Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.
PSA: Stores are provided two boosters per player for free prize support for your Prerelease. To notify Wizards of a breach of this policy, contact Customer Support.
It also means "two boosters per predicted player", since they have to ship that stuff in advance.
Given the structure of this prerelease, with guild boxes, why would Wizards not give stores enough product of prize support to match up with their guild boxes? If a store has 100 guild boxes then they should have 200 boosters (rounded up to the nearest box, I suppose) to give out.
In the past when they used ordinary packs, sure, since stores who went over expectation would pull sealed pools out of the prizes, but that shouldn't have been possible given this setup.
I linked the Gatecrash FAQ above with the official answer. Basically WotC wanted players to have a better chance getting their first pick of guild, so they provide retailers with extra copies of the guild packs to improve the chances.
PSA: Not all stores got enough gatecrash to make that.
Our store got 5 boxes of Gatecrash and 120 guild boxes. So we have 120 possible entries and 180 packs for prize support. So we only have prize support for 90 players. We got 107 total (across three flights). We had to supplement with other packs.
We split the Gatecrash evenly across all the flights so that no single flight received less Gatecrash than the others.
How a retailer structures prizes is entirely up to them. However, be aware that Wizards of the Coast provides you with two Gatecrash booster packs per player intended for use as prizes. Failing to use these boosters appropriately may result in a negative customer experience for your players and possible sanctions from Wizards of the Coast. Please note you will receive prize packs based on the number of players you’re projected to have for your Prerelease events; prize packs may not correlate directly to the amount of Guild Prerelease Packs you receive.
WotC determines how many players each retailer can support based on previous events, and then provides support based on that number. (Note that every demand exceeded supply for almost every retailer, so saying "WotC didn't give us enough" is not an excuse.)
Normally this match is very simple - if WotC decides that a retailer should get support for 100 players, they simply allocate them 100 x 6 packs for deck building, and 100 x 2 packs for prizes = 800 packs.
For the guild packs, WotC provided extra guild packs to help players get their choice. So a retailer that was assigned support for 100 players, they would have received 120 guild boxes and 100 x 2 prize backs. The 20 extra guild boxes are not for 20 more entries - they're to try and balance out player requests for specific guilds.
If your store did this, drop WotC an email. They're not going to take away Prereleases for a first offense, and as a player it will help this from happening again.
bdrago
I linked the Gatecrash FAQ above with the official answer. Basically WotC wanted players to have a better chance getting their first pick of guild, so they provide retailers with extra copies of the guild packs to improve the chances.
bdrago
Here's the Gatecrash Prerelease FAQ:
WotC determines how many players each retailer can support based on previous events, and then provides support based on that number. (Note that every demand exceeded supply for almost every retailer, so saying "WotC didn't give us enough" is not an excuse.)
Normally this match is very simple - if WotC decides that a retailer should get support for 100 players, they simply allocate them 100 x 6 packs for deck building, and 100 x 2 packs for prizes = 800 packs.
For the guild packs, WotC provided extra guild packs to help players get their choice. So a retailer that was assigned support for 100 players, they would have received 120 guild boxes and 100 x 2 prize backs. The 20 extra guild boxes are not for 20 more entries - they're to try and balance out player requests for specific guilds.
If your store did this, drop WotC an email. They're not going to take away Prereleases for a first offense, and as a player it will help this from happening again.