Last weekend marked the latest in Digimon TCG regional tournaments. This event was held in Liverpool, UK and saw some amazing play. We sat down with Adam Perry, OPE’s Community & Events Manager to talk about what they’ve learned through their TCG Expo events.
What are the lessons you learned from TCG Expo Glasgow?
If it’s too far North, players will not travel.
The most important thing that we learned that if we’re going to do it, we need to do it bigger and get as many different things involved. At Glasgow, we had a lot of UK TCG, but little numbers for them. For this event we condensed the number of events slightly.
We’ve had our main 3 Bandai games, and a Dragonball custom event so we had all 4. We had a big Pokémon tournament, we had Lorcana, had Magic the Gathering. And all of those have seen good numbers. Its been great to work with all of the vendors and get them in as well. Especially with all of our sponsors.
Source: OPE Facebook
Pokemon did well despite clashing with the international. Would you say that this is a sign UK TCG is in a good place?
Absolutely. I think with certain TCGs, the fact that it sells out so quickly and stock is hard to get is a good sign. It means publishers need to print more stock than they were possibly anticipating, looking at Lorcana, looking at Shadowverse, that sort of thing.
The response to UK TCG is currently experiencing a boom. There’s more card games than ever before. We keep seeing more communities popping up in little villages that have either a chain geek shop like Geek Retreat, or local game stores that are independent chains. With games like Lorcana, its family friendly, families play so you’re tyring to access a whole new side of the TCG market by making it accessible for them.
Do you think something like Pokemon’s Junior division is something that other UK TCG should implement?
Its definitely something that a lot of games could consider. It depends on the game. One Piece is aimed at teenagers and above, we have no problem allowing [kids] but it does have fairly adult themes so we recommend caution to parents.
Pokemon has its age divisions and it works really well, so maybe family friendly games like Lorcana might introduce that in the future, not sure if its been considered or not. There’s not much out about organized play.
How did sponsors come about?
The thing we got a lot of feedback on at [UK Games Expo] was that the event’s great but its mostly Tabletop games or board games. There’s a few TCG vendors and most of them only sell sleeves/binders etc. “We want a place with Singles that we can buy and sell.” We got in touch with a lot of vendors at Glasgow and a lot of them were instantly interested. Singles, rare cards, graded cards – we have multiple slab dealers and ACE Grading who sponsored the event. We wanted to make this a place for Players as well as Collectors, aim it at TCG enthusiasts of all ages.
What’s next?
[Digimon] Teams isn’t new, unofficial events have been done. Its good to get an official one. With better timing it would have sold out.
Right now we don’t have the budget for more than one . In future we’d love to invest in a multi stream setup for all games. We’re hoping to do another event some time next year, maybe aiming toward the later half of the year. Aiming maybe a bit more down South, maybe London or the surrounding areas.
Deixar um comentário