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Magic World Championship 30 Day Two Highlights

October 27, 2024
Corbin Hosler

Day One of Magic World Championship 30 ended exactly the way last year's Magic World Championship ended: with Jean-Emmanuel Depraz alone atop the standings.

But that was Day One. A strong Saturday morning Draft would mean a Top 8 run was on the table for each of the 57 competitors who qualified by finishing with a winning record on Friday. So while the defending champ Depraz entered the final round of Duskmourn: House of Horror Draft in pole position, it didn't take long for things to change at the World Championship. And when Depraz dropped his first round of Draft, there were no more undefeated players.

And so the scrum began. With every player competing in the biggest tournament of their lives, we saw risks taken and rewarded, weeks of preparation pay off for some, and when the dust settled, the final eight players who will return to the Sunday stage to battle for the trophy, the singular title of Magic World Champion, and of course a card modeled after themselves. Ask almost any of the 113 competitors who qualified for this event via a year's worth of Regional Championships, Pro Tours, and Magic Online and MTG Arena events what they most wanted from this weekend, and the answer you're most likely to receive isn't about the $1,000,000 total prize pool or the set of qualifications for the next year.

This is about the glory—and the card.

And so began Day Two of Magic World Championship 30.

An Elite Eight

Making the Top 8 of a "normal" Pro Tour is statistically improbable, with hundreds of the best competitors in the game. Making the Top 8 of the World Championship is considered nearly impossible.

"It's 120 of the best players, feeling confident going in would be obnoxious. You know when someone passes with mana open they aren't doing it because they don't have a plan; they always have something, and you have to prepare for everything," explained two-time Regional Championship finalist Jonathan Lobo Melamed. "It's impossible to feel confident."

That was doubly true as we wound down toward the Top 8 cut-off and the pressure built and every single decision point became monumental.

The first player to reach the Top 8 was Hall of Famer and 2015 World Champion Seth Manfield, who rebounded from a loss in his second round reel off nine straight victories in true Manfield fashion, working his way up the standings and eventually straight into the Top 8 when he reached the magic ten-win threshold early Saturday afternoon.

Manfield would soon be joined by another former champ: Javier Domínguez, who now adds another World Championship Top 8 to his career list of Top Finishes that now stretches to an incredible eleven, including a Top 8 at Pro Tour Modern Horizons 3 earlier this year.

The Top 8 filled out from there, with a mixture of greats that feature a heavy amount of World Championship Top 8 experience. From top seed Manfield through the eighth seed, here are the players who earned their spot in the Top 8 and their shot at the World Championship title.

  • Seth Manfield (Golgari Ramp)
  • Quinn Tonole (Mono-Red Aggro)
  • Márcio Carvalho (Golgari Midrange)
  • Ha Pham (Dimir Demons)
  • Javier Domínguez (Dimir Demons)
  • Yoshihiko Ikawa (Gruul Prowess)
  • Max Rappaport (Dimir Midrange)
  • Kai Budde (Dimir Midrange)

The amount of World Championship experience residing in this Top 8 is immense. Three previous World Champions, and another World Championship finalist in Carvalho. Pro Tour winners, including our most recent one with Pro Tour Thunder Junction champ Ikawa. And the final member of the Top 8 to earn their berth, doing so by just four-tenths of a percentage point on tiebreaks?

The German Juggernaut himself. In a twist that the Magic gods must have spent 25 years planning, the final win-and-in match for the 2024 Magic World Championship came down to Budde—the game's original GOAT and winner of the 1999 World Championship—facing down Depraz, the game's reigning World Champion. It was a match-up that took the Magic media landscape by storm, and it lived up to the hype.

Nielsen Dominates Duskmourn

Reigning Player of the Year Simon Nielsen loves talking about Limited. It's been a key part of his extraordinary run over the past few years, and he came to Las Vegas in the lead to defend his title. To do that, he needed another Limited run.

Good thing he loves it so much then—Nielsen was the only player in the entire tournament to go a perfect 6-0 in the Draft rounds. And despite all the preparation, his draft strategy simply did not go to plan as he found Team Handshake's preferred blue decks completely cut off at his draft tables.

But while it may not have gone to plan, it certainly went right.

"Our team preferred to start blue ... so of course I ended up with black-red and then black-green," Nielsen said in his famous deadpan style. "We liked blue, but this format rewards staying open for as long as you can and looking to see what comes to you and how the uncommons and rares play out."

Threats Around Every Corner Oblivious Bookworm Disturbing Mirth

Here's how it played out in Nielsen's second draft. Again he was unable to settle in a strong blue deck by the end of the first pack, or to settle in any deck at all; he finished with five cards for blue-black and another handful for an aggressive build in green-white. That's about as close to a train wreck as it comes in some formats, but at the World Championship—and in Duskmourn—the usual rules don't always apply.

