One of the best parts of our jobs as retailers comes from running events, and limited edition products like Modern Masters 2017 give us unique opportunities to provide specialized events for our players.

When a new limited product comes out, we find that players are willing to participate in events at retail value compared to just often straight-up buying the product.

Plus, these sets were designed around a limited play experience, and the quality of the experience, so far, has kept players entertained.

With both Modern Masters 2015 and Eternal Masters, Common Ground Games ran special limited-format events to celebrate their release.

On release day for Eternal Masters, we held Eternal Masters drafts as part of Friday Night Magic. At one point, we had seven draft pods going at once (fifty-six players) while our normal Standard and Modern events were happening. We had a lot of people who typically don't come out for FNM—as well as quite a few folks who do not normally play at our store!

My favorite moment came when a young man who had never drafted at our store came to sign up and asked "do we have enough to do the EMA draft tonight?" He couldn't believe most of the people in the play area were there to draft. It made me smile.

The hardest part about events with limited product comes from planning.

Unlike normal product, we only get a certain amount, and we must be careful to make sure we will have enough to satisfy the event. We decided that at least 60% of everything we get for Eternal Masters would go to events. We figured out what we wanted our maximum players to be and what we would need for prize support.

It turned out this was a bit low—we ended up drafting about 90% of our allocation. But I prefer this as it gives more people the chance to experience the set and open packs from it rather than just preselling all our boxes.

To help promote the event, we went hard on pushing people to preregister. We made sure to have online sign-ups available as well as in-store. We published the event to multiple social media channels (local and state Facebook groups are great for this. If you're not aware of them, search them out—they are there!) as well as our normal in-store advertising and emails.

Because of this we saw players from out of state, not just out of town! These are great events to advertise as no matter how old your store is—there's always some people who have never been or just still have not heard of you! We have gained quite a few regulars from events like these.

We've had our Modern Masters 2017 events scheduled since January. We put out the initial advertising and begun telling players about it right away. We're allocating more space this time around in hopes of seating more than our EMA event and getting players to experience the set in a way only a local game store can!

By Jamison Sacks, owner of Common Ground Games