Currently the venue I judge (and am a TO at) has a $5 entry for standard constructed FNM and $15 entry for booster draft FNM. The prize pool is 1 pack per player for constructed and 1.5 packs per player for draft.

Would people say this is par for the course? 2 months back I was able to convince the store owner to go up to 1.5 packs for draft, as we weren't being competitive enough with another store who was offering 1.5 packs.

It would be nice to get some feedback for people who are involved with organizing and logistics of an FNM.

Do your players prefer prizes based on record or standing?

I ask this because a number of my players are voicing dislike of FNM going to 5 rounds when we have 17+ people and would like the prizes to be based on record. I know I can't please everyone, but I am trying to decide which works best. We don't start until 7pm so I can understand that people don't always want to be playing until Midnight.

I have started to move FNMs to use table numbers and match slips. Previously I would read out pairings (and then often have to answer direct questions of “Who am I playing?” or “Who's s/he?”). Some people feel it takes the relaxed nature away from FNM, but I've found it very helpful in running things smoothly and a little quicker.

Do any of you have any suggestions on things I could be doing better, things I should stop doing, or things that you like? The logistics and running of a regular REL is something that interests me. I enjoy organizing these things when I am able to, just like I enjoy judging to educate others and keep the game consistent for people.

Hey Adam.

At the venue I judge at, we typically start at 7:30, and everyone is always interested in drafting, so that's pretty much all we do. For drafts, the store owner and TO sells packs for $3 a pack.

From my understanding, a booster box, which contains 36 packs, is intended to fully supply an 8 man draft. After the initial 3 packs / player, this leaves 12 packs remaining for prize support, matching your 1.5 pack / player setting. So in terms of that, I think you're running events very fairly, but for $15, I wouldn't do less than 1.5 packs / player.

For the number of rounds played, we cap it at 3, and distribute prizes based on record instead of rating, and my players generally prefer it as they don't need to worry so much about tie breakers. I might consider holding a vote amongst your players and see if they would prefer a different method then to go until a clear winner is established.

As far as table numbers and match slips go, I judge at a venue where we get ~ 20 players, and most people know each other by name. People will generally crowd around the parings once it's printed, and go find each other with limited intervention on my behalf, so it's not much I need to worry about… but my advice to you is to use whatever you find works best, and I think slips + table numbers to be a perfectly fine way of doing things.

Edited Erik Halverson (Dec. 10, 2012 07:46:39 PM)

This has been an issue at my store as well. Players have complained about 1 pack per player. Since I became an employee and changed it to 1.5 packs per player for a $5 standard FNM we have almost no complaints. We also do $10 drafts with only prize support being next draft free to winner. This has seemed to work well.

We start at 6:00 and sometimes run very late with our average attendance dictating we run 5 rounds of swiss. Most of the time our top 8 decides to split which saves time but sometimes they don't and we finish at 1 or 2am. Once we paid out by standings buy doing swiss + 1 round and I liked it and seemed to have good feed back but most were just more comfortable with the old swiss + top 8.

Edited Addison Miller (Dec. 10, 2012 07:44:18 PM)

If the MSRP of a booster is $3.99 and the store is providing players with
an opportunity to draft with at least 7 other players, rather than simply
crack open packs, then that store, if they charge $11.97 for the draft, is
already providing extra value beyond the $3.99 they'd usually charge per
booster. That's not even counting the PWP and the chance of players going
home with FNM foils, which are nice bonuses (that cost the store nothing).
But in order to provide this opportunity to their players, they still need
to have space to seat players and they also need to stay open longer –
both of these things are a considerable cost.

In short: if a store owner charges 15$ for a draft and gives 1.5 pack of
price support, he's already giving a ***much*** better deal than he'd
normally sell packs for.

Jurgen

My store used to do packs (it was something like 1.25 packs per player),
but we started getting complaints because we didn't have a set pay out. The
payouts also changed based on the price of the packs. The first month after
release, the packs are $0.25 more, so there would be less packs that first
month. That really made it hard to sit down an go “X players, prizes go
like this.”

So, we just made a change to store credit. Standard is $5 entry, Draft is
$15 entry. We pay out $5 in store credit for every player and came up with
a chart to reference for payouts to each place depending on the number of
players. Conveniently when we do a “higher stakes” event, like a GPT where
we charge $10 entry, we just double the prize based on our chart.

Might not work for everyone, but is has worked for us and has also helped
to drive our singles case better.

-George FitzGerald
L2, Sarasota, FL

I appreciate everyone's feedback. I wish I had more control over what the store owner sells packs for. The store generally gets in 3 booster boxes a week from their supplier, so I can't imagine he's getting huge discounts on the price he pays.

