Greetings from sunny Seattle, Washington (ok, it is really raining, but sunny sounded so much better!). My name is Justin Ziran and I am the Brand Manager for Online Games at WotC. For those that play online, you know we’ve experienced an exciting year so far. We’ve released 4 sets and looking forward to the putting out the 5th set, Mirage, in December. In addition to the release events, we have a pretty cool line up of special tournaments planned for November and December.
Starting November 10th and running through November 16th, we’ll start with Extended Celebration. And, now that the Online Extended format and the paper Extended format are finally synced, we’ll be holding a series of events to get everyone into an “Extended Mood”, just in time too, as an Extended Pro Tour Qualifier round takes place. By the time you get this newsletter, we’ll be in day 5 of the event but that still leaves 2 more days to get into the action. You can find all the crunchy tidbits of information on the tournament here.
Starting November 17th and running through November 23rd, we’ll hold our 4th “out of print” IPA event. For the entire week, we’ll run IPA qualifiers in various limited and constructed formats. All you need to do is top 8 in any of the qualifier events and you’ll get an invite to the IPA Championship. The Championship will be an IPA sealed event that will be held on November 26th. Did I mention we’ll provide IPA product and we’ll payout IPA prizes to the top 64? Check it out
Rounding out November, we’ll host several Thanksgiving Day events that will begin on November 24th. Events will include Nix-Tix (no tickets required) draft queues and a full schedule of Premier Events. In addition to the regular prize payouts, Premier Events will award one of our brand new promo cards to everyone that joins an event. Winners of each event will get a foil version of the participation promo. Detailed information, including the promo card selection will be posted on magicthegathering.com
Did you think we forgot about December? We didn’t, so write down this date, December 5th 2005. That’s the day we are putting Mirage on sale at the Magic Online store. Yes, that’s right we are releasing Mirage Online. Mirage will go on sale Monday, December 5th with a full week of release events starting December 7th and running through December 13th.>.
We’ll finish up 2005 and bring in the New Year with our annual holiday events, which will feature Nix-Tix draft queues and a full line up of Premier Events. And yes, these Premier Events will award promo cards too, just like the Thanksgiving Day events.
Have a great holiday season and see you online.