As 2024 draws to a close, it's important to take a moment and review the year we've had: from revisiting the best of the guilds in Ravnica Remastered to laying the groundwork for the next generation of Magic fans with Foundations, this year has been packed with incredible releases.

The Wizards Play Network team strives to support you and your community every step of the way: the local game store remains central to the Magic community, and taking another opportunity to celebrate with you at the end of the year is just another opportunity for us to thank you for all you do.

You continued to grow your in-store Magic play communities—WPN tickets in North America increased approximately 15% year over year.

That's a lot of Magic happening in your stores! We are thrilled to see your communities growing so much year over year—and we hope you feel proud of the Magic communities you've built.

As a reminder, tickets represent the total number of entries across all your Magic events recorded in Wizards EventLink in a rolling calendar year. So, whether it's Prerelease or capturing casual Commander play in-store, we want to thank you for continuing to schedule and report play in Wizards EventLink.

Our Magic Presents events also saw great success this year.

Each Magic Presents event is something special, and we're excited to see your communities were eager to attend—Magic Presents: Pride and Duskmourn: House of Horror Trick or Treat were just two that we noticed having a high amount of reported play.

You can read a little more about the roadmap for play programs in our recap of the virtual WPN Retailer Summit. Magic Presents will continue in 2025 with new events—the first of which we will be announcing in January 2025, so keep your eyes on this space for details so you can schedule it right away!

Standard play is on the rise: year over year, we saw around a 171% increase in Standard players at your stores.

With the shift of Store Championship being a Standard format-only event, plus return of Standard Showdown alongside Murders at Karlov Manor's release, you've been busy scheduling plenty of Standard events for your communities.

We saw a rise in Standard players of about 171% year over year, which is awe-inspiring for the team's ongoing efforts to revitalize Standard. Again, we thank you for leaning into these efforts with us by both scheduling and reporting your events in EventLink.

The WPN site launched profile pages, giving you metrics on demand.

To help you keep on top of your store's metrics, we launched profile pages, available to WPN stores when you're logged into our website.

This page gives you a snapshot of your total tickets, engaged players, activated players, and an estimated count of weekly promo packs your store might expect to use on a given week. We hope you continue to utilize this page as a resource as we continue improving it.

We started up new in-store play programs for Dungeons & Dragons.

Starting with the 2024 Core Rulebooks releases, we implemented the D&D Anniversary Play Series, giving you another tool in your toolkit to bring tabletop players to your store to explore the new rules, play with pre-made characters, and go on nostalgic adventures!

Each Anniversary Play Series event is timed with the Early Access release date for your store; and there's one more at the start of the new year! If you haven't yet, check out the 2024 Monster Manual Play Series event and schedule it early so players can find your event in the Store & Event Locator.

To support your robust play seasons, we provided incredible promos and promotional materials.

In-store play events are made all the better with sweet promos for participants—and being part of the Wizards Play Network, we provided you with suites of promos and promotional material items to support every Prerelease this year (and beyond).

Across Magic and D&D releases, the Wizards Play Network team devised new promotional materials to support your store's events. Some of our favorites from this year include:

• Magic Presents: Pride event prints, featuring Chandra and her embercat
• 2024 Love Your Local Game Store promo, Sakura Tribe Elder
• Bloomburrow Prerelease Repeat Play promotional Mabel Keychain (for WPN Premium stores only)
• Duskmourn: House of Horror Buy-a-Box Collector Booster addition
• Gold-numbered 50th anniversary-themed d20 featuring the D&D ampersand

Beyond promotional materials, we've also provided incredible Dungeons & Dragons metal standees to stores with qualifying orders for use at your point of sale.

We expanded the WPN Marketing Portal to be available to all WPN retailers in North America.

As we previously announced, the WPN Marketing Portal powered by Smartpress is now available to all WPN retailers in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, and Guam!

This portal is an incredible resource for your marketing, and is loaded with awesome features, including easy customization, a smooth checkout process, and an ever-expanding catalog of high-quality materials available to choose from.

You can get started at wpn.collaterate.com with the username and password sent via your invitation email. We hope you enjoy this resource to level up your marketing for Magic and D&D in 2025 and beyond.

Thanks for being part of the Wizards Play Network—here's to more in 2025!

This is only the beginning. The Wizards Play Network team is eager to continue iterating on events and promos, delivering unique promotional items and unforgettable experiences to take your events to the next level.

We know we can't thank you enough for everything you do to build and maintain communities united by a shared love of games but know that we truly appreciate everything you do as part of the Wizards Play Network. Look forward to your 2024 WPN Holiday promo, and we'll see you in 2025.