big domestic deal. too much of an east-coast bias, though. i have no idea why they continue to be hq'ed in some godforsaken hillbilly hamlet in western virginia. i'd guess it's because in that region everyone drives to every tournament. plus setting up in seattle is pricey.
invis are much, much easier to qualify for than the PT, much, much easier to stay on than the PT, much, much easier in terms of quality of play than the PT, and not all that worse in terms of value. i love scg tournaments. everything about them is fantastic. even at opens, the prize support is good -- so much less soul-crushingly -EV than a GP, say -- the judging and administration is good, the venues are fine, the competition is spirited but relaxed, the people are fun, and only having to t8 instead of win is a huge relief from the winner-takes-all BS of PTQs. also, the coverage is so much better than the boring lies one hears from imbeciles like hagon on the mothership. it blows my mind that a third-party vendor is able to so consistently and easily outdo wizards itself, who prints the cards. i am told hasbro is to blame for this too.
the thing about block is that it's rarely a robust format, like the PT metagame is often interesting (e.g. TSP, Shards, kinda ZEN, kinda ISD, RTR) but then people figure out the best deck pretty quickly and the format degenerates. iirc everyone was playing hella jund after PT AVR last year. it looked stupid.
an interesting insight a friend of mine had (he loved TSP block constructed, which is commonly cited as one of the best environments of all time -- RTR and KAM weren't awful either, he told me) was that, from shards forward, block suffered because the card pools were too small. like TSP has 100 more cards than a modern big set. that's not all that huge of a deal for standard, but for block it severely restrains the number of options
