2025 Organized Play Overview

Hello Universus Players!

The Organized Play (OP) team is back again with some exciting updates. We have been working hard on adjusting the future of the Universus OP program and are excited to bring you many of our 2025 changes today. This article is only the beginning of these updates, we will be providing more in depth articles as we get closer to the 2025 OP season. 

But first, I have been saying that “we” are here to bring you updates because it’s not just a one person team any longer. I am excited to say that Levi Lalonde has joined the Universus OP team and I could not be more thrilled. Levi’s expertise as a community member and long time player has already brought an incredibly important perspective while making these changes. I can’t wait to see where his expertise brings us!

Alright, let’s talk about OP 2025!

To begin, let’s talk about the main goal of the 2025 OP Cycle. This year we want to focus on simplicity. I know that hearing that might sound scary to our long-time players, but I want to assure you that we don’t plan to destroy all of the amazing things that OP has been able to accomplish over the past years. We just want to make your path clear and provide you with every opportunity to show off how great you are at this game, or how well your fun deck plays.

Part of the simplicity here is the separation of our two OP paths. These paths are broken down to Community Store Level and Competitive. In the Community Store Level you will be able to play with unreleased cards in Prereleases, earn cool promo cards in your Weekly events and show off your new decks in Store Scrambles. In the Competitive path you will earn prizes and Champion Points for doing well in your Local Championships and Regional Championships, which both lead to the annual World Championship. 

Since your journey for every new set starts at the Prerelease, we will start our conversation today with the Community Store Level events. These events are pretty straightforward and don’t have many changes from what you are used to already. However, as we hope to see some new faces as we continue to add new content to the game we should still explain how these work in general.

Prereleases are the starting point for each new booster set. Players can expect to see Prereleases on a quarterly-ish basis. These events will take place the week before each new booster set releases and allow you to get your hands on new content before the official release date. Participation in a Prerelease will get you a Prerelease Player Kit, which provides you with 6 packs for deckbuilding and a promo just for showing up. These Best-of-One, Four round events are designed to get you building with new cards and just having a good time interacting with your local community around a new booster set.

Weekly Events are intended to be a fun, light way to engage with the game and your local communities. These events have been designed with your local community in mind and provide stores with an assortment of events to host. From Learn-to-Plays and Demos to Standard Constructed Tournaments, you can find what you are looking for at Weekly Events. We will also be providing stores with Promos for Weekly Event attendees, giving you something just for coming to play. 

Store Scrambles are “new” in the 2025 Cycle. These events will be taking place of our Local Qualifiers and will be tuned to the Community Store Level function. These events are designed to give newer players a low-stakes tournament experience that is more focused on learning how tournament play works. These events will have flattened prizing and will reward attendance equally to performance. They will also primarily focus on the most current booster sets by featuring the Spotlight format. So, bring your fun and wild Spotlight decks to earn some promos and have a good time. 

We recognize that the constant change around our competitive OP has been tiring to our community and hard to follow.  To address that, we are making one more change that we expect will satisfy our competitive play needs for years to come. For now we will call this the Champion Point Structure, because that is what matters most in this program. Before we get into that, I do want to address the elephants in the room…

Many of you may have noticed something missing from this structure. This is not a mistake. We have decided to remove the National tier of events this season to focus on the Regionals. In the current structure there isn’t enough of a difference between the two event types and I want to be sure that we perfect our Regional tier before adding more to the structure. The intent is not to limit players, but to give you all the greatest experience you can have at the Regional level.

With this adjustment to only hosting Regionals, we are also adjusting the frequency of these events. We are going to move to a structure that has something big almost every month of the year. Within this structure we will host Regional events more regularly and with a greater focus on areas with larger playerbases. This does not mean that we will necessarily take events away from a region, but focus them in a more appropriate way. More on that to come. 

Okay, where was I? …that’s right, Champion Points. 

Players will earn Champion Points at every qualifying Competitive event and those points will tie directly into the path to the World Championship. Without spoiling the structure completely I will tell you that every point matters and that there will be no player cap at the World Championship…that’s right NO PLAYER CAP! Each and every player that reaches a point threshold will qualify for Worlds. That’s all there is to it. You don’t have to win a certain event (doing so definitely won’t hurt your chances), be the best player in your country or be a top contestant on America’s Got Talent to earn your Worlds invite. Some of you may be asking what I mean by a point threshold, so let’s dive into what it’s all about. 

Players in each region will be required to earn a set number of Champion Points for their Worlds invitation, but before I confuse anyone I need to let everyone know one thing about this World Championship. The 2025 World Championship will be a three-day event with multiple invitation possibilities. To explain this properly, I am going to be giving some examples. Before I provide these examples, I want to state that these are just examples and may not be final numbers. 

