Regional Championships are back for MLP: CCG, and they're starting soon! Regional Championships are events where players have the chance to win prizes, get promo cards, and new this year are limited-edition autograph cards, signed by folks from Friendship is Magic - one for the top place player and one as a random giveaway at each event! Click here to see the Regionals map.
Each participant at a Regional gets one copy of the special foil alternate-art Heart's Desire card you see above, and the Top 8 players each get the new version of Applejack, Carbo-Loader, with three copies going to the top player. The top two players at each event also get an invitation to the Continental Championships to be held at Gen Con 2016 in Indianapolis, Indiana.
The season kicks off with a special Regional event at Ponycon NYC, on February 14th. After that, stores around the US and Canada will hold events on the weekends of February 20th and 27th. Be sure to check here soon for the map of events!
And in preparation for competitive play at the Regionals and beyond, there has been an update to the banlist and card errata for MLP: CCG. Check below the break for the updates and word from the CCG developers on why those choices were made.
1) Bulk Biceps, Extra Strong Masseuse (Equestrian Odysseys #103) is being added to the Harmony and Block format banlist. This is effective as of January 25th, 2016.
2) Discord, Party Clasher (High Magic #78) now has updated text. "When you play this card," replaces the previous, "When this card enters play."
3) Fancy Pants, Respected Aristocrat (High Magic #47) now has updated text. "When you play this card," replaces the previous, "When this card enters play."
Here's a quote from one of the MLP: CCG developers, with more details on why these changes were made:
1) Extra Strong Masseuse has been found to generate very stale, repetitive game states in which the game's major axis of interaction (using Friends to confront Problems and challenge Troublemakers) becomes inaccessible indefinitely. Obviously, this is not conducive to fun games or exciting events, and unfortunately there is relatively little clear counterplay, so it's something we feel needs to be removed from the format.
As always, this ban applies only to Harmony and Block constructed - you're free to use Extra Strong Masseuse in Sealed or Draft events, and fans of the card can certainly continue using it in events using a format which does not have a banlist, or while playing at home!
2 & 3) Discord, Party Clasher and Fancy Pants, Respected Aristocrat have an unfortunate interaction which can lead to unintended play patterns. Rather than ban these cards, however, we will be issuing a template errata which updates the trigger text of both cards from "When this card enters play" to "When you play this card."
Normally, when addressing problematic cards we prefer to ban rather than errata, largely in order to avoid confusion over a card's "real" text and to avoid infringing on non-event play. However, the ultimate goal of our banlist policy is to keep the game's format healthy and fun, and these particular cards have some unusual attributes that lead us to believe that banning them outright is not what would be best for the game or its players. Among other things, Respected Aristocrat is part of an important cycle of deckbuilding tools, and keen-eyed collectors may have already noticed that a Party Clasher promo appears in the card checklist. Moreover, the errata necessary to address this particular interaction is unusually minimal - it is, essentially, a template errata applied to correct a power level problem, rather than a significant rewrite of a card's text, and is likely to have relatively little effect on the normal play pattern of these cards. So, while the Party Clasher/Respected Aristocrat interaction needs to be addressed, in this case we don't feel it is in the best interests of the players to do it in a way which puts the players of white decks at a structural disadvantage or which results in banning a card of which we know players will later recieve promo versions (or in us failing to distribute a card which appears on collector checklists). As a result, we've decided to make a slight deviation from our preferred policy and handle this issue through errata rather than a ban. This errata will, like the banlist update, be effective as of January 25th.
Thanks for your attention, and good luck at Regionals!
