Wizards of the Coast has been giving players some pretty fantastic limited formats recently. With each passing Friday Night Magic at Hex & Company, the draft pods were beginning to fire faster. More and more new players, as well as many returning to the game after a long hiatus, were joining us for our events. The community was steadily growing. Then the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to bring that exciting momentum to a screeching halt, just as the hype for Ikoria was beginning to ramp up. In order to preserve the positive growth, we knew we had to find a way to bring our community back together as socially as we could, as safely as we could, despite the difficult circumstances.

We’ve been in quarantine for over three months now, and our store has been closed to in-store play since mid-March. As a brick-and-mortar destination for a tabletop gaming customer base, watching the isolation deprive our community of their social tabletop opportunities was rough. Out of necessity, most players have turned to online gaming, but we knew that the online experience wasn’t quite the same. Though we were quite aware that we couldn’t provide a true analog alternative, we were keen to be able to offer our players a way to use online tools to simulate their tabletop experiences with as much community connection as possible.

We devised a system wherein players would assemble on our newly established Hex & Company Discord server, where we’d provide each draft pod with a group voice chat. Players would draft their decks in a Magic: The Gathering Arena draft event and save those decks to their accounts. Players would then play three Swiss-paired rounds, with the two players of each individual match meeting in their own two-person voice chat, and initiating a Direct Challenge on Arena.

A short while into the quarantine, our staff tested this idea to implement the new 8-player draft features of Arena with our Discord server. The most resounding response was, essentially, “It’s so great to be able to socialize with the whole draft pod again.” We talked together, in real time, throughout the draft. We heard each other’s verbal excitement about what we were opening in our packs. We laughed at our opponents’ snarky banter during our games. We were socializing almost just as we would in the store. It was cathartic enough to come to the conclusion that we needed to offer this opportunity to our Magic community.

The community’s initial response, we were very happy to find, echoed that of our staff’s trial run. It was abundantly apparent that everyone was missing the social aspect of playing in a draft tournament. In order to provide added camaraderie, we discovered over time that if all of our players try to enter into their Arena drafts at precisely the same moment, most (sometimes all!) of them would end up actually drafting together in the same pod. And, by collecting a nominal fee from each player, we were able to create a prize payout structure, where players with winning records accrue store credit. Some of our players have chosen to stream their games on Discord, so that other players who complete their matches can gather together to watch and to continue socializing, just as they would during in-store tournaments. What’s more, players realize that after completing the three rounds of the tournament, they’re three matches more experienced with their decks, giving them a strategic edge for when they play out the matches of the Arena draft events that they purchased.

Though we all know nothing can ever replace in-person, tabletop gameplay, providing our players the opportunity to maintain access to our growing Hex & Company community as well as a forum for live conversation has proven to be a vast and welcome improvement over quiet, lonely, isolated gaming sessions. Even though we and our Magic players aren’t playing these games together in the same physical room, the excitement permeating the conversations, the laughter, and the general sense of community familiarity is still palpable. It keeps members of our community coming back again and again, and some of our players have begun to invite their friends from afar to join us. And so, ultimately, these online tournaments have proven to be an effective element of the effort to do as every local game store wants to do during this uncertain time: catalyze the energy of its community, and maintain the momentum of its growth.

Hex & Company only recently became a TCGplayer Pro seller, and our online sales efforts were certainly accelerated by the pandemic. Perhaps others of you who are reading this have also recently made the decision to branch out into online sales of Magic: The Gathering product (or other TCG product) to best capitalize on your inventory in the current situation. As a new online seller, our sales have also benefited from the expanding outreach of our community as its members participate more in our online offerings. New customers who are enjoying their participation in our online community but have only known about our store from a distance are beginning to express their desire to support us, notably with our online preorders of new Magic: The Gathering product releases. Players who participate in our online draft tournaments discover the need to acquire copies of those spicy cards that proved particularly useful; unable to make the trip to our store, they’ll check for those cards in our ever-growing online inventory. Pro has proven to be a great resource for us, providing us with some much-needed revenue and broadening our reach to players around the country.

New York City is finally starting the process of reopening. And while we’re re-entering a world that is, now perhaps more than ever, turning to technology, we remain optimistic and excited to be a brick-and-mortar, social destination. Our business model thrives when people can discover the joy found when machines are turned off and put away, just for a while—and we’ve heard again and again that people are excited to do so. When the online world becomes as necessary as it has during this time of social distancing, finding ways to utilize technology in a way that can keep our communities excited to be together becomes crucial. It has been very encouraging, then, hearing the same general feeling conveyed to us online in many ways by members of our community, staff, and neighborhood: “We cannot wait until we’re all together at the store again.”