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Pro Tour Aetherdrift Day One Highlights

February 22, 2025
Corbin Hosler

Welcome to Chicago! It may be bitterly cold outside, but inside the McCormik Place convention center, Pro Tour Aetherdrift at MagicCon is heating up quickly as more than 300 players competed at the first Pro Tour of the 2025 season.

It's been a busy season already, as the days in February tick down like time counters on Overlord of the Hauntwoods, but this Pro Tour is especially supercharged. The season began with the first Magic Spotlight Series in Atlanta and has since been on a global tour for the Regional Championship series.

But that all takes a backseat to the Pro Tour. It's why 347 players arrived with their tested and tuned Standard deck, hoping to rock out in a Standard format with three big decks and a whole lot more cooking under the hood.

While a handful of seats at the World Championship later this year have been filled already, the first Pro Tour of the season is always a premium opportunity to set a player up for an entire year: a deep run offers not just to prizes and accolades, but a trip or two on the all-important "train," as the Pro Tour regulars refer to earning additional qualifications on the continuing circuit. It's also the launching point for the season-long Player of the Year race, as competitors look to stack match wins across events.

Speaking of the World Championship and the Player of the Year, reigning two-time World Champion Javier Dominguez waved the green flag for us when he cracked the first Draft Booster on camera and officially kicked off Pro Tour Aetherdrift.

When the dust settled on eight rounds of Day 1 play, two players led after the first leg of competition: Matt Nass and Ben Stark. Two old-school Magic pros putting up old-school performances at the Pro Tour, their mastery of both Limited and Constructed on full display.

They'll lead the field entering Day Two, though the margins are incredibly narrow and lurking just behind with one loss are ten additional players including Allen Wu and Reid Duke.


The relatively large field meant that this road to the Top 8 would be a bit longer than recent Pro Tours, and that made what is always a tiny margin for error essentially nonexistent. With Aetherdrift Draft leading the tournament, those most prepared for Limited could make their mark on the field. And that they did! There were an astonishing 43 players that went 3-0 in Draft, including several Hall of Famers and prominent drafters of the last two years of Pro Tour play.

Leading the (Booster) Pack

Pro Tour Aetherdrift isn't like any other event in recent memory. With the set releasing just a week before the tournament, teams had to alter their testing processes, marking a return to secrecy that was common in Pro Tour events of old. While public data indicated that green was the strongest color in Aetherdrift Draft, the game's best felt there was more to learn from the format.

So into the garage they went, tinkering away at their strategies.

"With the shorter timeframe, we wanted to start early on Standard to be confident in that before we could start doing drafts," explained Derrick Davis, part of Team Worldly Counsel Heavy Play. "I largely wanted to work with the team because of how good they are in Limited; I felt like it was a hole in my game. On previous teams, we wouldn't draft as much. This one was much more structured about firing a draft on schedule, every time. We had seventeen people in the testing house, and that made it very Limited-oriented."

It paid off; Davis went undefeated in Draft, with Worldly Counsel posting a 63% winrate against non-teammates. For Davis, the lessons learned from testing helped him navigate a tricky seat.

"I first-picked a blue card, and then I was all over the place in Pack 1, but I knew I wanted to be in black based on some early signals," he explained. "The deck turned out really well and I only lost one game."

The best athletes in the world focus on turning their weaknesses into strengths; Davis's hot start to the Pro Tour is the drafter's dream after having dedicated so much of his preparation time to the ins and outs of Aetherdrift.

The other Pro Tour draft dream a savvy competitor might hope for?

"I had a slight preference for blue, and in the first pack, Green-Blue was wide open. I opened Loot, the Pathfinder in the second pack and it scripted itself; I even had the classic debate between two cards, only for one of them to wheel back to me anyway," marveled Anthony Lee, who then paid off the smart signal-reading with the Draft trophy.

Lee is a part of the newly formed Team Cosmos Heavy Play, a collection of many of the game's current best including reigning World champ Javier Dominguez. Led by famed Magic Online player Sean "The Beekeeper" Goddard, the team took a very measured approach to Aetherdrift Draft, focusing on testing out strategies that the (only a few days old) conventional wisdom online had overlooked. "One of the biggest surprises we found was that the max speed mechanic doesn't necessarily make the games faster, because it means you're incentivized to block."

Drifting into Standard

Three big decks defined the Standard metagame at Pro Tour Aetherdrift. The most powerful deck of the last half-year was out in full force, with Gruul Mice combining the creature suite of Heartfire Hero, Emberheart Challenger, and Manifold Mouse with spells like Monstrous Rage and Innkeeper's Talent. It also led the field at nearly 19%, followed closely by Esper Pixie and Domain Overlords at 16% and 15% of the field respectively.


These three big decks, along with more than three dozen other archetypes made up our Standard metagame. That included Bram Meulders, who qualified for his first Pro Tour since 2018 and immediately went to work building a unique, spicy new deck.

"I don't like to play mirror matches, so I was looking to play something besides the big decks; I don't think I could play Esper Pixie all day. So I started looking for other things to build around," Meulders explained. "I tested The Enigma Jewel, but ended up moving it to the side. Then I tried Boros Krenko–We won't walk about that—and then I started looking at the Merfolk and the infinite combo with Forensic Researcher and Deeproot Pilgrimage."

Meulders considered the list a work in progress, and while it didn't have a standout day it did help Meulders become one of the 219 who advanced into Day Two.

Even within the main triumvirate of decks, innovations abounded. Notably, Ben Stark went undefeated with an Orzhov take on Nurturing Pixie, leaning on the strength of Temporary Lockdown and the Standard "classic" Unholy Annex // Ritual Chamber that had recently fallen out of favor.

The other undefeated list belonged to Matt Nass, who brought a tuned list of Domain Overlords and promptly went 10-1 in games played in Constructed.You can find all Standard decklists here.

Spicy decks expert Frank Karsten offered a few quick metagame notes from offbeat deck choices that impressed:

  • Dimir Enchantments (which is similar to Dimir Bounce but using Entity Tracker rather than Kaito or Enduring Curiosity) also had an impressive 9-3 result overall
  • Izzet Artifacts impressed with a 7-3 across its two pilots. Great news for fans of Repurposing Bay or Radiant Lotus!
  • Azorius decks, both Omniscience and Control, batted above average as well.

Overall, there were no overwhelming trends to glean from the top of the leaderboard; Gruul and Esper performances overall were deep in the middle of the pack, while Domain Overlords performed the best of the trio but didn't come close to lapping the field.

That means that things are more wide open after Day One than they were before it. We came to Chicago with most players feeling Standard had no clear best deck, and the fracas near the top of the Constructed leaderboard on Friday did nothing to change that perspective heading into Day Two.

Looking Ahead

The first lap is completed, but more than 200 players will be back on Saturday to continue Pro Tour Aetherdrift. The Top 8 will remain in reach of all when we return for three more rounds of Aetherdrift Draft followed by five rounds of Standard.

After that, our Top 8 will be set–and you can watch all the action unfold live at twitch.tv/Magic!

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