Just a few months ago, Corey Burkhart was doing what he loved most: he was spending his weekend playing Magic with his friends, in this case a team event with Hall of Famers Martin Jůza and Shuhei Nakamura. As they advanced through Day One of Grand Prix Providence, Burkhart would finish his match and then turn to help his teammates in theirs.
There was only one catch—they didn't want his help. In fact, they didn't even want him at the table.
Instead, he had an MTG Arena tournament to play.
"We went to the tournament with the goal of getting Shuhei to the number-one spot in Pro Points, but Martin told me the night before to bring my laptop because there was this important MTG Arena tournament I should play," Burkhart explained. "So at 9 a.m., instead of building our Limited decks, I'm on my laptop playing the Mono-Red mirror in a Standard format I hadn't played before."
The MTG Arena tournament would decide the Challengers who would compete at Mythic Championship III. As the MTG Arena event went well for Burkhart and the GP went poorly for his team, it wasn't long before Jůza and Nakamura were kicking Burkhart off the table to focus on MTG Arena.
His team dropped from the GP soon after, but Burkhart squeaked into Day Two of the digital tournament; he ended up finishing in 126th place, with cut at 128. Burkhart wasn't familiar with the current Standard metagame—what exactly was Four-Color Command the Dreadhorde?—but he stayed calm, learned on the fly, and worked his way through Day Two.
It wasn't quite so easy for Jůza.
"Martin and Shuhei were biting their fingernails the entire time," Burkhart recalled with a laugh. "I was in the hotel lobby, with MTG Arena open on one screen and another small laptop open trying to learn the format. Martin was taking pictures and posting to Twitter and coming back into the hotel lobby every few minutes to ask if I had won yet, and it was like 'dude, it hasn't even been a turn yet.'
"I get to the last round with a chance to qualify, and I'm playing against Grixis. I told myself it was just like winning my first PTQ, and I was going to do have to it against my old deck."
An hour later, Burkhart, Jůza and Nakamura were in a car on their way to the airport, screaming out the window—Burkhart was heading to the first-ever MTG Arena Mythic Championship.
It was not the kind of scene Burkhart had thought possible for himself even a relatively short time ago. After a steady rise through the ranks in which he continually set lofty goals for himself and continued to meet them, Burkhart ended last season at the top of his career. After several years of Top 8 appearances that ultimately fell short of the goal he readily shared every weekend—to take home a trophy—he had finally gotten that monkey off his back by winning GP Providence 2017 with teammates Jůza and Andrew Baeckstrom. He had reached Platinum (the peak of pro play) and was ready to chase the next step: a Mythic Championship Top 8 appearance and a run at qualifying for the World Championship.
Then things took a turn. The Magic Pro League was created and took the Top 32 ranked players to form the league; Burkhart was just outside the cut.
"At first, it was pretty dejecting," he admitted. "I didn't really want to play anymore, and it was demoralizing. It took a few months and a few sessions of therapy, I won't lie. It definitely hit me."
Burkhart's friends helped him through the setback, and they helped him find his motivation again. It paid off in one wild weekend of convention center wi-fi, hotel lobbies, and one ecstatic car ride.
Now Burkhart will head to Mythic Championship IV in Barcelona, with a new goal in mind, even if he doesn't know quite yet how to achieve it.
"Qualifying for the MTG Arena event helped to make up for the rough start to the year, and I want to qualify and play in every Mythic Championship this year—and if the MPL rolls around next year and I have a shot to qualify, you bet I'm going to try," he proclaimed. "I'm big on setting goals, and that's what I'm aiming for."
There could scarcely be a better opportunity for Burkhart to make progress toward that than this tournament. He's widely recognized as a Modern expert and is known for crushing tournaments with his trademark Grixis decks. He's played nearly 200 high-level Modern matches—which puts him in the Top 25 of Challengers at MC IV—and his 64.6% win percentage in the format places him firmly in the Top 10 of that group. The man knows his way around the Modern format.
Of course, one of the biggest questions we'll ask in Spain is exactly what Modern looks like after the hugely impactful releases of War of the Spark and Modern Horizons and the banning of Bridge from Below. Few are better equipped to answer that question than Burkhart, so will he be sleeving up his trusty Snapcaster Mages and Kolaghan's Commands again—or even Dreadhorde Arcanist, the card he is most excited about testing?
"I'll be honest—I have literally no idea what I'm playing," he confessed. "A few years ago, I felt like I was so far ahead of everyone else in the format, and I loved when people would look at me like I was a madman and scramble through their notes trying to figure out how to sideboard against me. But right now there's so many different decks to prepare for and answer that I haven't figured it out yet. I may end up taking five different decks with me on the plane, but I want to keep my options open while I work at figuring it out.
"But you can bet I'll be doing everything I can to register four Cryptic Command and four Kolaghan's Command and a Keranos in my sideboard."
