peace Strider is not as useful when his 3/3 body gets 2 First-Strike -1/-1 counters on it before he gets to deal damage. Nice 1/1 Peace Strider, dude.

C-bass, meanwhile, lost Round 2 and decided to completely change decks for Round 3. While this new deck performed better, he still lost Round 3, and decided to drop out at that point. He went over to play @the_stybs (who was gunslinging for the event) and got a nice Purifying Fire Jones Soda for his efforts. Adam reports that he [C-bass] "tore me apart." That made C-bass feel a little better.

So, all in all, a very enjoyable day. C-bass was (understandably) disappointed, but it was not a total disaster. I think he may go back to the Open Dueling type of event next go-round (he's not so confident in his deck-building skills yet to try Sealed again) but, maybe some day.

All listings activated!

2010-12-12T22:26:00.002-05:00

Okay, I bit the bullet, and unchecked the "Hide products from catalog when quantity is zero" option in ProStores. Now every single card I have in my database will be displayed in a search on my store, whether I have that card in inventory or not.

Some (potential?) benefits from this:
1) This may (I won't know for a few days probably) overcome the Google search issue where if I'm out of stock my items don't show up in a Google search.
2) If I can get off my duff and price everything (which I haven't yet - I've been pricing cards as I add them - so many quantity=0 items have price=$0 as well!) then people can comparison shop.
3) People can add out of stock items to wish lists (this has been confirmed - so this one's a definite benefit - next I need to figure out how to do a "Notify me when this comes in stock" thing).

Some problems with this:
1) I still don't have photos for many items. I need to figure out what to do with them - make a "Photo Coming" image to default to?
2) If you search with the hope of buying, there's now a LOT more cards to sift through - this may annoy many potential buyers. (I'm working on creating a "only display in stock items" option in the Advanced Search, but so far the programming has proven beyond me.)

These problems, hopefully, can be overcome. We shall see.

In the meantime, if you'd like to be amused, check out the search results if you search for items in the Beta Edition (the one I have the least products in stock for).

The next giveaway - What are the choices again?

2010-11-25T10:52:00.003-05:00

Welcome back to the latest installment of "I'm giving away random M:TG related items that I happen to have lying around my house, and you get to help pick what goes next." Winner of the "Reality show with the longest name" award for 2010.

This go-round your choices are as follows (see the poll above for your chance to vote):

A random box-topper from the 3 I have remaining (Ambition's Cost, Avatar of Hope or Underworld Dreams - all 8th Edition). See this earlier post for details on what a box-topper is if you don't already know.
The Tahngarth life-counter card from The Duelist issue #31. More details (including what it looks like) can be found in this entry at the Magic Librarities.
An unopened pack of 8 Double-Sided Tokens. At the risk of sending business to another store, this store is selling them if you want to see what they look like. I have several packs of these to give away.
An Ultra Pro Dual Life Counter featuring art by Elmore (the "Dragon Rider" version seen in this search). I've got two of these to give away, ultimately.

Those are the options this time (to be given away by random drawing to a subscribed to my email newsletter [sign up at www.DonsMagicAndSundry.com] on Thursday, December 9, 2010). Future choices will probably include the very oversized Thorn Elemental promo card from Starter 1999, a Lorwyn playmat as well as more Fallen Empires tokens & counters from The Duelist.

Another mystery signature...

2010-11-20T20:50:00.008-05:00

Here's another mystery signature. I have four copies of this Wall of Roots (from Mirage) with a signature (initials, really) that looks like "LB":

But the artist on this card is John Matson, whose initials are clearly not "LB". And it just so happens that I have another card from Mirage, Purraj of Urborg, with art by John Matson that is signed by him:

So I think it is quite clear that the Wall of Roots signature is not Mr. Matson's. So, whose signature is it? Any ideas?

Can you help me ID these?

2010-11-20T14:20:00.006-05:00

Okay, here's the deal. I just got done processing a bunch of photos of what I am calling "Specialty Cards". These are cards that are signed (some non-English), or misprinted, or miscut, or crimped, etc. In other words, cards that appeal to a more limited audience than your normal Magic cards.

While working on these, I came across three cards that have proven themselves a mystery to me. The biggest problem with the signed cards is that all of these have come to me from collections that I have bought in the past. This means that I cannot, 100% for certain, verify that the signatures are indeed the actual signatures of the artists involved. I will be certain to state such when I list them - I don't want to mislead anyone.

But these three cards CLEARLY are not signed by their artists. The signature is identical, but all three have different artists. Instead, I figure these may be signed by someone "famous" to Magic, perhaps even the designer of the card.

That's where you, hopefully, come in. Can you identify whose signature appears on these three cards? Please comment to the post if you have any ideas or suggestions!

"You're giving away WHAT now?"

2010-10-23T10:54:00.003-04:00

In my latest Blog Poll, the option of "Box-toppers? Really? Don't you have anything ELSE to give away?" narrowly edged out the 9th Edition Hell's Caretaker box-topper for the next giveaway prize. This meant I had to go find something besides a box-topper to give away (which I would have had to do eventually, once I ran out of them, but I thought I'd have a few more months).

Then I remembered that I had a box of these beauties sitting around:
These are cardboard punch-out counters and tokens intended to accompany the Fallen Empires set. They were originally included in an issue of The Duelist Magazine (issue #4 to be exact). Here's the Magic Arcana article from Daily MTG that covered these for those possessed of incurable curiosity.

Fallen Empires was a set notorious for generating lots of different token creatures (1/1 White Citizens, 1/1 Green Saprolings, 1/1 Blue Camarids, 0/1 Black Thrulls and 1/1 Red Goblins) from lots of different cards (such as Icatian Town, Elvish Farmer, Homarid Spawning Bed, Breeding Pit and Goblin Warrens, respectively). It also made lots of different counters (Spore, Credit, Time, Javelin, Net and Tide as well as -1/-1, +1/+1 and a variety of +/- combinations that are no longer used in Magic at all) for lots of different cards (Spore Flower, Icatian Moneychanger, Tourach's Gate, Icatian Javelineers, Merseine, Tidal Influence, respectively, as examples).

So, to help with all these different tokens & counters, WotC included these in with The Duelist.

When I rediscovered these, I Tweeted to my followers the above photo and asked if these were junk, or an awesome giveaway. The overwhelming response as "awesome giveaway". So, this coming Thursday (October 28, 2010 for those who may be reading this later) I will be giving away some subset of my collection of these beauties to a random winner chosen from amongst the subscribers to my email newsletter (I say subset because according to my inventory & this handy website detailing the exact contents of one of these sheets, I have 2+ sheets worth of these guys).

Not already a subscriber? Visit my home page at www.DonsMagicAndSundry.com and sign up - it's free and easy and I promise not to overfill your email inbox (I typically send less than a newsletter a month).