Feb 22, 2018 — Events

Are You Scheduling Too Many Events?

Firing a lot of events is good, but firing a high percentage is even better .

Feb 22, 2018 — Events

Are You Scheduling Too Many Events?

Firing a lot of events is good, but firing a high percentage is even better .

The less confidence a player has that your event will fire, the less likely they are to show. The fewer players show, the less likely the event is to fire, the less confidence players have. And so on.

Bottom line: firing a lot of events is good, but firing a high percentage is even better.

If it means firing a higher percentage of your events, trimming your event calendar could be the right move. Here are three ways to do it:

1. Schedule carefully, with little-to-no surplus.

Some events you're certain will fire. With others, you're optimistic at best. That's fair, but our Store and Event Locator can't tell the difference. Which means neither can the hundreds of thousands of players who use it. Review your Dominaria schedule with that in mind.

And remember—you can change formats on the fly now, so there's no need to flood the Store and Event Locator with redundancies as a contingency plan. And a Sunday Prerelease Party can help you move overflow Prerelease packs after your main events.

If you need help judging whether to make cuts or what to cut if you do, this principle may help guide you:

2. Limit yourself to one event per player type per day—at most.

We all know that the way an event is structured will determine who shows up for it. The prize pool, the number of rounds, the format—the choices you make will dictate whether your event draws competitive types or folks looking for more of a social experience.

Competing events aimed at the same audience could end up cannibalizing each other. So separate your Modern event from your high-payout Standard; keep your casual Sealed apart from League meetup.

(Michael Bahr has a must-read breakdown on this here.)

3. Let Wizards help.

Prerelease and League are for Sealed, Draft Weekend is for draft. The rest of the season is mostly about Standard.

By and large, that's our plan. If you're in sync with it, you've got our entire marketing engine working behind you—connecting with players via email and social media, driving engagement on the Magic site, delivering our message in every channel available to us.

By all means, do what's right for your community and what's profitable for your store. But the closer your schedule looks to ours, the more free marketing you get courtesy of Wizards.

Start with Dominaria.

Take a look at what you've got planned. Will any of it appear on the Store and Event Locator, despite a poor chance of going off? Is League going to overlap with another casual option? Did you schedule Draft Weekend or are you running another format?

The window closes February 25. Before then, tune your schedule to give your events their best chance of firing. Soak up Bahr's advice, make sure you're not running events against each other, and let Wizards' marketing team go to work for you.

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