In this example we will say that you need 50 points to earn an invitation to the World Championship. We will also say that winning a Local Championship earns you 10 points and winning a Regional earns you 200 points (with other places below the winner earning fewer points, based on final placement). This means that a player can win 5 Local Championships or one Regional to get the points they need for their invitation. Some of you may be questioning why a Regional offers more points than a player needs for their invitation and I’m glad you asked about it. With this being a three-day event, we have decided to offer multiple invitation thresholds. Those that earn the 50 points, from the example above, will be invited to day-one. However, anyone who earns 200 points or more (winning a Regional in this example) will receive a day-two invitation. This means that players who earn 200 points or more, will not have to play on day-one but will automatically qualify for the second day of competition, giving them more time to rest. As a reminder, all points are accumulated throughout the year from Local Championships and Regional Championships and can be applied to these invitations.

The final “tier” within our Champion Point structure will be for those who have earned the most points throughout the season. With the 2025 season we will be closely watching the Champion Point Leaderboard and those who have the most points (per region) at the end of the Cycle will earn airfare and accommodation for the World Championship Weekend. 

I know this is a big change, so let’s take a minute for it to sink in while we start talking about the events you can earn points at.

This is your first step toward the World Championship. Local Championships are a store level event that will focus more on final placement than any other in-store event. This event is designed for you to show off your skills against your other community members and come out on top. That being said, there is a little something for everyone. Participation will earn you a Champion Point and a Participation promo, but doing well will increase the number of Champion Points earned and the number of placement promos awarded. Doing well in enough of these events could even earn you an invitation to the World Championship.

We already talked a little bit about Regionals above, but will get into more details here after discussing one major change to Regionals. 

One large adjustment that we want to make in the Regional tier is to make it feel more…grand. Currently Regionals are a tournament where competitive players gather to see who is the best. We want Regionals to feel more like an event than just a tournament. The plan is to host an event that gives players, competitive or not, a desire to show up and engage with a game they love. This event will both feature the Regional Championship tournament, but will open the doors for non competitive players to come and hang out, play in side events and generally engage with others who love the game. One of the ways we can accomplish this will be the addition of prize walls to each and every Regional for the 2025 Cycle. Prize Walls will have alternate art and treatment promo cards as well as playmats, deckboxes and other game accessories to really improve the look of your deck on the table. Contents on the Prize Walls will also change through the year for those that attend multiple Regionals in the 2025 Cycle. More details about prize walls will come later. Let’s get back to discussing the Tournament taking place during the Regional weekend. 

Regionals, as stated, will be held more regularly throughout the Competitive Cycle and will be more focused around areas with higher player activity. We will be hosting the first Regional of the 2025 Cycle in March 2025, making sure there is always something exciting for our competitive players. These events will, like Local Championships, award Champion Points for participation and placement. The higher you place, the more points and additional rewards you will receive. The tournament itself will be pretty straightforward. All Champion Points earned from this tournament will be added to whatever has already been earned through the year and getting you even closer to, or fully obtaining, that World Championship invitation. 

Now it’s time to talk about “The Big Show”. 

We have already covered this, but I want to touch on it again for clarity. The World Championship (Worlds) will be a three-day event with invites for Day 1 and Day 2 players based on your Champion Points accumulated through the year. This means that we will have many more players than ever before and many more people to meet as you sit across the table. With this being a three-day event we will be changing the general format of play as follows. 

Day 1

Those with a day one invitation will be entered into the tournament and will play through a day of Constructed Swiss rounds. Every player who does well enough on day one will qualify for Day 2. Anyone who already has a Day 2 invitation will have an assortment of Side Events and activities to participate in to start earning those sweet Prize Wall items. This way everyone has something to do. We also plan on opening up the event, as space allows, for non-qualifying attendees to come and play in Side Events and engage with the game and community. 

Day 2

Anyone who automatically qualified for Day 2 or who made it through the Day 1 grind, will be entered into the day 2 Swiss rounds. Play will continue until we reach a Top Cut (based on player count) and those Top Cut players will qualify for Day 3. For those who didn’t qualify for Day 2, there will be an assortment of Side Events to play in throughout Day 2 allowing you to continue to play and meet new people as the World's weekend continues. 

Day 3

Day 3 will focus heavily on the Top Cut players and will follow their games closely until someone reaches the title of World Champion! In addition to making Top Cut, all Top Cut Players will automatically receive an invitation to the following year’s World Championship. They will not receive any Champion Points from this event for the upcoming season, but will receive a day 1 invitation. 

But that is not all that Day 3 will provide. We will also be hosting a Qualifying event for the following World Championship on Day 3. This will award top placing players with an invitation to the following World Championship by giving them a Day 1 invitation. This event is a competitive player’s opportunity to breathe a little easier going into the upcoming Competitive Cycle. In addition to the Qualifier, there will be an assortment of Side Events and the final opportunity to receive prizes from the Prize Wall. 

Conclusion

I know that this is a lot to take in now, but we will be talking to you about all of these changes and events in more detail as we get closer to the 2025 season. Continue to watch our socials and website for articles going into more detail of each and every topic discussed today. You can also find a video covering all of the content here

Make sure your UGN accounts are up to date so you can start earning those sweet sweet Champion Points and we’ll see you soon!