1664869:Our Realm qualifiers had 4 people..
It was absolutely terrible... we have more consistantly on battleground nights..
NO one was willing to pay 25 dollars to get the terrible prizes offered, and since our city is so far away from the Realm championship (at least a 12 hour drive, plus border check) the invite meant basically nothing... Really, the only people who showed up are the 4 of us who are commited to the game who wanted to show support to the store for holding the events..
20 people showed at our Realm Q, was 21 last week. One of the top two finishers did come back to play a new deck type and I assume for the Conq contest. The other top finisher will probably not do another Realm Q the rest of the season which is kind of sad because he is the only person in LA who desires the winning EA card; he collects EAs. While I attendance is down 6-7 people on the average it is doing better then what some of us thought it would be.
Guessing by the talk imo the attendance will probably start taking bigger hits but talk it cheap and who knows maybe some of the people not attending will decide to come back.
It seems there is a huge negative feeling about block in general but maybe just because there is no talk of deck possibilties. Both the realms we have had so far have had some really interesting and new decklists.
For example I was using Unrelentling Assualt as one of my win conditions...I think people completely forgot about this card with the stranglehold Hammer of Justice/Cyclone put on heros attacking.
Saw another deck making use of Vigor, solo fire mage deck, affliction warlock, holy paladin rush and realistically one could probably make any number of druid variants with all the powerhouse cards druid have now a days. This is not even including the sham variants, priest variants, warrior variants from existing decks that are doing well.
Imo block is much more diverse then regular constructed because you can make a deck from just about every class and spec. Maybe demons take a hit but the rest is almost wide open.
Maybe after 3-4 tournaments the best decks would rise to the top and things would settle down but right now things are wide open and imo pretty fun.