The Games Club Wednesday Constructed Leagues 2012

[Crispin Bateman]

The official announcement is here: http://forum.magicmadhouse.co.uk/viewforum.php?f=15

Assuming you have read all that, I am very pleased to be running these leagues with Jason and hope that all of you Londoners can make it. There has been a small but vocal community of constructed players in London who miss having decent events in the capital and I hope this will fix that problem. In addition to the leagues, we will be running some big prize tournaments at weekends; watch this space. (or that space, more accurately!)

Hope to see all of you next Wednesday.

[Nick Lovett]

This would have been great - If you hadn't picked the only night of the week other than Tuesday Night drafting that I have a commitment I cannot move!

[Crispin Bateman]

If I had a magic power which meant there was a new day in the week where no one had any commitments then I'd use it, unfortunately... Originally we considered running this all alongside the draft on Tuesday but in the end we felt it deserved it's own dedicated day so that players weren't forced to choose between constructed and limited. Hopefully the number of people who cannot come due to the Wednesday time slot are few and far between.

[Thomas David Baker]

This is great stuff.  I particularly like proxies allowed as all my cards are in the trunk of my car in the US right now.

[Philip Dickinson]

the prize support is excellent! i unfortunately do not have the time to make regular weekly appearances but i know there are a number of players who will be very pleased with this announcement

[Crispin Bateman]

This is tomorrow! Hope you are all coming! See you there.

[Gary Lynch]

WOW, this is amazing. Great prizes.

If players dont go to this and ever complain about events they need a HARD smack in the face.

These events actually make it worth owning a deck. There are no excuses to not play this, well unless you live thousands of miles away :)

[Dan Barrett]

I agree this series is great, even though I personally would prefer one-off (weekend) tournaments for a smaller prize purse - Wednesday's are just no good for me, and making a regular commitment to the same day each time can be a problem for some of us.

[Crispin Bateman]

Weekend tournaments are coming too.... Don't you fear!

[Dan Barrett]

Awesome news!

Just as some general feedback - £15 entry for a tournament that only offers prizes to the top 4 (and only 2 of them win more than their entry fee back) is too top heavy IMO. I don't expect to win/make the big prizes at every event I enter, but I do think getting a few boosters for a winning record is reasonable, I don't pay to play tournaments just so someone else can get 4 duals, you know? Also, prize distribution shouldn't be such that splitting is the obvious answer once you make top 4 or 8. I like seeing tournaments played out to a winner too.

[Crispin Bateman]

This really is a discussion for another thread, but in short...

Every tournament has to break even. Costs of running tournaments especially in London are almost prohibitively high. In order to have big prizes at the top of the chain, sacrifices such as booster prizes for lower down the list have to be made. There are of course adjustments to be made on the equation, but as a general rule, it is much more exciting to have big top end prizes than weak prizes throughout and doing so attracts more players. While you may like to win a booster or two for coming fifteenth or whatever, it would mean that the top prizes are a lot weaker and less people would turn up as a whole. Feel free to have this discussion with me personally at some point in real life, Dan, but it goes into specifics which I do not think are correctly discussed on a public forum. I'm sure you, and anyone else interested, can do the maths yourself anyway!

As for prize splitting; I hate it with a passion and we are working on all sorts of cool ideas to stop it from happening. To my mind, a tounament should be played through to having a true winner and anything else devalues everything that went on beforehand.

[Glenn Goldsworthy]

I actually hate playing tourneys were everyone gets prizes no matter how bad people are, if you do well you get hardly anything as the prizes are split very thin, I would prefer the tournys I do well in to be worth my while and the tournys I don't do well in to be a learning experiance not about gaining a booster.

I haven't done any research but for me better prizes at the top would make me show rather than poor prizes at the top and everyone getting something.

Dan - get better at magic!

[Dan Barrett]

I didn't say everyone, just more than 2/3 people!