Blog

Ry Schueller

Welcome to the era of monsters, heroes and allies! Throne of the Tides is the first set of the Aftermath block, and we’re all super excited about the impact this block is going to make on Organized Play. We’re about ready to release our full 2012 Organized Play Schedule at World Championships in just a few short weeks, and we had this schedule in mind when making a few of these tweaks to the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game Policies Appendix.

As a nod to MMO fans, I present these changes to you in World of Warcraft patch note style! The most recent version of all of our tournament documents can always be found at www.wowtcg.com/policy

General

• Two Block Core Rotation is now live. For any Core Format event for about the next year, players will build their decks with cards that are legal from the Worldbreaker and Aftermath blocks. The next Core rotation will occur when the first expansion in the 7^th block launches (tentatively Fall 2012).
• This will affect deckbuilding for the Goblins of Anarchy Showdown events occurring the weekend of November 5^th and 6^th.
• For additional information about this change, feel free to reference Patrick’s article here. 

Two-Pack Hero Changes

• A hero card isn’t inserted in every Throne of the Tides booster pack. If you get a Loot card, a Crafting material or a token ally card you will not receive a hero card in your booster.
• Players choose their hero from the two packs they opened.
• If a player doesn’t open a hero, then that player is considered to have a “generic” hero with 30 health. This hero does not have a class, a faction, a race or any powers.

Two-Headed Ogre

• Players are no longer required to play the same faction for Two-Headed Ogre events.
• Two-Headed Ogre Constructed is a format where two players form a team and play together against another two player team. In the past, official Two-Headed Ogre Constructed tournaments required players to play with heroes from the same faction. Well, officially Monster isn’t actually a faction in the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game, however with the launch of Monster heroes in Throne of the Tides, we felt that retaining this rule could be confusing to fans of this format.

Team Format

• Instead of merely requiring players to play with different classes for future team events, the new policy for deck construction at Constructed Format Team events is players on a team are allowed to have only 4 copies of any individual card across all three of their decks. For example, if I’m playing with 4 copies of Burly Berta in my deck, then neither of my teammates are allowed to run Burly Berta in their decks.
• This change should increase the diversity in deck construction at large events, and make deck building feel like a team effort. This should also make these events more unique as many players will be playing decks that are different to what they might play in other tournaments.
• Our tournaments with three player teams were huge successes in 2011, and we’d like to do more of this as part of our 2012 Organized Play plan. We want these events to fill a different space and the goal is to keep these events fresh and exciting for players and create a special meta for players that enjoy participating in these types of tournaments.

The Cryptozoic Organized Play team feels that these changes create a better experience for our players, and we’re excited how these changes compliment Throne of the Tides and the Aftermath block. Look for our full 2012 Organized Play Schedule to be released during the World Championship weekend in Rotterdam over the weekend of November 10^th – 13^th, to see where you can find locations to play events in the formats listed above, or your other favorite format events.