Magic the Gathering

Events

StarCityGames Open Series Announced

By ManaNation.com ⋅ November 25, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

StarCityGames.com has been run­ning their $5k week­ends for two years now and it was con­tin­u­ing to grow, well 2010 is the biggest, most poten­tially awe­some. Today they announced 16 events, only 3 short of Wiz­ards’ Grand Prix sched­ule (though notably the prize pool for each week­end is 1/3rd the Grand Prix prizes.) How­ever, along with their events, they announced the final 2010 event is an Invi­ta­tional based on play­ers accu­mu­lat­ing 10 points from the var­i­ous Open events to be invited to the Invitational.

At each stop of the Open, Sat­ur­day will be a Stan­dard tour­na­ment and Sun­day will be a Legacy tour­na­ment, the prizes will be $5,000 for each tour­na­ment as well as Invi­ta­tional points being awarded depend­ing on how you finish.

One very inter­est­ing fact is that the sched­ule over­laps the Grand Prix sched­ule in a num­ber of places, only when the Grand Prix is out­side of the United States. The SCG Open is by far the biggest and most excit­ing non-Wizards tour­na­ment series since the Pro Tour was announced. It shows a grow­ing will­ing­ness of play­ers to play at non-Wizards events and for Magic retail­ers to begin open­ing up for big­ger sized tour­na­ments in an effort to gain a com­pet­i­tive advantage.

With the StarCi­tyGames sched­ule announced it is likely we will now see a tor­rent of events com­ing, from TCG­Player, Chan­nelFire­ball and per­haps oth­ers. They were most likely wait­ing for this announce­ment to avoid con­flicts which would wreck their event.

With the announce­ment came also news that these events will be cov­ered by Bill Stark, a reg­u­lar mem­ber of the Wiz­ards cov­er­age team, and GGSlive, the guys from Pas­times games who pro­vide live video cov­er­age of tour­na­ments. Evan will undoubt­edly be present at some or all of these but not pro­vid­ing live coverage.

We have added all StarCi­tyGames Open events to our Pre­mier Magic the Gath­er­ing Event Cal­en­dar.