Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne discusses the effects of expensive promotional prize cards on tournaments and the Cosmere RPG Kickstarter.

I can appreciate what Wizards of the Coast wanted to accomplish when it provided a foil full art Urza’s Saga card as the prize for the winning player in August’s Bloomburrow Store Championships but all it did, at least here, was engender hard feelings among some of our players.  Copies of the card sold last week on eBay for around $360, and listings on TCGplayer are hovered around $340.  The desirability of this card mirrors the same pricing we've seen for the promotional prize items for Disney Lorcana Store Championships.  The Ursula’s Return Store Championship prize playmats sell for around $80 to $120 and the Ursula Sea Witch Queen sells for $100 to $130.

I can see what WotC hopes to accomplish by providing a highly desirable card as the prize for a Store Championship; generate more interest in Standard format play and drawing more players into Store Championship events.  It worked.  We had about 40% more for this store championship than we did for Outlaws of Thunder Junction.  Unfortunately, it also brought some highly competitive players, drawn by the high value Urza’s Saga.

I did see a few stores dealing with this problem by either requiring players to participate in a certain number of previous events to earn an invitation to the Store Championship or charging an extremely high entry fee (I saw as high as $300) and reducing the fee a certain amount for each previous in store event in which the player participated.  I like the idea of tying entry into a store championship to participation in store events, as the store championship should reflect store play rather than drawing in players from a distance away who only come to the store for competitive events and do not spend their hard-earned dollars there.

For our first Disney Lorcana Store Championship, we had one player drive in from Memphis Tennessee, which is a good five-hour drive away from us.  From what he told us, he looked at the tournament locator on the Melee website for Lorcana Store Championships and, since stores had quite a bit of flexibility regarding the dates on which they scheduled tournaments, he laid out a schedule that allowed him to participate in a number of tournaments throughout the Mid-South region.  Of course, someone willing to do that would have to have skill at the game and a highly competitive deck and this player did.

I have seen some stores also arguing against imposing any limitations on participation as they want participants in their events and restricting entry limits foot traffic as well as player tickets which improve a store’s metrics with Wizards of the Coast.  Higher metrics improve a store’s standing with WotC and grants access to more promotional materials and events.

In case you missed it, Brotherwise Games launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the Cosmere RPG (see "Cosmere RPG Passes $11 Million").  I certainly couldn’t miss it as an advertisement for it popped up in my social media feeds multiple times every day.  By the time the Kickstarter campaign closed last Friday, it had raised some $1.5 million, making it the number one game campaign funded and the third largest Kickstarter campaign ever.  Brotherwise Games' Boss Monster has been a steady seller here for well over a decade and I am happy to see them have another hit on their hands (see "Kickstarter and the ‘Boss Monster’").

Comments?  What do you think about limiting access to certain tournaments?  Email castleperilousgames@gmail.com.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.