Rich Waldbiesser of Six Feet Under Games in New Holland, Pennsylvania saw the ICv2 story on organized play changes made by Wizards of the Coast to its Dreamblade $1K tournament program (see 'WotC Scales Back Dreamblade 1Ks'), and doesn't like WotC's explanation:

I find the response by Ms. Thorburn at Wizards of the Coast absolutely incredible.  She states that no confirmed events were cancelled.  This is a very gray area at best.  My store was one of the stores that received the e-mail cancelling our event and I can say that I have a previous e-mail from WotC which confirmed the date of my event and said that contracts would be sent in one or two weeks.  Instead of a contract as I was promised, I received this cancellation.  Like many other stores who had events cancelled, I requested some reason for this and was met by silence until the official statement was made by WotC on March 26th. 

Ms. Thorburn states that WotC is refocusing attention on the stores that have better attendance and stores who are in areas of high concentrations of players.  I have evidence that this is far from the truth.  The table below shows the number of players by state along with the number of Season 3 Dreamblade 1k events scheduled for the state.

As can be seen from the table above, three of the nine states with 100 or more players did not get any 1k's while Maryland with 18 and Alabama with 22 each got a 1k event.  This seems to refute the refocusing based on player distribution. 

When looking at event attendance, it becomes even more evident that WotC is not telling the whole truth about this restructuring.  During the first two Dreamblade seasons, the top two locations had combined attendance of 76 and 72 respectively.  Both of these stores lost their 1k events for season 3 while the Alabama store which kept its event for Season 3 had a combined attendance of 14 and the Maryland store only had a combined attendance of 26.  Also, the store chosen for the New York event had only half the number of players at its first season event than the New York store which lost its season 3 event.

The real reason for these lower performing stores keeping their events becomes evident when you look at the Magic events being run by the tournament organizers of these stores.  These are all the chosen few who are allowed by WotC to run the premier Magic events. 

WotC has always had its chosen few for Magic and I, like most other store owners, accept this.  What I, and most other store owners who lost 1k events are refusing to accept is WotC's betrayal of those of us who have worked hard to promote Dreamblade and run successful 1k events while allowing unsuccessful locations to continue holding their 1k events just because they are hosts for premier Magic events.