The Regional Championship series continued last weekend in Bangkok as 178 players gathered to compete in the MTG SEA Championship Final. The Regional Championship came with Pro Tour invites on the lines, as well as a coveted seat at the 2024 Magic World Championship later this year. The event was a culmination of a season's worth of qualifying tournaments the field had played in and won to make it to this point.

When the dust settled on a wild Modern format that sent five different decks into the Top 8 elimination playoff, it was Lucas Lim who stood out above the fray with the breakout Goryo's Blink deck that has been making waves both before and after the Violent Outburst ban. Lim's reanimator deck made its way through a Top 8 field that featured three Crashing Footfalls decks, a second copy of Goryo's Vengeance, Azorius Control, Hammertime, and Domain Zoo to round it out.

Lim dropped just one match on the weekend and none in the Top 8, earning the trophy, the seat at the World Championship and the title of Regional Champion.

Lucas Lim took Goryo's Vengeance through a diverse Top 8 en route to the Regional Championship title.

Lim's deck aimed to churn cards through its hand and graveyard with tools like Faithful Mending. Then it would reanimate Atraxa, Grand Unifier or the classic Griselbrand with Goryo's Vengeance, which is enough to take over the game when the rest of the deck is a control shell with a playset of Leyline Binding and even Supreme Verdicts to clean up.

Lim's finals opponent was Chung Wye Hee, who shocked the field by advancing all the way to the finals with Azorius Hammertime, a deck that has sat on the sidelines in recent months. But the strategy of putting a surprise Colossus Hammer onto an Ornithopter is alive and well in Modern, and it earned Hee an invite to the Pro Tour.

The rest of the Top 4 included Christian Wijaya (making a back-to-back Regional Championship Top 4) and Rick beng Lee, who qualified for the Pro Tour with Azorius Control and the Domain Rhinos deck that incorporated Leyline of the Guildpact and Scion of Draco.

Overall, the Regional Championship featured an incredibly diverse field where no deck claimed more than a 10% metagame share, though the traditional Temur Rhino builds were the most-played deck and the Domain variant the second most-played, so it was a showoff for Violent Outburst decks from the jump. The surprise came from the large contingent of players who chose to combat that with Domain Zoo, putting their Pro Tour hopes on Territorial Kavu and Tribal Flames.

Of the most popular decks, it was actually a different cascade deck that posted strong performances: Living End was a standout that sent one player to the Top 16, while Golgari Yawgmoth was similarly shut out of the Top 8 but performed strongly on the whole.

The celebration of Magic in the region now looks ahead to the next cycle, and the next opportunity to qualify for the Pro Tour and the World Championship beyond! If you're interested in learning more about Regional Championships, you can find qualifiers near you to get started!