Ambassador Report - September 2001
Region: Ronara - West Texas
Ambassador: Matt Clouser
#1 What is a general state of the CCG industry in your area. What trends are you seeing? What games are doing better/worse over the past month? How is your Product Champion CCG doing compared to the other games lately? What is your opinion of how things are going in general?
To quote Dickens - "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times".
The CCG scene here in San Angelo remains subdued after the summer. At Hard Drive (the main gaming store in town), ST remains the the best seller, followed by Magic and Pokemon. Other Decipher products (SW, JK, YJ) remain dead, with no local interest to speak of.
The Borg Expansion was a big hit among our players. To my way of thinking, it built well on the strength of Voyager, and gave the Borg affiliation some needed strategies and game play options. The addition of the Hirogen was icing on the cake - and truth to tell, these hunters are absolutely BRUTAL, particularly in the WS format.
Unfortunately, we're going through some more problems with our primary game store again. The near-closing in May, plus the change in ownership has damaged the store's financial position, and they are in danger of closing their doors again.
We (our local player base) inadvertantly caused the gaming store to loose some revenue - some of the adult players ordered large amounts of Borg through a distributer and sold off a lot to many other local players. As a result, the store sales suffered a hit - right after I had convinced them to order up their stock based on the sale of Voyager. While I have no control over this, I've cautioned my players about the need to support our local vendors, and warned them this was a good way to hustle ourselves right out of a playing venue. Several of us have started buying as much STCCG product as we can afford to try and offset the losses.
#2 What have you been doing to promote your Product Champion CCG in the
past month. How many tournaments and were they successful? How many demos did you schedule and show up for? Any new players brought on? Any new TD's created? How is the mentoring of your TD's going? What types of retailer visits have you done, and what were the results? Finally, how well did you succeed in accomplishing your planned goals for this month? (see part three below.)
Mike Harrison (one of my TD's) ran a successful sanctioned constructed deck tournament on September 22nd to break in the Borg Expansion. There were two Borg decks - both of which performed poorly because the players had forgotten to include critical Borg equipment cards (they're not used to dealing with equipment!). I put together a Klingon Delta Quadrant Deck - I was wondering how well they'd play alongside the other DQ races. I took second out of a field of 10! The only real surprise was there were no Hirogen decks played.
#3 What is your plan for what you intend to do over the upcoming month
to promote your Product Champion CCG. Any tournaments scheduled? Demos?
Retail visits? Are you going to be working with anybody in a mentoring
capacity? Any long-term plans that you will be advancing on during this
month?
Assuming all goes well, Jerry Jackson (our other TD) will be hosting a sanctioned constructed deck tournament on Oct 27th. Also, we'll continue to hold our Saturday open gaming/demo sessions.
Matt Clouser
STCCG Ambassador
San Angelo, Texas USA
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Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 20:15:35 EDT
Subject: [Amb] September Report - San Angelo Texas
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