For drafting, do you guys only pair within pods? Or do you have multiple pods for the draft and then a single set of pairings?

The table numbers seem to work, but sometimes I run into people who know each other and just found their opponent and sit anywhere. This can make putting out match slips a little more involved. I may try and keep the pairings posted, and let them sit where they want and have them just come and get their match slips for their game. We can fluctuate between 13 and 31 players, depending on the mood of players at the other venue it seems. People regular to the store don't always know these people.

No one wants to do a top 4 or 8 cut for our FNMs, which I am fine with. I had not thought about offering the winner free entry into the next event. I might try and work that into the draft nights.

I also like the idea of the pack-per-win idea, that would give our less skilled players a chance at getting a prize. I might offer two FNM events, one run with prizes based on standings and the other with pack-per-win. Now we are advanced and can sanction two FNMs this option is now open, assuming we have the required 8 people minimum in each event.

Has anyone done two tiers of FNM in this manner?

Unless you want to move to Ryan's neighborhood, I'd say you should probably set your expectations a LOT lower…

One of the most popular stores in the Denver area runs 2-3 pods of draft, almost every Friday night; these are $15, last I checked, and I don't recall how many packs are being added to the prize pool - maybe 1 per player? - but the primary prizes are the FNM foils, and “picks” from the rares & foils drafted. They also run Standard.

Keep in mind, that's a store that consistently draws large crowds, in a market that supports hundreds of FNM players at dozens of different stores, each with their own unique twist on how to run FNM.

And that's my point - what YOUR players want, within reason, is what YOU should probably do. Or, move to Michigan. :)

While you don't have to go to the excess available to some other successful
areas, 1.5 or 1.66 would be the minimum I would expect at smaller
stores/areas that perhaps can't risk to do more. 1 pack for either of your
situations is quite stingy. If the store is lacking profits, perhaps offer
food + drink fridge at the venue.


2012/12/10 Ryan Rubley <forum-2186@apps.magicjudges.org>

How flexible the store owner feels he can be with magic product I think comes down to the fact it's a comic store that just happens to also sell some sealed product. There is a trading card store in the vicinity and they do a lot of business in singles and sealed product. He is able to buy in larger quantities and work at a lower profit margin. The advantage my venue has is the play space, the fact that the store is perfectly fine with staying open all night for people (we get large midnight pre-releases as the other store doesn't want to stay open) and people dislike the owner of the other store for how he handles some things. We are getting more players who say they used to go there but have gotten fed up with him.

I'm trying to put more focus on magic at the store, building a community and a profile for the store. We have only just started to buy and sell singles.

I appreciate that what I should be doing is what my players want, and that's how I am going to make things successful. But at the same time I have to work within the constraints of the money the store owner is willing to put up for product and the profit level he wants to run at. Eventually the role changes from tournament organizer to store owner who has to think of business.

We do sell drinks and the like to make a little more from the foot traffic magic brings, but again these types of things are business decisions rather than tournament decisions. But I'll keep pushing, advising and begging with the store owner to change the direction of the store to make the experience enjoyable and worthwhile for the players. That is going beyond the role of a TO and a judge, but I do both of these things for the magic community, so in that sense I see it as something I should at least be trying to do.

My local store (or at least, the only one I play/judge for anything other than Comp level tournaments) is $14 draft with 2 packs per person support. Pairings are all intra-pod, which seems the only fair way to do things. We don't get big enough to need slips; it'll cap out around 20 people. Of course, the store is still relatively new; it opened 2 months ago.

FNM is Standard, $5, 2 packs/person. Also caps around 20-25 right now.

What is reasonable comes down entirely to how much competition there is in the area. If it's the only game in town, you can get away with whatever you want. Of course, if someone moves into the area and takes all your business because your customers hate you for being stingy, well, that's a risk. Generally, most stores that aren't the only thing going in town will shoot for breaking even on FNM because the increased traffic creates increased word-of-mouth advertising (free!) and increased revenue. People in your store will buy things just because they're there.

For event pricing, I highly recommend looking at the cost is blocks of 8 players and to consider the type of player you are attempting to attract. By far, the most common price point I see for drafts around the US is $15. Often this includes a one-box-to-eight-players ratio (24 event packs and 12 prize packs… 1.5 packs per player or $3.33 each) with players keeping what they draft.

If we consider this a reasonable baseline, then we can understand how any specific event measures up. More packs or lower entry is above baseline. Fewer packs or higher entry is below baseline. Ryan's store sounds very generous, but I often caution stores that they need to remember their overhead (as Jurgen pointed out). A generous store that goes out of business isn't good for the community. (I'd also argue that a store that is generous with events but gouges players other ways is also bad. I like moderation in my stores, I guess.)

