Blog

Ry Schueller

Welcome back to our OP Blog, heroes and allies! Currently the US team is gearing up for the North American Continental Championship next week, and we’re trying to iron out the final details of our ‘Summer/Fall Hobby Program’ (working title!) so that we may announce it in the next week or two. No, I’m not talking about the Spectral Safaris in July. As eluded too in a few forum posts, the CZE OP Team is rolling out something new that’s available to every store worldwide that’s been awesome about sanctioning and uploading their events.

We’re not quite there yet. In the meanwhile, I’d like to chat briefly about what goes into designing an Organized Play Program that will be effective for local play communities. To put it simply, the goals of our hobby store OP programs are to give World of Warcraft TCG fans a reason to get their game on and get them organized at the local hobby store level. Designing a good program that gets players to do this, maybe for the first time ever in the case of new players, is where our team comes in.

Creating an Identity

Offering new, different, and interesting formats is one way we can engage a player base. Using promo cards such as Token of Justice redemption cards that release about a month after each booster set is also a great way to keep the metagame fresh, and gets people thinking about new deck types or improving current deck types.

It’s difficult to design a good program that can appeal to everyone. A good OP program encourages participation from players of a variety of levels to ranging from your new player that just bought his or her first class starter deck, to your competitive player that knows what every card ever printed does. Anyone can buy cards and play with their friends at home. What can we do to make you want to go out to play with people you may not know?

What prizes are you excited for in the future?

Johnny, Tell Him What He’s Won!

Picking prizes that encourage players to go out and play casually or competitively is probably one of the trickiest parts of this job. We have to work within budgets that will allow us to offer events frequently throughout the year, but still have cool prizes that players will travel to acquire.

We also want to offer new prizes to get players excited, and doing something different like the VIP Card for our Realm Championship winners this year rewards those players that achieve success in our Organized Play events in different ways than they've ever been rewarded before.

We try to offer other types of prizes that players will place value in.

I Have Come Here for Phat Lewts

The Spectral Safari has historically been one of our best attended events globally. We want this hobby store exclusive event to be special, and that influences our decision on how many of these to run over one weekend. We also want it to be accessible to new players and that influences the format for the event.

Spectral Safaris use the Class Starter Deck product. Players use the pre-constructed deck right out of the box, and there’s no deckbuilding for this event. Participation Loot Cards for the first 25 players at each location should encourage players to sign up early. That, in turn, gives stores a better idea of how many players to expect so they can have the right number of Class Starter Decks available.

The Hunt Is On this July!

The OP team has been working hard to give players things to do in their local stores, and to build a number of programs of different levels so players have a reason to go out and play the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game (and often!) no matter what their skill levels are.

It’s also important to us to get hobby retailers excited about hosting these programs, so they continue to make their stores a destination for players to go play. We work to make many of these hobby OP programs worthwhile to those retailers.

Thanks for checking in with the OP Team this week! We’re hitting the road soon, and we certainly look forward to seeing each and every one of you who’s attending North America Continentals next week.