The WPN's new metrics, Tickets and Engaged Players, are meant to unite the interests of everyone invested in tabletop Magic: the player, the store, and Wizards.

That means rewards for the quality of your events, not the size. It means rewards for nurturing a loyal community, and for supporting Magic’s cardinal formats. And each one of those things has implications for your event strategy as we head into M20 season.

Let's take a look.

Repeat Play Matters (For Both Metrics)

Both Tickets and Engaged Players are meant to reward healthy, active communities in a way that previous reward systems have failed to.

Under the old system, each unique player in your community "counted" exactly one time. The new metrics work together to correct that. Engaged Players counts all Standard, Sealed, or Draft events. Once a player hits six, they count. And, each of those six events counts as a Ticket.

All this has obvious implications for your event strategy. In the updated system, repeat play matters in new ways, and so does format.

But the latter might not matter quite as much as you think. . .

Format Matters (But Not as Much as You Might Think…)

While the new system is designed to encourage Standard, Draft, and Sealed play, it's indifferent to everything else about the event. Ranked or Casual. Two players or two hundred. Modern Horizons Prerelease or just Saturday drafts—it's all the same, as far as your metrics are concerned.

And there's a twist here that may surprise you: to get more Promo Packs, you probably want to focus on the one that doesn't care about format: Tickets.

The way the metrics work, you need to meet a certain threshold for both metrics to boost your Promo Packs—your allocation is based on whichever metric sits at the lower threshold. Nine percent of the WPN can boost their Promo Pack allocation by increasing their Engaged Player count. Fifty-two percent can do it with Tickets.

(For the remaining stores, both metrics are at the same threshold—which means they, too, need more Tickets. Add it all up and a whopping 91% of stores will need more Tickets to get more packs.)

Experience Matters (Size Doesn't)

We believe that if you're offering players a first-rate experience, the new metrics will reflect that. This is part of why they're indifferent to the size of any given event—a bigger event isn't necessarily a better one.

That means you might want to cap attendance a little lower than you might have in the past. With no "biggest event" requirement to chase, you can set the attendance limit at whatever will create the most comfortable experience in your play area.

(This mostly means Prerelease—which is why you can run nine of them now.)

The Schedule Matters (Don't Miss Anything)

Promo Pack allocations count Tickets and Engaged Players on a rolling 12-month basis.

There's a limit to the number of Promo Packs you can earn in that time, but just fifteen stores have reached it. So, if you're one of the other 5,985, there's opportunity to get more. It'll help to know your deadline for doing so.

The first such deadline closed today, May 13. The next one closes August 2.

And that whole time, last year's Tickets and Engaged Players will be disappearing from your total. Which means that, even though your Promo Packs are not strictly based on the events you schedule, they still sort of are—pass on events that you scheduled last year and you risk a dip in attendance.

All the more reason to log into WER right now and schedule Core Set 2020.