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 reviews the results of the recent Magic Celebration at his store.

After last week's column (see "Rolling for Initiative--Trade Show Time Again"), I received an email from Laura Steinhoff at ACD, alerting me to several additions to the company's Game Day(s) this week.  Game Day, as of her email, had 59 sponsors/exhibitors and had added two more programs:  1) a presentation by Lynn Potyen of The BoardGame on involving a gamer's whole family, spouses, kids, grandparents, and how to make them feel comfortable in your store, as well as discussing community outreach and 2) a demo by Wizards of the Coast of the upcoming Lords of Warterdeep game.

Speaking of WotC, we hosted a Magic Celebration at the store yesterday, which went off well (but not as well as we had hoped).  Since we were giving away free packs of Magic 2012 all day, we really expected more people to turn out than the 22 that did, especially since we had just had 27  people in the store the night before at Friday Night Magic, who played until almost midnight for foil promo cards.  With the Magic Celebration, they got free packs of Magic 2012 all day long.  We started the first tournament at 11 a.m. and wrapped up play shortly after 9 p.m. that evening.  By my count, we ran four tournaments open to everybody and one for players under age 16.  As an outreach program, which I gather is what WotC hoped from the program, it worked great, as a third of the players that stayed all day were from our successful Magic at Recess we run at one of the local schools.  Of the twenty-two people who played over the course of the day, only two left before the last tournament started about 7 p.m.  Sales the day of the Celebration were good but pretty much in line with those of a typical busy Saturday.  The Celebration players spent their downtime during tournaments trading cards with each other or engaging in side casual play with each other, rather than shopping our single collection or buying packs and decks, which had been our expectation from a day’s worth of events.  On the plus side, we did sell them lots of sodas and candy bars.

The t-shirts provided for us to give away with purchase of a DeckBuilders Toolkit were a nice touch, as were the promo codes for the Duel of the Planeswalkers games but there didn’t appear much interest among attendees in either.  We hung one of the t-shirts for a week, telling people how they could get one but still only sold one ToolKit and that was to someone who wanted the ToolKit, they didn’t purchase it because of the t-shirt offer.  We'll give away the rest with future ToolKit purchases  (luckily, we had stocked up on the ToolKit prior to the event as I understand a number of stores had sold out prior to the event and were calling distributors trying to restock).  The promo code cards attracted even less attention as we found a number of them left lying around the gaming area over the course of the day.  If WotC does this event again next year, based on our store, I'd suggest dropping the t-shirts and promo code cards as an additional expense that did not appear to accomplish what they set out to do.

Overall, we were happy with the Celebration from an advertising and public relations point of view and have players already asking about if there will be one next year.  Thanks again to WotC for sponsoring a really cool event.

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