Did anyone here attend a WOTC era prerelease event?

General
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Hi all, first post here.

Modern prerelease events are my favourite part of the hobby and during Covid I’ve taken to collecting the vintage prerelease cards. I’m looking to learn a little bit more about them. For a hobby which is so thoroughly documented, I can barely find any information for how prereleases were ran back in the WOTC era. There must be someone here who went to these events at the time!?

I’ve searched these forums, bulbapedia and Google, but if I’m missing anything, please feel free to send me a link in the right direction.

Questions below:-

  1. How were the promos distributed? I understand that they weren’t individually sealed as none of those ever pop up

  2. Were the events ran before the sets official release in the same way they are now? (I’m assuming so based on the self explanatory name, but again, I can’t find anything concrete such as advertisements or dates for these events)

  3. Again, like today, were these events tournaments where you also got booster packs ahead of time and played in a little sealed tournament?

  4. If the promos came in bricks rather than kits like they do today, was it guaranteed that a store would be shipped enough for everyone at the event. On the flipside, were stores shipped enough that you can remember being handed out one of these cards weeks later at a regular league event?

  5. Does anyone have insight into the reason that these cards are so cheap? In the case of the Aerodactyl and Dark Gyarados, they have similar pop reports to their first ed counterparts, more significance in my eyes, and yet, are like half the price?

Any answers to the above, or any general information about these events is much appreciated!

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As far as I remember there were no prerelease events in Europe during WotC. We got the WotC prerelease cards shipped to give away to league players for earning points.
Those we got enough, more than enough. The reason those are cheap, to many printed of them.

First real Prerelease was EX Sandstorm for North America and EX Dragon for Europe.

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For both Jungle and Fossil, the places that had regular gaming nights (In my area, a Zany Brainy and an established comic & card shop) simply announced that the new product would be available on a specific game night. Players who showed up got whatever promo card was given out, along with whatever other promo materials were available.

For Jungle there was a promotion where buying a theme deck or buying 3 boosters got you a free booster, but I never knew whether that was coordinated by WOTC, or was a more local belated apology for the debacle that was Base set (running out of 1st edition, then nothing for weeks until Unlimited finally arrived). By the time Fossil showed up there was more than sufficient product.