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Day One Highlights at Pro Tour Edge of Eternities

September 27, 2025
Corbin Hosler

Welcome to Atlanta! We've come to the Peach State for the final MagicCon of the year, and the highlight of the festivities is Pro Tour Edge of Eternities and its 300 competitors who traveled from across the world to gather for a very rare event.

Modern debuted at Pro Tour Philadelphia in 2011 in legendary fashion, and there have been ten Modern Pro Tours since then. Fast forward fourteen years and, as much as things have changed in Modern, some things remain the same about the format. For instance, Samuele Estratti won Pro Tour Philadelphia playing a combo deck (Splinter Twin), and he was back in Atlanta playing a combo finish in his Eldrazi Tron deck.

Something else that hasn't changed is Modern's famed deck diversity. While the release of Modern Horizons 3 blasted a Nadu-shaped hole in the metagame, an update to the list of banned cards helped Modern settle into a new normal for the format. That new normal looks a lot like the Modern we saw in Philadelphia all those years ago. It has fast mana, big mana, and no mana.

Which player best navigated that field through eight rounds, including three draft rounds featuring Edge of Eternities? None other than Hall of Famer Shuhei Nakamura, who was also in attendance at that famous Pro Tour, and now finds himself standing atop the Pro Tour Edge of Eternities field with a classic Modern archetype: Affinity. Nakamura defeated Hyuma Nishi's Goblin Charbelcher deck in the final round to finish the day a perfect 8-0, the only undefeated player left from the 300-player field!

Shuhei Nakamura


Lurking just behind Nakamura in the 300-person field are 6 players with 7-1 records, with unique archetypes making up those 7 players. Now all the players who earned at least 12 match points will return on Day Two for their chance to make a run to the Top 8!

At the Edge of Edge of Eternities

Did you know you can go infinite in Edge of Eternities Draft? Here's how:

  • Play Umbral Collar Zealot and Susurian Voidborn or Weftstalker Ardent.
  • Play a Perigee Beckoner.
  • Play a second Beckoner, targeting the first. Sacrifice the first Beckoner to Zealot. It returns and targets the other. Repeat for any number of Voidborn or Ardent triggers.

"You can do the entire combo in black, so it's something to be on the lookout for," explained Team Handshake standout, five-time Top Finisher, and winner of the Neon Dynasty Set Championship, Eli Kassis.

It's the kind of combo you can build toward when you're drafted a set over 100 times, as Kassis is. And while it didn't come together for him on Day One, the discussion is emblematic of what the players at Pro Tour Edge of Eternities are faced with. Unlike most recent Pro Tours, this Pro Tour features a well-established Limited environment rather than a fresh one. That means that there were no surprises to the competitors, and this deluge of information is why Kassis felt the need to heavily prepare.

"I actually like it when everyone is equally unprepared," he said wryly. "When everyone is equally prepared, there's more variance."

That tracks with how most players treat Limited at the Pro Tour—as the best place to gain an edge on the competition. This change meant that many teams opted to spend more time on Modern–but only because players had already put in so many hours into Edge of Eternities and its litany of Spacecraft and warp creatures. That latter one was one of the biggest pivot points of the format, as players entered drafts knowing the pseudo-Vehicles were powerful, but difficult and at times risky to power up. A stray bounce or removal spell can undo turns of work sunk into stationing, and all that tapping opens you up to pressure from the opponent.

"Where we settled is you pretty much ignore most of the common ones, play one but usually not two of the uncommons, and of course you play almost any of the rare ones," explained Brent Vos, who put together a 2-1 record in the draft rounds, with his single loss coming from getting milled out by Specimen Freighter. "I think a fresh format is generally more fun for competitive players, but I didn't mind it as something different. It gave us more time to test Constructed."

Not that players didn't take a few last-minute opportunities for a little more practice.

The explored format also meant that players were willing to experiment. For instance, Team Sanctum of All member Nicole Tipple put together one of the Limited format's coolest but most difficult-to-draft decks: Weapons Manufacturing. She paired it with another red rare, Memorial Vault, and piloted the deck to a 2-1 Draft finish.

Luis Salvatto, the former Player of the Year who made a return to competitive play, enjoyed a massively successful Day One, finishing 6-2, and did so thanks in part to a masterpiece of a draft that included two copies each of Tannuk, Memorial Ensign and Seedship Broodtender. Not to be outdone, Hall of Famer Willy Edel had two copies of the creature land Lumbering Falls, from Edge of Eternities's Stellar Sights cards.

All in all, Edge of Eternities Draft was the perfect opener for the headlining Modern format, and 35 players finished Day One with a perfect Limited record, Hall of Famers Seth Manfield and Gabriel Nassif among them.

