MTG Salvation

Quote from haseothepunisher

The only reason im upset is I had to pay an extra 5 bucks for the event and got a normal helvault. Because many distributors told lgs to increase their pr price for the helvault events.

Distributors have nothing to do with Helvaults

Quote from ∞8∞

It looks like a lot of people on MTGS and other forums are upset, but you must realize that the online communities (many of whom share users) are a very small portion of Magic players. For the people who participated at my LGS's prerelease, I'd estimate half of the players still don't know that there were premium Helvaults (and may never will), and of the half that did find out, the large majority couldn't care less.

Most everyone had a lot of fun where I go even though our LGS didn't get a premium Helvault. Saying that stuff like this hurts the community is very misleading because when you go offline and actually observe the results, the complete opposite seems true.

In my opinion, it was a nice and different promotion to drum up some extra excitement. It's certainly better than doing the same old stuff.

Yeah, should try telling that to the players in my community here. At least 40 of our 50 mainstay players have sent complaints to WotC regarding this, most due to the general dissatisfaction of the helvault not being anything more than what they've given out at past events with less hype, some also on the promos.

As there have been various confirmed reports of it now, this had led to stores charging more based on what distributors told them (NOTE: The Helvaults did come from WotC, but of course it's in the distributors best interest to drum up all their stores to do it so they could sell more product in the long run; I work for the local gamestore and our distributors called us a few time to try and discuss how we'd be handling the event, to which our reply was 'Our way' and proceeded to ignore them otherwise on the subject), stores stealing the promos and foils for themselves, and a number of people throughout this thread and a number of other M:TG related forums saying they will no longer support their core store in favor of going to the advanced store further away, and/or accusing their store (falsely or not) of ripping them off on the foils. This is highly damaging to the community, perhaps not from the perspective of the more casual player who is probably 90% unaware as to the discrepancy in values between the premium and non-premium helvaults and couldn't care either way, but from the sight of both the stores and the people who play regularly, it's an affront not to be taken lightly.

This just in from Wizards...

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg%2Fdaily%2Farcana%2F963

Apparently there were over 6000 helvaults and only 30 of them were the premium type. And of the premium ones only a few contained judge promos. I feel a little less ripped off now. And many of you should feel extremely lucky. Anyway just wanted to share this.

I just realized if they had announced this before the event people would have signed up for 2-3 pre releases easily.

I think what Wizards did was awful. How do you give some stores $100 promos, and not others? Don't want to over saturate the market with Judge promos? Fine that makes sense, but then don't give ANYONE judge promos. What really gets me is that 30 of these things had foiled tokens and big cards. Why didn't all of them have foiled versions? seriously, it doesnt cost wizards any more to ship out the foil versions :\

All they did was make people resent their store for not being an advanced store, and make people more interested in traveling 2 hours away than attending their local stores release events. Seriously, who the heck do they have doing their marketing?

what people are complaining here are but small things that gamers care about. you have been ripped $5 more? blame the distributors. not WoTC. for me, i've enjoyed playing last weekend's pre-release. and being able to have an extra price would mean extra experience on my gaming experience. WoTC did an excellent job here. that's what i think and i will definitely come back to play more.

We should question how they are claiming this as a random and fair event structure, when clearly as many have pointed out they only randomly selected from Advanced stores, and did not even give Core or Gateway stores a chance. To see what it takes to be in these categories, and the benefits the different levels receive, look here:

http://www.wizards.com/WPN/WhyJoin.aspx#Levels

This really isn't a question of what they did, but more a question of how what they did will now affect the future. First, should they ever hint at doing something like a Helvault again, no matter what they say about distribution of promotional items, many people will not go to Core or Gateway stores for an event that features a promotion anything like this. They will instead go to Advanced stores for the big events, leaving stores that draw less players (clearly by their level rating) high and dry for big deal events. For whatever reason they have, it seems like they have a goal to centralize large promotional events. You would think that they would have learned from the utter failure of the WotC game centers (I was present for the grand opening of the first in Seattle) that this sort of centralization destroys Magic. The small environments provide a calm, less competitive place for new players to learn the ins and outs of the game without feeling like total failures in front of a huge crowd. Prerelease and release events draw the most new players because they offer promotional items and a relatively equal playing field card wise (compared to constructed). So, by the actions committed here, Wizards has made a huge push on players to go only to stores that already have large player bases to get better stuff at big events. What do you all think about this?

Quote from ashtonvanhelsing

We should question how they are claiming this as a random and fair event structure, when clearly as many have pointed out they only randomly selected from Advanced stores, and did not even give Core or Gateway stores a chance. To see what it takes to be in these categories, and the benefits the different levels receive, look here:

http://www.wizards.com/WPN/WhyJoin.aspx#Levels

This really isn't a question of what they did, but more a question of how what they did will now affect the future. First, should they ever hint at doing something like a Helvault again, no matter what they say about distribution of promotional items, many people will not go to Core or Gateway stores for an event that features a promotion anything like this. They will instead go to Advanced stores for the big events, leaving stores that draw less players (clearly by their level rating) high and dry for big deal events. For whatever reason they have, it seems like they have a goal to centralize large promotional events. You would think that they would have learned from the utter failure of the WotC game centers (I was present for the grand opening of the first in Seattle) that this sort of centralization destroys Magic. The small environments provide a calm, less competitive place for new players to learn the ins and outs of the game without feeling like total failures in front of a huge crowd. Prerelease and release events draw the most new players because they offer promotional items and a relatively equal playing field card wise (compared to constructed). So, by the actions committed here, Wizards has made a huge push on players to go only to stores that already have large player bases to get better stuff at big events. What do you all think about this?

But the thing is, we *did* have large scale pre-releases, which were scrapped to give more stores a chance to run them. Then they go and do this?

If there had been normal helvaults, and then some premium ones, given out randomly (maybe 1/5 helvaults) that just had the foil large cards/tokens, it wouldn't have been such a big deal. But what, hundreds? Thousands? of dollars worth of judge promos sent to 30 select stores?

The whole thing just doesn't make any sense, I mean, whoever thought of it probably thought it through and thought we would be excited (and we were until we found out what was in it). As someone said on the MTG boards, imagine what could have happened if the spoiled one happened to be one of the premium ones and everyone went to a pre-release expecting judge foils.

Quote from Roger

But the thing is, we *did* have large scale pre-releases, which were scrapped to give more stores a chance to run them. Then they go and do this?

If there had been normal helvaults, and then some premium ones, given out randomly (maybe 1/5 helvaults) that just had the foil large cards/tokens, it wouldn't have been such a big deal. But what, hundreds? Thousands? of dollars worth of judge promos sent to 30 select stores?

The whole thing just doesn't make any sense, I mean, whoever thought of it probably thought it through and thought we would be excited (and we were until we found out what was in it). As someone said on the MTG boards, imagine what could have happened if the spoiled one happened to be one of the premium ones and everyone went to a pre-release expecting judge foils.

That is exactly what I was saying. They used to only do large scale events at special locations, and then realized it didn't work. Apparently they have changed their mind. And yeah, in my opinion, they should have spliced the foil current content (oversized angels) to all Helvaults randomly and worked out a better system for store owners to track who was breaking seals. Then leave out the judge foils all together because that was the real "Hey screw you little stores that don't track enough players!" I don't disagree that the event was bungled severely, but the question is, does Wizard's have some sort of ultimate design behind the bungle that is also a terrible idea. Spotting that early and calling it out WILL prevent it from happening, especially if they can be convinced it will be bad for business.

Did Wizards spoil the Helvault or a game store?