Last week, Wizards of the Coast announced a new partnership with tournament platform Matcherino. For their kick off event, they partnered with Team Liquid and Crokeyz to hold a Standard tournament on the platform. It was a free event, but unfortunately it fell flat.
Sadly, there were too many entrants into the event, and the platform couldn’t quite handle the volume. While Crokeyz was given a chance to push the event back while the site was fixed, he didn’t want to do that. While this was an upsetting thing, Crokeyz said that he didn’t want to compromise on the quality of the event, which is respectable.
Looking at the event, there were over 550 people entered into the tournament. This is definitely a lot of people. It’s far more people in one event than any other event on the platform that I could find. I’m not sure what Wizards was expecting to happen. It’s a free tournament, with one of the most beloved and long standing teams in Esports, alongside a beloved member of the MTG community. People are going to enter.
This really begs the question, why didn’t Wizards partner with MTGMelee instead? They have used Melee in the past for various events in the past. With events like Red Bull Untapped having sometimes upwards of 2000 players on site as well, Melee definitely would have been able to handle volume of people.
My only guess is that some of the ancillary features played into the decision. Examples of this could be the polish on the user interface, the stream overlay creation tool, and the charity integration. It also could have been a matter of integration for partnered organizers. Either way, this isn’t a good look for a new partnership for Wizards, especially if this is a first step to rebuilding Organized Play.
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What are your thoughts on this? Would you have rather seen them work with MTGMelee? Let us know in the comments!
