Can you believe it has been a year since Cryptozoic took over the World of Warcraft TCG license from Upper Deck? The last 12 months have been incredible for the game, with major tournaments scheduled around the globe—including the World Cup—and a regular dosage of new expansions. The future of the game seems as healthy as it has ever been.

Happy Birthday Cryptozoic; you’ve done an amazing job with the game and we can’t wait to see what you have in store for this year. In honor of a job well done, I thought we would take a trip down memory lane and reflect on the WOW TCG awesomeness that has been spread across the globe over the last year.

June – European / North American Continental Championships

The first major Cryptozoic-ran tournaments brought the TCG to both Las Vegas and Paris in a pair of tandem Core Constructed events. Building off the results from the very last Upper Deck event, Darkmoon Faire Houston, [Death Wish] marched through the field and took down both tournaments in the hands of both Tim Rivera and Anssi Alkio.

August – World Championship

It didn’t take long for the best players in the world to reconvene once again as the World Championship came to Gen Con Indianapolis. Incredibly, five Europeans made it into the Top 8, leaving many in the US wondering just which side of the Atlantic Ocean held the game’s best players. Piloted by German powerhouse Jonas Skali, Mage once again took down the title, making it two in a row for the intrepid class.

September – Darkmoon Faire Guangzhou

The first Darkmoon Faire in China showcased the new Chinese Core Constructed format where players in China worked with a smaller card pool when building decks legal for competition. The first official DMF on Chinese soil highlighted a very different take on the competitive scene. Xie Zhi Qiang used [Vor'na the Wretched] to unleash [Illidan Stormrage], taking the title in the process.

October – Darkmoon Faire Antwerp

The Darkmoon Faire circuit stayed in the Eastern Hemisphere with a stop in Belgium. The second largest DMF of all time, players were challenged by incorporating the recently released Icecrown expansion into their decks. Christian Kurze took his now infamous Highlord Tirion Fordring Shaman Control build to a perfect 17-0 record on the weekend using the new tool-box design to perfection.

December – Darkmoon Faire Los Angeles

Due to some product delays, DMF LA became known as the “pre-release DMF.” Players who joined the main event were able to open and compete with the new Worldbreaker expansion for the very first time. Despite a perfect 8-0 Day 1, Tim Rivera quickly lost in the Top 8—as did a solid collection of three previous Limited DMF winners. In the end, Alex Gellerman took a bomb-laced Priest deck featuring [Eranikus], [Vigil of the Light] and [Devout Aurastone Hammer] all the way to the finish line.

February – Darkmoon Faire Orlando

Back to Constructed! This was the first tournament where players got to add Worldbreaker to their decks. The impact was felt right away, as the Stash mechanic made its way into several powerful designs—perhaps none moreso than Stuart Wright’s winning [Jeremiah Karvok] mid-range build which featured an incredible seven face up resources.

March – World Cup Paris

Just last weekend, the WOW TCG made its return to Paris, France for the inaugural World Cup. Players grouped with two of their fellow countrymen to battle it out in the team tournament. The story of the event was the lone American team charging through the standings and eventually taking home the title.

While awesome, tournaments weren’t the only great thing to come out of Cryptozoic over the last year. The Class Starter decks changed the way players were first introduced to the game by giving them a chance to pick their favorite class and faction combination to battle with. And then there is the lovely WOW TCG website. Players had to wait close to a year for the new site to come, but the wait was certainly worth it.

Daily Metagame in 2011

Speaking of new websites, Daily Metagame officially launched in November and we’ve been hard at work to bring you something worth checking out on a daily basis. Today you can find every Question of Gluttony Podcast, various contests, Top 8 decklists and regular written content.

But we don’t rest on our laurels around here, and we’ve been working on a variety of new features to release over the year. The first major one is our WOW TCG visual database. This program is still in beta, but please check it out if you haven’t already. We are collecting feedback here which will help us greatly as we continue to expand and develop on its capabilities. Some of the features we have in the works include the ability to save and share decklists, as well as tracking of your own collection.

The next release you’ll see from us is a Daily Metagame blog. I can’t go into too much detail just yet, but essentially this will let anyone who has interest in blogging come and talk about anything they want while sharing it with the world via this website. I will be using this section to share what life in Las Vegas is like as well as giving some insight into our WOW TCG testing and other gaming shenanigans. You can look forward to that release in the not-too-distant future.

In the past, we’ve experimented with videos on cakedraftmasters.com and we have plans to bring it back. We are still determining what format we want to use for recording different content. If there is a particular format you like or think would work well, please voice your opinion in the forums. It is likely that we will be focusing on Limited, but if you would like to see another aspect of the game covered, please let us know.

Cryptozoic has an aggressive schedule of product releases for this year and we plan to cover each of them. It is unclear which game will be coming out first, but you can be sure that we will have reviews and strategies as they do.

What features would you like to see on Daily Metagame? This site is built with YOU in mind and we want to make it a place any gamer would feel comfortable calling home. We have a lot more in the works for 2011 that I can’t dive into just yet . . . but rest assured that both the WOW TCG and Daily Metagame are not going any where. We plan to make 2011 our best year yet!


Phillip Martin has been playing the WoW TCG for years, and has become an active member in the Las Vegas WoW TCG community in early 2010. He has multiple high-level finishes to his name, including a top 8 at the 2009 World Championship and a win at DMF Indy in 2009. He is also actively involved in the online community with his writing for the game, and he has been one of the commentators during the GGslive tournament coverage in 2009 and 2010.