June 24, 2017 | Standard | Time: 12pm - 6pm
HJ: Tobias Durose
Players: 21 | Winner: Markus Thibeau

This one was kind of interesting, I'd never done a PPTQ at Treasure Chest before, I'd also never played a PPTQ there either, so I didn't know what kind of numbers or who to expect.

The first thing I realized was that this was going to be one of those places where I was flying very solo, the TO didn't really know much about magic, so the support coming from them was going to be basically nothing. Which honestly, would've freaked me out a few months ago, but by now these things are old hat. The other thing I noticed was that we didn't have access to a printer, I was kind of coming off (or going into) a cold and I know I don't project vocally very well even when healthy, and wasn't really up to yelling a bunch of names and eating tournament time, so instead I decided that if the turnout was small enough (which it fortunately was) I would just have the players come up to the computer to see their pairings and I would take reports verbally (a little unnerving since I know I make a lot of mistakes but I decided to be extra careful!)

Round 1 came, I made announcements letting players know what was what, and got them playing pretty quickly. During this round I collected, organized and counted all the decklists. Round two I had some kind of parking announcement that mucked my ability to do a pre-sideboard deck check, so I grabbed a midround instead, round 3 I did another deck check, some guy had 6 forest 6 swamp registered but when I counted he had 5 forest 7 swamp, I called him over and fanned the cards and determined that it wasn't actually a 7th swamp but in fact a swampy-looking forest. Player seemed relieved, his opponent was a little confused when I said nothing had happened but there were no followup questions.

Overall it was super quiet, I had a few very simple rules calls and a stack I needed to work out, but other than that there were basically no infractions. I guess this is to be expected, WotC is literally only taking cards out of the card pool.

To be honest, everything went really smoothly, we fired a few rounds before the timer expired so I just gave those tables time extensions (all infractions & extensions were stored on a notepad in my phone, because, remember, no match slips) I feel like this is the first tournament I have run where I don't have any really catastrophic errors to report. (which is good because one of the local and very experienced L2's was playing) I feel like there were a lot of things that could've gone wrong (mostly erroneously entering scores or people misreporting) or being called while in the middle of a deck check, but none of that actually happened.

There was one thing that did bother me about the tournament though, and that was the prize support. We had 21 players at $30/player, which is $630

$630 total pot
-$96 judge fees
=$534 total pot
534/ 4 (rough market value of a pack) = 133

through calculation I figured I'd be giving out about 3-4 boxes of product give or take. I was told that I'd be distributing 2 boxes of product flat. This was... a little disconcerting, the person working told me that the store owner would like to turn a profit on the event. Again, his venue his decision, but I knew the players would not be pleased, and unfortunately, nothing about prize support had been previously stated so it wasn't like the players knew beforehand.

There is about $246 that simply vanished from the prize pool, that's pretty significant. Magic in BC is priced pretty competitively and I've known some stores to run events at a loss, considering it an advertisement, or hoping to make it back on singles (I don't know if this is a great business model) we also have one store that is full on crazy train and does double prize pool for some reason.

After making up a somewhat anemic looking prize pool I went back to the person working and asked if we could add anything else to the pool, she said that she would take a look around. Since it seemed like giving away other stuff from the store was A-OK.

In the end I managed to get two prerelease packs (+12 packs yay!) and a “worthy challenger” mat. She also gave me a pile of promos and said I could give those out, but after leafing through them there wasn't really anything in there the players would find of value, and I felt like it would be kind of an insult to include them.

In the end my prize support looked like this:

1st : RPTQ invite
2nd: 1Box + Mat
3-4: 4 packs + prerelease kit
5-8: 7 packs each

as expected one of my regulars came up and looked at the prize pool suspiciously and asked how many packs went into the pot, I told him the truth, he seemed a little upset but I think he understood I did what I could.

I considered breaking up the box and doing a first and second prize pile, but I felt like that would further enunciate the lack of prizes. Also, I would be opening a perfectly good box and loose packs are kind of worse on the secondary market than boxes. I figured there'd be a little prize distribution discussion in the finals anyways.

Prize support is something that is very standardized, some store owners kind of just pick a number out of thin air and go with it. In my uneducated opinion, there are a few main determinants of tournament attendance, payout, location & past experience. I think location being the strongest factor, however prize support pulls in a close second, especially the more competitive demographic, and if players know that the store is shaving a significant amount of their entries off, the probability of them returning is much lower. For a store like this I'm not sure how this is going to impact their future attendance, but I am definitely a little worried.

It's not really a judge specific concern, but more of a community issue, and as part of the the community it impacts I think it is something that is worth thinking about.

What is everyone elses experience with prize support? What is normal in your areas? What do you think is fair for both the stores and the players? I'm interested to hear if things are different in other regions.

Thanks for reading :3