In the second of a two-video series, Jamison Sacks of Common Ground Games shares tips and best practices that help him run seamless events for his players.
If you missed the first video on how Jamison prepares for an event, you can find it here.
You can read a full transcript of the video below, just click the "Transcript" button. For localized subtitles, click "cc" on the video.
Every Prerelease we've managed to hit between a 90 and a 95% fill rate.
And a lot of that is just taking pre-registrations and you want to make sure that when there are problems the players aren't even aware of it.
Overall, we try to set the expectation that the time of the event is the time the event starts.
When it comes to our hosting round pairings, we generally find, especially for bigger events, to print out several copies and place them in multiple areas so not everybody has to go to the same spot.
And you want to make sure that all of your table numbers are very clearly labelled so everybody knows where they're supposed to be going.
That's one of those things that help speed up the time between rounds a lot.
My favorite thing about Magic events run at Common Grounds is they're very well structured, you know where you're sitting, you know where you're going, the pairings are very easy to find.
For our midnight Prerelease, we only do three rounds rather than our normal four rounds.
So we structured it in a way where at midnight you're getting your packs, at 12:30 round 1 is starting.
We kind of talk about the rules and stuff while people are opening the packs and it just keeps everything moving along and we're out of here at like 3:30 in the morning.
If you want to help decrease the amount of time between rounds, you want to make sure that you're putting in all of your filled-in match slips very quickly and being aware of the tables that might be going to time. Reminding people at 10 minutes left in the round is usually a good time and then also going around right beforehand and seeing if any of the players who [haven’t reported] might actually be done.
You know, just sitting there chitchatting which is great, they're having a good time, but we still need to move the event along.
To make it easier for prize payouts we always tell people during the fourth round to remember to bring their slips upfront together with the person they were playing and we sign off on the slip.
We make sure it gets entered in the Wizard Event Reporter and then we put their final point total on it, and then as long as it's a non-ranked event we just have them go upfront and they're able to get their prizes and leave or go back and do whatever else they want and not have to wait for the entire event to finish; we found really quickly that the players really like that.
Prize payout is largely dependent on the type of event.
We found that "pack per win" is just the simplest thing. Most people tend to walk away with at least something and it makes it much more enjoyable for everybody. Because of that, whereas competitive events have an expectation of having higher prizes, we try and spread that down a little bit further than I've noticed other places do, because we still want other people to feel like there's a reason to come.
Shout out to Jamison for running a great store.
I love it here and my move to Dallas a year ago would have been a lot harder without having the ability to come here and have just a great crowd that's really accepting of new players and just great to be around.
We go through all of this because game stores are a community when it comes down to it.
People come in here and they get the expertise that they're not getting anywhere else and we get to watch people actually make new friends and create a sense of community amongst themselves, that they probably weren't actually expecting that they would ever have through something as simple as a card game.
