If you’re reading this, it means you have the slightest interest in the inner workings of the store and the lives of us humble Tabletop Gaming Center employees. I won’t judge you for that; we’re all pretty interesting, and hopefully you learn a thing or two about life along the way.
As of this moment, this blog is going to focus more on the events side of things. I’m a member of the Events Team, and its newest member. So you’ll also be getting the perspective of the “new guy.” As I learn, so can you, and potentially obtain some interesting insight into the inner workings of the Events Team. That said, we’re going to talk this week about the lead-up to one of the big events of the fall, the Star Wars Unlimited: Ashes of the Empire Planetary Qualifier.
If you aren’t sure what that is, that’s totally okay. I started writing this post about a week out from this event. Last time the store ran one, I was a member of Tabletop’s Stream Team and hadn’t yet begun my time as a member of the Events Team. This will be my first one too, so we’re in this together.
Planetary Qualifiers, or PQs, are the largest competitive Star Wars Unlimited (SWU) events that we can run at the store. Our event on September 12th is going to be for the current SWU set, Ashes of the Empire, and last I heard, we’re gonna have over 100 players. If this week is Majora’s Mask, the PQ is the moon. Not that it's a world-ending event, but everyone seems to be bracing themselves for sheer absurdity, and the seconds, minutes, hours, and days are counting down.
It will be an all-day ordeal with 7 total rounds of Swiss, meaning that each player will be paired with others based on their win-loss ratio. After that is complete, the 8 highest-performing players will begin a 3-round, bracket-style “top cut,” which will determine the tournament’s winner.
Being on the events team means you may try to understand every game, but it’s impossible to master all of them. We do our best, but we pick up the slack where we can for each other. Me? I’m not super knowledgeable on most games, but SWU is slowly becoming my wheelhouse. You can thank our resident Star-Wars-Unlimited-peddler and Events Manager, Addy, for getting me into that. A few of us here at the store actually play the game, though none of us will be throwing down in the PQ.
If you do happen to find yourself in an event such as this, you get some fun promos. For this PQ, all 128 players get a special promo Marrok, Mysterious Warrior card along with 2 Ashes of the Empire booster packs, an Ashes promo pack, plus one promo pack from an older set. The Top 8 players get all that, plus booster packs and a specially stamped promo foil card, Luke Skywalker, Answering the Call. Yours truly, and fellow events team member, Teagan, had the honor of packing the promos for all the players.
And the CHAMPION of the whole thing gets a special playmat.
If you weren’t feeling the competitive allure of demolishing your fellow SWU players and claiming a playmat to show off your superiority, you can always come by on Mondays for Premier, Thursdays for Eternal, and Sundays for Twin Suns. With the new set Homeworlds releasing on October 9th, we have our pre-release events running October 2nd-October 4th. As we get closer to said dates, we’ll find our way back to discussing SWU again. Stay tuned for that, and I’ll see you in the next post!
-Aaron
