About Prerelease

Prerelease is your community’s first opportunity to get their hands on the latest Magic: The Gathering release and explore what the set has to offer. Players crack open a Prerelease Pack, build a Sealed deck, and try out the set for the first time in a casual tournament. Prerelease events are available all week, June 16 – June 22, starting at 12PM local time Friday, June 16.

Tournament Prerelease events (with rounds) and Player List Only events (without rounds) are now both available to be scheduled from the Prerelease event template on Wizards EventLink, and use Prerelease Packs for the event.

Select 'Swiss' as the pairing method when scheduling a structured tournament Prerelease or 'Player List Only' to schedule a casual Prerelease where players find their own matches.

Scheduling: Between June 16 – 22; use the Prerelease scheduling template

Format: Sealed Deck

Rules Enforcement Level: Casual Recommended

Pairing Method: Swiss or Player-List Only

Promo Support:

• 30th Anniversary Promos: Tarmogoyf (low print quantity, printed in Japanese), Glen Elendra Archmage (low print quantity), Acidic Slime, Terastodon
• Promos will be included with your The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™ seasonal promo kit
• Welcome Boosters
• 30th Anniversary promos will come in varying quantities; read our article for additional ideas for 30th anniversary promo distribution.

Additional Details

At-Home Prerelease is available all week beginning Friday, June 16.

Provision of At-Home Prerelease Packs and Prerelease Early Sales products can begin as soon as your store is open for the day, but structured events must wait until 3 P.M. local time.

As a WPN member, your store is provided with an allocation of Prerelease Packs and Prize Support Set Boosters. Your Prerelease allocation includes both baseline and growth allocations of Prerelease Packs to purchase from your distributor.

Baseline is determined by the attendance of previously reported Prerelease events, whereas your growth allocation is extra Prerelease Packs that can be used to support more players if your event attendance is growing.

For each case of Prerelease Packs you order from your baseline, Wizards of the Coast provides your store with one box of Prize Support Set Boosters for prizing at the event. If you order any cases of Prerelease Packs from your growth allocation, you will not be provided with Prize Support Set Boosters. We encourage you to purchase one box of Set Boosters to use as prizing per case of Prerelease Packs; however, it is not required.

In addition to Traditional Sealed Prerelease events that use Prerelease Packs, you are welcome to run limited events that use product from the new set such as Booster Draft and Jumpstart events. Unlike Sealed Prerelease events, these events will not have special scheduling templates, nor will they count towards future Prerelease Pack and prize support allocations. You can simply use the "Create Custom" tool to schedule these in EventLink.

Metrics Information

Metrics will be reactivated with at least 6 months' notice. At this point in time, we do not have a current anticipated date for metrics reactivation. Until the end of the grace period, promo and product allocations will be based on live metrics or the Q1 2020 metric snapshot, whichever is higher. 

As always, all Magic: The Gathering events reported through Wizards EventLink will count towards play metrics: Tickets, Engaged Players, and Activated Players.