Good news, everyone! After weeks of complaining that we have no information about anything, we’ve finally got a date for the War of the Spark prerelease.

Here’s the thing: on paper this sounds okay. A prerelease GP? Neat.I see a lot of people excited by the prospect, and on paper it does sound pretty cool. Unfortunately it’s been executed and communicated horribly.

I spent yesterday evening speaking to judges, TOs, storeowners and players. Here’s the rundown on why so many of us in the UK are upset.

The Stores

Prereleases are a huge deal for stores. They’re the events that see everyone come in: competitive players who want new cards for standard, casual Friday Night Magic players, kitchen table players who only play in store events at prereleases. They’re the events people bring their friends to when they’re learning to play or making the transition from playing at home to playing in store.

GP weekends in the UK generally mean a big hit for local stores. Not only are many of their players absent for a number of days, including one Friday Night Magic, but the cost of attending and playing in a GP feeds back into what players spend in store in the weeks before and after the event.

With this in mind, having a prerelease GP is likely to have a pretty big impact on the LGS network here. Saying “but the players aren’t going to prerelease at a GP over their LGS” is a bit of a false equivalence, as a lot of them now don’t have that choice. The GP has been picked over the store completely inadvertently.

And that’s not even mentioning staffing issues, if the store employees who run Magic events are attending the GP, as a number of them are.

Which brings us neatly onto:

The Judges

From a judging perspective, applications to be on staff at London closed nearly two weeks ago. Judges who get accepted will be judging a competitive REL prerelease, with brand new cards neither they or the players have used, in a set that’s being touted as more complex than either Guilds of Ravnica or Ravnica Allegiance.

Good luck have fun!

More than that, many LGS owners are not Magic players. In these instances, judges are invaluable to the success of things like prereleases – they run them, judge them, and in a lot of cases their very presence means that these events can happen at all. By now, a lot of these judges have financially committed to attending the GP, whether they’ve applied to be on staff or not.

These judges are now left in the awkward position of choosing between an event they’ve made a financial commitment to – and in some cases, a significant one – and their local game store that will struggle to run events for the community over prerelease weekend without them.

Also, the judges who are working at this event – judging a main event with cards that haven’t been played before – are getting paid in boxes of Ravnica Allegiance. Not War of the Spark.

Yeah.

The Players

Even from a player perspective, there are divided loyalties. It’s been drummed into us by content creators and store owners that our LGS is the beating heart of our communities, that we should be attending events and buying products from them instead of through chain retailers like Amazon. And we do, because we recognise the importance of them.

Now Wizards of the Coast, while they’re attempting to give the players a great event, have invariably given players the choice of attending one of the few GPs in the UK or supporting their local store.

Look at the description on the Wizards site of a prerelease. I’m not sure how running a prerelease at a GP that will be heavily attended by the UK Magic community is conducive to any of this happening.

The Communication

This is the main issue for a lot of people. It wasn’t communicated when it was announced as a Limited GP, leaving many people assuming that it would be War of the Spark sealed. It wasn’t communicated before the staffing applications opened. It wasn’t communicated to stores, giving them a chance to adjust their staffing or event schedule. It wasn’t communicated to players, many of whom would rather play a prerelease for £25 at their local game store than spend £70 on top of their other expenses.

Wizards have also yet to tell us what the new store level scene will look like going forwards. At the time of writing it’s been 130 days since they announced PPTQs were no more. Since then there’s been no information, aside from a promise we’d hear more before MagicFest Cleveland, which is next week. Scheduling a prerelease on the same weekend as a MagicFest really, really feels like a slap in the face for the stores who’ve been waiting for weeks to hear what’s happening with store level competitive play.

If you’re not going to the GP, attend a prerelease and support your local game store. If you ARE going to the GP, go in anyway, buy a few packs if you can and play some games.

It’s an uncomfortable time, with questions around the future of the game, particularly at store level. This announcement is only raising more. Support your LGS. Be good to your judges and each other. We’re all working for the same thing: the community. ❤