Let’s be honest. The UVS side event scene coming into this year has been has been a ghost town. On-Demand events are slow to fire. Prizing has been… less than exciting. Even fun ideas like Legendary Wolf’s Cavalry Battle saw too few players interested. So, what do we do? We need more than just the Main Event to attract players to spend their time and money playing the best TCG on the market! In Vegas a few months ago, they lowered the barrier to entry by offering a discount on all side events if you entered the Main. That worked pretty well. I mean who’s turning down a $10 Sealed event??

There’s two ways to think about enticing players to play in your events. Either make them so easy to enter that players say, “Well yea I’ll enter. I mean why not?” OR you can make the event and prizing so attractive that they say “I’m GOING to play in THAT!” In St Louis, thy tried the second way. A side event for those players that are excited to spend our Sunday trading, calculating, building, and blinging our way to the top!

The rules are simple. Build the most BALLER deck you can muster! If you have a single card that’s not foil, you’re out! 🤣Come Sunday after round 8 of Swiss ended, I found myself running all around the event hall looking for anyone with a trade binder, actually getting several unsuspecting players the cards THEY were looking for to complete their decks and collections. I met a bunch of awesome people from the ones I bartered with, to the ones I was competing against, constantly asking each other what our point totals were at before we found new ways to squeeze 1 or 2 more points out of our lists.

I have a bunch of notes for how to make the event better, but first I want to talk about what made it great to begin with. The Collector’s Tournament is naturally an event for whales, so it only made sense that the event was supposed to ruthlessly cut to Top 2, giving the victor the spoils. Giving us the opportunity to play in a high stakes event like this might be the closest some of us come to a heated streamed Finale against a UVS Champion with the regional on the line. “A Festivus for the rest of us” if you will. 😁 I haven’t watched the stream yet, but I hope they cover something like this in the future. It’s an AWESOME complement to the serious nature of meta gameplay. Also, THE DECKS LOOK INSANE! I can’t tell you how many times I drew my 7 and had to take a second to figure out how many Foundations I had. 😅

The Collector’s Event also brings players together. As I wrote earlier, it gets players involved that would normally be waiting for the event to end. It also gives players a reason to BRING THEIR TRADE BINDERS! I don’t know about you, but I find a lot of players don’t bother bringing their trades to an event because they aren’t engaged to trade/sell very often. Hopefully this helps that.

The last this this event does get Leenoco off his lazy butt and give him something to do!! 🤣

Disclaimer: If you are newer to UVS and don’t know Leenoco, seen below, no one works harder than he does and he came up with the rules for the Collector’s Event. Props to a king! Thanks for an awesome idea and execution!

So what would I change? Well first off, the point structure pushes players to add attacks because most SRs and URs are attacks. I ended up adding in Alt-Super Grape Rush’s just to make it to 80. We joked about how our ratios were so nuts that luck had to play a major factor in who ended up winning it all. Limiting the attacks at 20 has to be a thing.

Second, the points should be up on the wall for all to see. Every time a player turns in their updated list, the leaderboard gets rearranged adding to the drama. Of course, this leads to the biggest issue with the event that most people called out right off the bat. If you’re smart, you’ll just wait until people turn in a bunch of their lists and see how many points your deck would have. Then you’ll already know if you’d win the event before you enter, which leads me to my 3rd change…

Lock entrees at the same moment you reveal the leaderboard. Let people enter on Sunday until about noon. Then you unveil the leaderboard, and have a nice moment of “Omg, how did that person get so many points!” Also, you start the last mad dash for players to edit their lists for, say, 2 hours until the winners are selected. That would be a good bit of content for our casters to talk about on stream between Top Cut matches. It also might make the game seem more like a universe or more like an entire event, with more going on that just Top Cut on stream for Sunday.

All-in-all I think the Collector’s Tournament was an awesome idea and I hope to see it again in Atlanta, Dallas, and Orlando. What if Collector’s in Atlanta is MHA Spotlight and Dallas is an AoT Spotlight? We’ll have both AoT sets by then. That’d be awesome! We all have so many beautiful Set 1 cards that we’re just waiting to bust out. The new ballers on the block can show off their AoT stuff, and then the BIG ONE in Orlando at Worlds… RETRO! All the prettiest cards from the game’s history! Only the most legendary collectors can compete with incentives for older cards from more IPS and different rarities.

Well, I’m all out of words. Hope to see even more of you in ATL! Until then, I’ll see you on the tables!