"I was trying to stay open, but I ended up straddling two decks. Then I got an Unstoppable Slasher and Unholy Annex // Ritual Chamber in pack two," he explained. "It can be dangerous, but being patient is a skill to learn. You have to work on it, and there's a balance. The best advice I have is to look out for the cards that wheel; in Play Boosters, it's very common to see a pack that just has no cards for your archetype. But that doesn't mean that archetype isn't open—it just means those cards might not have been opened. What you see come around in the packs is much more important than what you don't see."

No one can argue with the current Player of the Year (for at least one more day) on that, and certainly not after yet another dominant Limited performance for the most consistent gamer of the season.

How Standard Shook Out

Magic World Championship 30's Top 8 would come down to Standard. The recently revitalized format had its first rotation in a year, and Duskmourn helped to reshape it in the best of ways. Every single Standard deck in the field played at least one card from the new set, and several, including the Abhorrent Oculus reanimation builds, were based almost exclusively on the denizens of the House.


What's more, almost every major testing team in attendance landed on a different deck archetype. That meant the first major Standard showcase after the release of Duskmourn showed off not just a consensus best deck of the format—it showcased every deck in the format.

That included Gruul Prowess, the most explosive deck in the room that could win as early as the third turn with a fast Leyline of Resonance start. It's what led Depraz to his perfect Day One start, and it was the deck that put the most pilots into Saturday competition, followed closely by Dimir and Golgari Midrange flavors as well as the breakout Azorius Oculus deck.

Leyline of Resonance Abhorrent Oculus

"Standard has been very fun to test, with lots of variety to play whatever you want," explained Regional Championship victor Adam Weiss as he played through Day Two. "There are no real 70-30 match-ups, it's a lot of 55-45s. Because there's not a real best deck, you don't feel bad playing anything."

"The gameplay has been really interesting, too, not just deck selection, which is not always the case," added Rampant Growth Heavy Play teammate (and Pro Tour Murders at Karlov Manor Top 8 competitor Adam Edelson, who described Standard as the Wild West ahead of the tournament. "Every team chose a different deck. There was no clear best deck coming into the tournament, and there's no clear best deck coming out of the tournament."

Perhaps the best example of that? Quinn Tonole's Mono-Red deck featuring a full playset of the card Shock. It's simple, it's classic, and off and on, it's been a Standard player for three decades since its first appearance in Stronghold. A mono-red deck full of four-ofs making the Top 8 of the World Championship? It's 2024 but you can be forgiven for thinking you were watching Sligh in action.

17 Mountain 4 Shock 4 Monastery Swiftspear 4 Screaming Nemesis 3 Witchstalker Frenzy 4 Manifold Mouse 4 Monstrous Rage 4 Rockface Village 4 Lightning Strike 4 Emberheart Challenger 4 Heartfire Hero 4 Hired Claw 4 Torch the Tower 1 Obliterating Bolt 1 Witchstalker Frenzy 3 Lithomantic Barrage 4 Urabrask's Forge 2 Twisted Fealty

Manfield, Domínguez Race for Player of the Year

We might have mentioned Simon Nielsen and the Player of the Year race once or twice over the past few weeks, and it was more of the same at the World Championship for the tour's most consistent player. He was the only player to finish the Draft rounds a perfect 6-0 and was in Top 8 contention all the way through the end.

The Top 8 that will eventually yield a new World Champion will also be the final stretch of the season-long Player of the Year race. Nielsen entered with a lead in that race, but when the action kicked off in Las Vegas, there were eight players who had a chance to take the title. After Day One saw several fall off, we entered Day Two with the following players still in contention:

  • Simon Nielsen
  • Seth Manfield
  • Yason Ye
  • Javier Domínguez
  • Eli Kassis

Where does the race stand after Day Two?

Incomplete.

With the Top 8 spot, it's now Manfield who holds the edge in the race. But it's not over yet—Domínguez is hot on his heels. Their play on Sunday will determine who wins the title and the Kai Budde Player of the Year trophy.

And the best part of all? They could meet in the semifinals, with the winner of the match also winning the Player of the Year title.

Looking Ahead

The Sunday stage is set, and it includes the final eight players standing between us and the culmination of the 2024 season. One of these players will walk away with the $100,000 first-place prize, the trophy, and of course their name and face immortalized on a Magic card forever.


It all comes down to Sunday, and you can catch all the action live at Twitch.tv/Magic! The stream goes live at 1 p.m. ET (6 p.m. CET / 2 a.m. JST). We'll see you then as we crown the winner of Magic World Championship 30!

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