Four major events in 10 days. Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh held their World Championships this past weekend, with Magic running its Spotlight Brisbane in the background. The Cookout ran in Atlanta as well, achieving the first TopDeck Diamond event of the season. The weekend before, Riftbound held its largest regional yet, in a Barcelona hall that could barely hold it.

TCG events are growing. I’m sure you saw some of the stories coming out of San Francisco this past weekend, or Barcelona last. DSG Rosum breaks down his experience at RQ Barcelona, and the costs of event size.

Let’s get into it.

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Riftbound has the growth every TCG wants. Barcelona is what it costs the people standing in the hall.

By Jon Rosum

RQ Barcelona just wrapped up and boy was it one of the weekends of all time.

Riftbound finally had a weekend where it was “suffering from its own success” with a very overcrowded hall, the biggest regional yet, Pre-Regional AND Rebound both selling out, limited ODEs (On-Demand Events), prize wall metals selling out completely for the first time ever, and if you have an X (Twitter) the absolutely unbearable summer heat of Barcelona in a very mildly air conditioned place is something you’re probably well aware of by now. 

I’m not going to lie, all the complaints I saw about the event were very valid. From the outside looking in, the Friday of the RQ was kind of a complete disaster. The Pre-Regional had over 2,000 players which was expanded to support more players but the AC seemed like it wasn’t even set. By the time Round 1 of the Pre-Regional concluded it was just a sauna and I / most of the hall was sweating profusely the entire day. People were lining up and just standing by the doors because the breeze of the outside air was cooler than the convention center. It was at least 83 degrees Fahrenheit for reference. 

Thankfully, I was able to buy a ticket because my sleep schedule is quite something and I was awake when Pre-Regional tickets dropped. I understand the frustration expressed originally by my fellow North American competitors who weren’t awake at 3:00am EST. If you didn’t buy a ticket for that event in the first 20 minutes you were absolutely cooked which is wild to think about because these events normally take days to sell out. I do think expanding the amount of slots at the Pre-Regional the day before was a good idea in theory but in execution it was just too much to handle for the size of that convention center. 

By the time Friday wrapped up and people were lining up for prize wall tickets the amount of cutting I had witnessed was absolutely diabolical. I understand that there is a mad dash to the prize wall line after all the events and specifically the Pre-Regional where you can get your hands on the more desirable ones of the bunch. With that being said the amount of cutting the line I witnessed was actually quite gross, we are all there for the same thing. I just beg that people respect each other's time and not just be scummy. 

The Friday of the RQ was probably the worst day ever in all of the RQs I witnessed. Saturday actually started out on a high with better AC, but we quickly got plagued with the usual 80-90 min rounds but besides that I would say pretty normal experience at this point. Then we get to Round 7 where we get the longest overtime I have ever seen in this game… 57 minutes. Apparently, there were multiple cheating investigations going on simultaneously that resulted in why that round took forever so we didn’t actually begin Round 8 till around 9:05ish pm local time. This isn’t a new issue but having rounds go that far into overtime lead to people not actively leaving the hall until around 10pm the earliest. That was also true for this RQ. If there is one thing I would love to see at these events is the round-turnover average being closer to 75 than 85ish minutes because of how long these days feel. Playing Riftbound all day is awesome but looking at the clock after a quick match and thinking “well I have an hour to kill” isn’t exactly what I would call the most fun feeling in the world. I do want to give a shout out to the judges / staff because these events are quite challenging and with a new game like Riftbound that receives so many updates it’s hard to show appreciation when things miss the mark. Always treat staff / judges with respect and even if they mess up you always have the right to appeal, without them I promise you this experience would be a whole lot worse and we are lucky to have passionate and smart folks like Grenton in our community.

With that being said, by the time Sunday rolled around I would say a lot of the kinks of the event were worked out. The competitor area was in a good spot, the overtime got a bit better but mostly due to the fact that there are less people in the room and from what I heard everything ran pretty smoothly. I believe the Rebound was sold out and expanded a little bit to fit more people playing Riftbound but this all changed when both the Rebound and RQ finished at roughly the same time. The line to claim prizes was absolutely gigantic and by the end of it there were actually 0 metal cards left and I knew several people who walked away with much less to show for the weekend from their finish. The one pro I will give to the European RQs is that players like watching the Top 8 which is something that hasn’t traditionally happened in American RQs which I think is a nice touch and hearing the crowd roar from a sick play or punish is something that is hard to not get you completely amped up.

I don’t want this article to come across as purely negative, again Riftbound is suffering from its own success and I think it’s a good thing that they are actively trying to get more people into the venue and more people into tournaments. If anything I’m more so saddened by the lack of overall decency that I witnessed or I heard about throughout the event along with how poorly optimized the Friday before was. Riftbound in my opinion is the best game out there and we are seeing its success in realtime with each RQ being bigger than the last (besides Sydney since it’s a little hard to get to Australia). I don’t know what the actual fix is but I’m sure Riot is taking note of what transpired this past RQ and is going to work hard in improving the player experience. 

With RQ Singapore on the horizon I hope the lessons learned from Barcelona will be applied and we will have a much better experience overall. Barcelona missed the mark and I have no doubt that we will likely never experience an RQ like the one we just had ever again. That being said it was an important learning experience and unfortunately I’m sure a lot of peoples first RQ experience just didn’t meet the bar in which I’m sure Riot wants to be at. Moving forward I would like to see some expansion in the Prize Wall, along with more spacious venues that can support the amount of players that are trying to get into the tournament. Riftbound is exploding right now, and while I know the best intentions were there; it just missed in execution.

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