An alternative structure for drafts has been championed by Star City via their Open Series with the $10 drafts. No prizes except for free $10 draft entry to the winner (as Addison mentioned). That's 24 packs for $80–the same $3.33 each price point initially. Subsequent drafts are $70 / 24 or $2.92 each.

What pricing model, what payout pool, and how that pool is distributed all affect the type of player a store attracts. The steeper the payout (rewarding high finishes), the more competitive people will be motivated. The higher the price point, the more casual players will be discouraged. Conversely, a flatter payout (paying less at the top but to more players) encourages casual players as does a lower price point. The key is recognizing that competitive players will evaluate stores based on their expected value–how much they reasonably expect to get out of an event versus how much they put in. To a competitive player, $15 and a 1.5 pool paying 6/4/1/1 is generally better than $10 and no prize because they expect the $5 difference to net them 4 ($1.25 es.) or 6 ($0.83 ea.) packs. Competitive players are more willing to spend because they see it as an investment rather than a cost.

Personally, I find that competitive players also apply their competitive analysis to many other things, too. They will look at the store's sale price for boxes and singles versus online prices, and unless they have to have something right then, they'll go with the best deal. Competitive players are also more likely to look as casual players as though they've gone insane when the casual folks immediately tear into their prize packs rather than saving them for… well, for drafting.

To a store, impulse purchasing and rampant pack shredding are good for the bottom line. Thus, I tend to lean very heavily towards promoting things that encourage casual play. In doing so, I have found that healthy casual customer bases still will have competitive players. The sharks are happy because so many minnows keep them fat whereas a tank full of just sharks is not what they want. I also apply this approach towards how players are treated and making sure new people feel welcome. Remember, for every 8 player event winner, you have 7 losers.

I do want to caution against one seemingly casual-friendly idea–redrafting rares. The idea is that after the draft the players will pick cards from the draft in some fashion (as Scott mentioned). This is a fine idea for established otherwise closed play groups, but it has major downsides. While redrafting rares allows a store to keep costs down, the potential feel-bad situation is not worth it in my opinion. If a competitive player opens a Jace, for example, he or she was likely to win anyway and would wind up with the Jace either way. But a more casual player opening a Jace means that after Spike McStabberson tears off Timmy's face, he's also going to take Timmy's pretty cards. First his face and then his Jace is not a fun night for 7/8 of pod. I, for one, am thrilled when a terrible player opens an expensive card. A good pull like that is the type of thing that reinforces his or her desire to keep coming back even though they're likely to get crushed week after week. (I am less thrilled when they destroy me with said card, but I can live with that, and wrecking an old player every once in a while can be another motivational experience for the casual folk.)

As a final note, the store I operate out of pays prizes based on standing most weeks, but for Prereleases and Launch Parties, we pay out based on record. Tie-breakers are definitely “un-fun,” so we ignore them at our most casual events, but we encourage at least a little competition otherwise.

I just want to say that John Carter's write up above is amazing. It is exactly in line with what I experienced when we owned our game store. Realize that competitive players will never buy packs or spend money in the store, other than for tournaments. They will never open packs unless they are drafting and they have very little loyalty to the store.

However, what the competitive players will do, in my experience, is:

1. Drive up demand for singles as other players will see interactions that they would not otherwise see.
2. They set a benchmark for others to aspire to.
3. They will generally help other players with their decks and give them play advice. As much as they like winning, they also want some competition and to be challenged.

It is the casual player that loves playing pays the bills. For that reason, we made sure that we paid down to half way in tournaments. If we had 40 people, we prized down to 20th place.

You need numbers to keep the competitive player happy, so you have to cater to both.

I concur… Great post John.

To add my 2c… Our store does a $15 buy in for 4 rounds of Swiss, 1 pack per win. FNM foils to the people who go 4-0 and the rest as a random door prize.

Edited Adam Zakreski (Dec. 10, 2012 10:44:43 PM)

That's excellent John, thank you. And thanks to everyone else. I feel I have a good amount of information to try and sit down and talk to the store owner and get him to understand how we could do things a little differently and, more importantly, why.

Sent from my iPhone

Just to chime in, my LGS runs drafts with 3 packs at MSRP with a 4th “pack” at cost for the prize pool, which pays out 4-3-1. So you're paying just under $15 for anywhere from 3-7 packs and other bonuses.

Constructed is a flat $5 entry fee and top 3 or 4 get store credit (gift cards) based on a split of those entry fees.

We're a small shop but we pretty consistently get close to or hit our 24 man limit with this setup. I don't think the players care much about the tournament payouts, they're just there to have a good time.