(See previous Days of Yuletide here.)
The PC Weekend League has ran, if not quite uninterrupted, then close to it almost every month since its inception in June of 2020. It has brought attention to lesser used formats, and been an opportunity to rally the community around well-loved formats.
The chance to win some striking full-art promos on Gemp certainly didn’t hurt, either.
As time as gone on, the PC has experimented with all sorts of tweaks to the event length, games played, formats played, and other sorts of details until we felt the event as a whole was about as optimized as it could be for what it was: a single, focused event that fit in a single weekend, with both casual and competitive goals available.
We are proud of the Weekend League, but it is high time to start offering more events.
Beginning in January, the PC will be running 2 monthly events. The first will be the PC Weekend League we all know and love, and the second will be a new PC Monthly Sealed League.
If you are not familiar with sealed leagues, the basic idea is that at the start you get to open a bunch of booster packs and starter decks, and then construct your deck out of whatever you happen to open. Balance is therefore somewhat less of a concern, since nobody is able to craft the perfect combos like one can do in constructed.
The PC Monthly Sealed League will be a single serie run, maximum 10 games over 20 days and will not overlap with the Weekend League.
In general, we will be keeping the Monthly Sealed League to more-or-less familiar formats, which means they will rotate between PC-Fellowship, PC-Movie, and PC-Expanded. As there are loads of variations on what exactly that means in a sealed context, every month will be somewhat different as we experiment with what boosters to offer, how many, what specific block to focus on, etc.
With the Monthly Sealed Leagues hovering around the familiar formats, the PC Weekend League will start to wander around unfamiliar formats. Poor Man’s? Hunter Block? French Format? Who knows?
Here is the schedule for what this will look like over the coming year:
As you can see, each month will have a PC Weekend League around the first or second weekend as appropriate, and then 24 hours later the PC Monthly Sealed League will begin, and will run for 20 days. This should ensure that there is something to work towards 75% of the time whenever you log in.
“Work towards?”, you say. Why yes, we will continue offering digital-only promos to be awarded for participation and accomplishment. Awards may change as we refine this process, but the plan is as follows:
- Tier 1: Award a new thematic Masterwork card for participating in at least 1 game per League
- Tier 2: Award a second thematic Masterwork card for participating in half of the maximum games for that League
- Tier 3: Award a thematic full art card for placing well in the League itself
Some possible examples of each of Tiers 1, 2, and 3.
The Tier 1 awards will be shared between both leagues, so if there’s a particularly appealing one you may only need to enter one or the other to earn it. However, Tier 2 and 3 differ between the PC Weekend League and the PC Monthly Sealed League, meaning if you want to earn everything you will need to participate in both.
(In the future, we hope to be able to offer choice prizing, where Tier 2 would be replaced with an open choice of any card previously awarded in a prior League, including old Weekend Leagues. It’s no fun missing out entirely on an event you were never aware of, and this would help alleviate that. The details and the mechanism for this are still in flux, however, so there is no estimate on when this will be ready.)
Aww, PC, what about tournaments?
We would love to run a tournament circuit! We’d love to tally up invitational points, and run a World Championship, even. But as it is, we do not at this time have a dedicated Tournament Director, and that is what it would take to be able to run something like this. If this sounds like something you would like to do, come join the PC and make it a reality!
What about daily tournaments?
Actually, we have an idea or two about revitalizing these, notably in modernizing the prize pool to use Masterworks and Full Art Promos, and seeing what else we might improve there. However, again, there’s nobody whose role is to look after these events and tinker with them, so if you’d like to head this up, come join the PC and make a difference!
Keep checking back here every day for the next 12 Days of Yuletide update!
The White Council 