Update: Tony Pagliocco and his team have now fixed the issue!

I logged into Planeswalker Points to see how I’d done for the year. For Scotland I was sitting about 50th for the year and 299th of all time. Pretty cool for having only played Magic for a year.

A few days later I was discussing with friends, one of whom had an old 6 digit DCI number and couldn’t find their new one. I fiddled around trying to spot and saw something strange. I was now 13th for the year and 21st best of all time. Something wrong there methinks.

The thing that stood out was that the only people whos names I recognised started about the same time as me. Everyone I knew to be above me was missing. I contacted one to check and he had been changed to be registered to Britain rather than Scotland.

Ah some bizarre nationalist political point I’m making in the run up to the referendum this year, or perhaps a stance taken by the Scottish magic community to show they are opposed and see themselves as British! Well no, looks like Wizards did some kind of data update and broke the data, reverting old accounts to be British and not Scottish.

Why is this important? Soon we’ll have the World Cup Qualifiers. Players have to be registered as Scotland (and England, Wales, etc respectfully) to be allowed to take part in the qualifiers to try and be in the team representing their country.

Last years Scottish team was Stephen Murray, Jamie Ross, Alan Hutton and Bradley Barclay. A quick check shows none of them in the lifetime top 100 for Scotland.

Brad is now the 7th best in Britain, Jamie Ross 114th. Various other Scottish players from Dundee are now in the British list too.

As soon as I saw this I contacted Wizards to let them know. Their reply was:

Thank you for contacting us. Changes to nationality are typically applied at the beginning of the year. While we are not able to provide information about a specific account to anyone but that account’s owner, it is possible that some players may have requested this change. If any players have mentioned to you that their accounts have changed nationality in error, then please ask them to contact us directly, and we would be happy to help those players.

So rather than check why loads of people including half the Scottish team from last year have definitely had their nationality changed they are leaving it up to individuals to check and then contact them if they spot a problem.

So if you want to play in your countries World Cup Qualifiers you need to:

1. Check your nationality is down as the correct one

1. b. if not contact Wizards to have it corrected

2. Go to your Friendly Local Games Store and win some matches at FNM, Pre-release, Release weekend or the upcoming Grand Prix Trial or Pro Tour Qualifier to make sure you have at least 100 points (for Scotland, different countries vary).

Tags: Magic: the Gathering, Wizards, World Cup