Community Cup 2013

Last week Wizards of the Coast announced the initial details for the Community Cup 2013 event. For those unfamiliar with this event, each year Wizards brings together a team of players from the Magic Online community and flies them to Seattle to compete in a series of events against a hand-picked team of WotC employees. But it's much more than that. Each year the community team gets to enjoy a tour of WotC headquarters, special interviews with key employees, and all sorts of unique and zany experiences. Then, at the end of the weekend, whichever team has assembled the most points takes home the Community Cup for the year.

While the player community has dominated most the events, last year our string of successes came crashing to an end as Wizards of the Coast won the trophy for the first time. From my perspective, last year was the first time that WotC got serious about winning this event, and I would not surprised to see another strong showing this year.

To that end, it's vitally important that the right people get chosen to participate. Each year, Wizards of the Coast takes nominations from the community as to who should represent us at this annual event. You can use this form to send them your choice for this year's team. You will have to have an active account on the Wizards site to utilize that form. Also, when nominating potential candidates, these are the desired qualifications:

• How has this player contributed to Magic Online and its community? Creating and sustaining casual formats, helping new players learn the game, answering questions in the forums—all of these are actions worthy for nomination.
  
• How well will this player represent the community at the event? Is he or she a good sport? Does he or she handle winning and losing gracefully? Is this someone you'd personally enjoy playing against?
  
• What has this person done to help raise awareness for Magic Online? Articles, live streams, recorded videos, and social media conversations about Magic Online are all great ways to expand public awareness about the game and its players and will make your player a strong nomination for the Community Cup.

For those of you who use Twitter, you can keep up with all Community Cup related Tweets at hashtag #mtgocc.

Speaking of Twitter, here are a few tweets from people I respect nominating other players:

The Pauper community from PDCMagic.com has traditionally sent at least one member to this great event as well, and some initial discussion of candidates can be found here.

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to see what this year's Community Cup has in store. Let's field the strongest team we can, and take back the trophy from Wizards this year! Thanks for reading.