Phooey! 🔜 CCS ATL

Now that set champs season is over, I think it’s time for a discussion. We had an incident in our local community where casual players showed up to a set champs, and as soon as they saw the players with the jerseys walk in to compete, they all left. On a certain level I get it. Who wants to pay money to be fodder for players who practice more and take the game more seriously? And for the record, I’m not saying the jerseys did anything wrong here. But there is this imbalance in Lorcana organized play. On the one hand, RB markets this as a casual friendly game. So casual players pick up the game thinking that this is the one for them. They go to local leagues, planning on having fun. Then it’s week after week of being beat by the jerseys. Which eventually leads them to stop playing all together (who else has seen their local scenes drying up?), or if they’re lucky, to find a store that caters to casual players. Set champs then creates a dynamic where those casual players can’t escape the jerseys. It’s the one time that there is actually something worth playing for locally. I don’t know how your set champs went but attendance at ours is definitely less than they used to be. So we are in this cycle where casual players aren’t having fun and not coming out anymore, but the prize support isn’t compelling enough to attract jersey players from other games, which leads to shrinking local scenes. And I know that the game is doing just fine with collectors. The game is making money off of their wallets. It’s the health of the local organized play scene that I want to chat about. But honestly, I don’t know how to fix it (or maybe this is just me and it doesn’t need fixing at all)