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 offers up his thoughts on how the Lorwyn Eclipsed prerelease weekend went at his shop and elsewhere.
Stores are midway through the prerelease weekend for Lorwyn Eclipsed and so far several things have struck me:
Marketing Kit. For years, Wizards of the Coast has said the logistics of including a list of items in a prerelease kit made it impossible (see “Final Fantasy Launch“): the company was able to get all of the correct cards and promotional items in the kit but not a list of the items. However, with no fanfare, the marketing kit for Lorwyn Eclipsed included not only the usual promo card (no AR-enhanced pins or art prints for this set) but a complete list of those items, along with instructions on how WotC would like stores to use each item. This is far more convenient than searching through the Wizards website in order to learn what to expect to find in the kit.
Sold Out. Lorwyn Eclipsed is the first prerelease for which the store sold through kits prior to the start of the first event; even with the best-selling Final Fantasy set, we did not sell out of pre-release kits before the weekend. This indicates there is a healthy interest in this set among players, not just collectors. Final Fantasy and Avatar the Last Airbender generated more dollar sales for us than Lorwyn Eclipsed on their respective pre-release weekends but not the play interest. Players in the prerelease say playing with Lorwyn Eclipsed feels like playing Magic for the first time in a long while. We even had staff members who have not played in prereleases signing up for Lorwyn Eclipsed as they liked the feeling they were playing in the Magic universe again, rather than a Universes Beyond setting. We will see if that feeling continues with the upcoming Secrets of Strixhaven set.
Eventlink. For the first time since the Outlaws of Thunder Junction prerelease back in the spring of 2024, Eventlink crashed. Several stores reported the software shutting down between the 2nd and 3rd round of the prerelease or processing results slowly around 9 p.m. Eastern time, right about the time one could expect to see high numbers of results being reported. The incident prompted some retailers to call, once again, for a version of Eventlink that event organizers could download to a desktop, allowing them to continue to run events in the case of a problem like this, and upload the results to Eventlink once the problem was resolved. While this incident was much less than ideal, this does indicate that Lorwyn Eclipsed was overwhelmingly popular with fans.
Promo Glitch. There was a significant problem with the foil promotional cards included in the Lorwyn Eclipsed pre-release kits. It appears a significant number of kits shipped with a promo card from the upcoming Teenage Mutant Turtles set, rather than the Lorwyn Eclipsed set. One store reported that 9 of their 12 kits had the TMNT promo. This glitch occurred often enough that WotC posted official directions in its Facebook group on what to do if a player found the wrong promo. This was a situation I had not experienced or heard of happening before (at least not to this extent).
Comments? How did your pre-release go? Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
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