From November 15 through February 6, 2025, you can run weekly Standard Showdown events in your store to bring players together for friendly tournaments. With Foundations entering the fray and sticking around until 2029 at least, this is an excellent opportunity to grow Standard at your store!

Standard Showdown presents allows you to bolster repeat play and invite players to explore a more competitive environment.

Please keep in mind that Standard Showdown encourages competitive play but does not feed into competitive play events like the Pro Tour—however, this makes them no less of an incredible opportunity for your community to get together and duke it out with their Standard decks!

Encourage newer intermediate-level players to bring their Magic Academy decks to Standard Showdown.

For newer players curious about competitive Magic, encourage them to build on the deck they constructed during Magic Academy: Deck Building to prepare for trying a Standard Showdown event. Players ready to take their first step into more competitive play may enjoy the challenge, and even learn new strategies from their competitors.

In addition, you can direct interested customers to the Foundations Starter Collection. As Foundations enters Standard, this robust product provides a large suite of cards to instantly expand a player's collection, giving them a broader pool to build a deck from.

You may even consider running additional Standard events outside of Standard Showdown for newer players to refine their strategy and ask questions to staff or other friendly Magic mentors in your community.

Build repeat play incentives to keep players coming back.

Weekly play programs help encourage repeat play habits among players in your store, but you may develop additional incentives to keep players coming back week after week. Items like stamp cards or accruing point systems for reward trade-ins are just two examples of ways to incentivize repeat play.

On top of other strategies, be sure to use our ready-to-post marketing materials to show off the weekly winner promo, Go for the Throat.

Foster a robust Standard environment in-store with plenty of events.

Standard Showdown is a weekly play program that can ladder players up to an event like Store Championship, but what events bring players into Standard Showdown? Filing your calendar with additional play opportunities helps foster a Standard play environment in your store.

Whether you choose to run Standard Draft events, Sealed Deck experiences, or even more beginner-friendly Magic Academy events, schedule a full calendar that drives players to build up their Standard decks and enter your Standard Showdown events.

It all starts with scheduling—so open Wizards EventLink and build an event schedule that works best for you and your community.