Blog

Ry Schueller

Long time no talk, heroes and allies! It’s been a busy month for the Organized Play Team. We now have NACC and Origins behind us, and EUCC is this coming weekend. It’s great meeting up with players at events ,putting faces to names, and your humble narrator has spent the last two weeks doing just that. Talking with players, volunteers, and hobby store owners really does help me do my job better.

As you might imagine, a topic that comes up frequently is tournament events. Each year has a full schedule of tournament events ranging from your local hobby store’s weekly Battleground tournament to the World Championship. Before I crit everyone with a wall of text explaining all of our events and how some events flow into larger tournaments (and since I’m sure many of you are visual learners like I am), I present to you the following flow chart that I threw together to help explain some of this. Please note that this is how things look in North America and doesn’t properly account for Europe’s National Qualifier and Championship season.

Feel free to click on the flow chart to make it bigger.

Casual Local Events

At the foundation of this chart, we have our local hobby store run events. These are casual tournaments aimed at providing players a consistent local scene that they can attend without traveling too far to do so. These include weekly Battleground tournaments, Holiday Celebrations occurring approximately every two months, and Release Parties for each booster expansion throughout the year.

These events are open to every hobby store that has been verified as a Battleground location and that maintains good standing with our Organized Play programs. Stores do this by sanctioning events in advance and uploading the results of these tournaments so players may receive Honor for participating. All of these materials are provided to hobby stores free of charge.

Major Local Events

The next tier up on the chart is for the ‘Premier’ events. While we encourage stores and volunteers to express an interest in hosting these events, we place these events ourselves.  These are events that players will often travel to attend, and most players should be able to find a location that they can get to within their region. Every store in good standing is in the running for these events, but there are a limited number of them to be offered in each area. We work to space these out geographically so more players have access to them.

These include programs that players are familiar with like Realm Qualifiers and Spectral Safaris, and will also include the new Draft Rally and Showdown events.

Regional/National/Realm Championships

These events are larger and attract a greater number of players than other local events, even if they’re still hosted inside of larger hobby stores. These are events that players need to qualify for by participating in local events, and they offer unique prizes like the VIP Card.

Major Conventions

Here lie the Darkmoon Faires and the Continental Championships we run for North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific regions. These are events run directly by the Cryptozoic Team, and we send a few members of our staff to oversee these events. The assistance of experienced judges and Champions of the Black Flame are what makes these events successful, and it gives out team an opportunity to interact and observe these volunteers in person.

Global Scale

At the top of this chart are World Cup and World Championships. Players can earn an invite to the World Championship each year from a variety of events or the proper Honor rank, and even players that don’t have the opportunities to travel to multiple large regional events throughout the year can still accumulate honor by playing at their local Battleground store.

Where to Play

The goal of all of this is to give you, the reader, places to go play the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game and different types of events to play in. Different types of tournaments appeal to different types of players. We also want some events to flow into other events so players who are engaged in a series of events have some destination to look forward to at the end of a tournament season.

We’re working to make local hobby stores a destination for their region, and local scale events from this chart are one way that we do that. Major local events are a way we can reward good stores and volunteers that excel in their regions and encourage other players to travel to these destinations to see what they offer to their players.

We also want to make World Championships each year a prestigious event where players can play against the best players in the world, but still have this event to accessible to players that want to work to qualify to participate in the highest level of event that the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game offers each calendar year.

Which events are you the reader the most excited about on the current tournament schedule?