With the cancellation of Team Liquid and Crokeyz’s Innistrad: Midnight Hunt launch tournament today, Wizards of the Coast and Matcherino’s partnership got off to a bad start.
On Sept. 22, Wizards of the Coast announced a new partnership with Matcherino, a digital tournament organizer, while promoting a launch event hosted by MTG streamer Stephen “Crokeyz” Croke and sponsored by Team Liquid. The Crokeyz MID launch tournament, which was set to take place from September 25-26, was canceled early this morning due to a lack of tournament site support from Matcherino.
The tournament was canceled by Crokeyz because the goal of the launch event was to show off the new Standard post-rotation meta.
Crokeyz explained, “I was offered the chance to delay, but my entire reason for running this was to explore a new meta. It would be ruined if we waited.”
Since the digital launch of MID, Crokeyz has been promoting the free MTG Arena tournament on his Twitch and YouTube channels. Crokeyz has never had to cancel an event on his stream before, and he says he’s “not happy” about it. ” The only option was to cancel the event because the organizers refused to compromise “on the quality of the event.”
Matcherino is a Seattle-based company that specializes in assisting tournament organizers with the management and handling of funds for their events. MTG Arena and its player base were supposed to benefit from a partnership with WotC, which was supposed to bring more competitive events to the game. At the time of writing, it is unknown what improvements are being made or whether Matcherino and WotC will continue to work together.