The Modern Metgame Opens Up

The last Modern Pro Tour came at Pro Tour Modern Horizons 3 last summer, where Nadu, Winged Wisdom dominated and warped the metagame. Since its removal from the format, things returned to the more open field that Modern is known for, and that extended to the Pro Tour field.


You can find all Pro Tour Edge of Eternities decklists here, and check out Frank Karsten's selection of the spiciest lists here.

In a format where people are often encouraged to master a deck, there's a lot of history to consider when looking at any Modern metagame. On Day One, decks were largely divided along a familiar axis: versatile combo decks playing some amount of interaction raced to win, midrange decks aimed to keep them in check, and big-mana Eldrazi decks amassed massive amounts of mana for equal massive creatures.

That Eldrazi deck is wildly explosive—just ask Samuele Estratti's Round 5 opponent Sébastien Lachance, who could only laugh as he watched Estratti ramp to a turn-three Portent of Calamity, which then revealed four cards types including an Emrakul, the Promised End. Estratti went on to cast Emrakul for free and ended the game in short order.

Portent of Calamity

Most Eldrazi Tron players were not running Portent, but for those who were it stood out as one of the key developments in a wide-open metagame. In fact, it helped carry one former Player of the Year to an 8-2 finish.

"We started out on a full Blue Tron list, but eventually we cut the other blue cards until just [Portent of Calamity] was left," explained Salvatto, the 2017-18 Player of the Year. "It's been really good for us."

Another piece of surprise tech to make an appearance this weekend? The little-known Abstergo Entertainment, from Magic: The Gathering® – Assassin's Creed®, which added yet another layer of redundancy for big-mana decks.

The other three decks to make up the top of the metagame were Boros Energy, Tameshi Belche, and Esper Goryo's, three decks with very different origin stories. Boros Energy was born from an influx of cards from Modern Horizons 3, and it bore the flag of the best "fair" deck in the room.

Boros Energy players looked to powerful sideboard cards like Vexing Bauble or Surgical Extraction. Goryo's Vengeance utilized the many ways to pitch a big creature into the graveyard, and then used Ephemerate to get extra uses out of Atraxa, Grand Unifier or Solitude. The white Elemental Incarnation is a key part of the format, and along with another five-drop powered the top end of multiple blue-based archetypes.

Quantum Riddler

Quantum Riddler was a bit of a slow addition to Standard, but now it has made the leap to Modern and done so in a very big way. Thanks in part to synergy with Psychic Frog–you can discard down to one card and then draw multiples thanks to Riddler– the versatile creature has broken into many Esper archetypes finding success in Atlanta, including for Johnny Guttman, who finished 4-1 with the list and 7-1 on the day, with his only loss coming to Nakamura.

"Quantum Riddler is really what ties the whole deck together," explained Linden Koot, a Regional Championship winner from Canada who used the card as a key piece in his Grixis Midrange list. "Riddler fills a role similar to The One Ring. It refills your hand after you've used your cards to interact."

And what about Goblin Charbelcher? The archetype is synonymous with eternal Magic, and has made a comeback in a very big way recently.

Tracing its modern routes back to a list popularized by Austin Deceder–a Charbelcher fan so devoted he has a tattoo of its activation cost–Goblin Charbelcher became a true player with the release of the double-faced spell/lands in Modern Horizons 3 that made the Belcher's unique "drawback" into its eminent feature.

And in another throwback, Isochron Scepter-Orim's Chant formed the backbone of several control decks in the field including Jason Ye's list. The noted deck builder's list leaned on the endgame lock engine as a win condition, and it helped Ye to a 6-1-1 finish on Day One. And even Affinity is back in Modern, with Hall of Fame Japanese legend Shuhei Nakamura taking the new-look Izzet list to a perfect 8-0 finish.

Overall, Modern lived up to its reputation on Day One: five decks comprised the Top 7 on Day One, with eight different decks among the Top 12.

Looking Ahead

A total of 188 players finished with at least 12 match points and will return on Saturday morning for Day Two of Pro Tour Edge of Eternities. Now, all that stands between us and the Top 8 is eight rounds. Saturday will begin with three more rounds of Edge of Eternities Draft followed by a sprint through Modern as players chase their goals. Not only are Top 8 seats on the line, but a number of players are hoping to secure their spot at the upcoming Magic World Championship.

The top players will be back to crack packs and fetch lands on Saturday, with Nakamura leading the way, as Pro Tour Edge of Eternities rolls on! Follow the action live on twitch.tv/magic and right here on Magic.gg.

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