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Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering® | Marvel Super Heroes Day One Highlights

July 18, 2026
Corbin Hosler

Play the game, meet the world. It's not just a phrase that harkens back to the earliest days of Magic's Pro Tour. It is also the feeling that Mason Buonadonna first felt when his team converged on a small town in Germany for a week of Limited and Modern testing before Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering® | Marvel Super Heroes. With representatives from more than 80 countries and at least a dozen languages spoken, the Pro Tour is a truly global event—but all participants are fluent in Magic.

"This, more than any event I've been to, has felt that way," Buonadonna gushed ahead of the tournament. "We took over a small town outside of Dusseldorf, Germany, in a certified ancient mansion. We made friends with the locals and became the local attraction for a week. What better way to spend your summer than playing Magic with your friends in an ancient mansion in the European countryside?"

And he wasn't the only Pro Tour competitor taken with the location.

There were more than 350 qualified players at Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes, making it one of the largest Pro Tours since the return to tabletop play several years ago—and a historic Pro Tour at that, given that the Top 8 will feature the first Pro Tour Top 8 draft since Pro Tour Nagoya in 2011. These drafts are always thrilling, giving us unforgettable Sundays like the final day of Pro Tour San Juan in 2010, where legend of the game Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa took down the title (well) on his way to a Hall of Fame career.

"You never know who's going to win when it gets to the Top 8," he explained to Meghan Wolff, before the tournament. "If you have a Constructed Top 8, you're like, 'Well, these people have been doing really well in Constructed. Their deck is really good.' You can sort of map out how it's going to go and which decks beat which. But with a draft, every draft starts over. You get to the Top 8, and it's really a blank slate. Everyone is on even ground when you get to that Top 8, so I think that part is different."

It's hard to set the stakes higher for the Pro Tour, MagicCon: Amsterdam, and its over 17,000 attendees. A return to the home of 2024's Pro Tour Modern Horizons 3 (where Simon Nielsen capped off one of Magic's all-time runs with a mirror-match victory over Sam Pardee with the since banned Nadu, Winged Wisdom), the event featured a number of old-school Hall of Fame members like Guillaume Wafo-Tapa and a look at a Modern format remade since Mox Opal and Violent Outburst were unbanned.


The large field meant that the race for the Top 8 would be tighter than ever. To get there, players would have to demonstrate their mastery of Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes long before taking the Sunday stage.

Powering Up in Draft

A few things were made abundantly clear by players heading into Friday's opening draft. Namely, the fact that the white cards in the set were the most powerful by far, allowing for aggressive starts featuring S.H.I.E.L.D. Spy Kit and some of the best removal, like Web Up. Of course, drafts are famously self-correcting. Every testing team knew what would be most contested as they entered the room. As renowned Limited expert (and recent qualifier for the 2027 Magic Limited Championship) Eduardo Sajgalik put it, the mission statement he helped craft for Team Worldly Counsel Heavy Play was simple.

Let your opposition self-destruct.

"We found that drafting the open lane overperformed. That had a better win rate across the board than forcing the 'best decks,'" he explained. "For me, I really care about and look at the team's success across drafts. We have no way of knowing if we're in a group of people who are trying to force the best archetypes when we sit down at a pod, or if they're trying to force a different color to avoid fighting over those. I can't control what our team will face in the draft, but I can give them an approach and strong theory. Success in this Limited environment is about understanding what's going on in the draft and letting other people make mistakes."

The strength of the white archetypes was found in its depth. Cards like Web Up are clear examples of premium removal, but with the mixture of a strong base of creatures like Agent of Atlas or the "mythic common" Hero in Training and high-end bombs like the terrifying-on-turn-two Agent Phil Coulson, the color white can support multiple strong decks in a draft pod.

Hero in Training
S.H.I.E.L.D. Spy Kit
Agent of Atlas

Knowing that going in, plenty of teams developed backup plans. And for Francisco "Patxi" Sánchez, that's exactly where he turned.

"White seemed to be the best color by far, and we were expecting it to be over-drafted at every table. Aggressive strategies are very good in best-of-one games. But in a best-of-three match, I like to find ways to grind out the game," he explained. "I'll take every small two-for-one I can get, like Stark Industries Executive and Kingpin's Enforcers. I don't mind playing until turn twelve."

That was especially true in the 3-0 deck he played on Friday morning featuring Mjölnir, Hammer of Thor and Hawkeye, Young Avenger, which create a nearly one-sided board wipe when paired together.

That helped carry Sanchez to a 3-0 finish in one of the over 40 draft pods at the Pro Tour, the same as Lee Shi Tian, who watched five strong white cards not make it back around to him in the second booster. That sent him into his backup color of red, and a Hall of Fame-worthy performance sent him through to the Constructed rounds with a 3-0 record—something also achieved by the reigning world champion, Seth Manfield (who did end up with the strong white cards).

The Return of the Hall of Fame

One of the many announcements made at MagicCon: Amsterdam concerned one of the very first—and undoubtedly most famous—collections of Magic talent ever gathered.

That's right: the Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame is back.

Minding Modern

The Top 8 on Sunday will be decided by a draft, meaning that to win the tournament, a player must play through nine total rounds of Limited and ten rounds of Modern. But getting to that all-important single-elimination draft requires a herculean performance in a fresh-but-familiar Modern metagame. After Mox Opal returned to the format—powering a new-school Affinity deck featuring Pinnacle Emissary and Kappa Cannoneer—the first Modern Pro Tour since Michael Plummer won Pro Tour Edge of Eternities last year with Tameshi Charbelcher.


There wasn't much Belching this time around. Instead, we saw a metagame where it was Kozilek's Command, not Violent Outburst or Mox Opal or Faithless Looting, that looked like it would dominate the tables—along with the ever-present Boros Energy.

Kozilek's Command

Driven in large part by its inclusion in Basking Broodscale Combo lists (not to mention the traditional big-mana Eldrazi decks it's named for) the other "K Command" has become a pillar of Modern and delivered players like Lorenzo Gruppi a near-perfect Modern record.

But, as Modern is known for, it's not just about what you know. It's about how well you know it. Or, as Chris Kral put it on his way to a winning record with Esper Blink (and a 6-2 finish overall), it's better to play a deck you know the ins and outs of than a deck that might be better in the abstract but much worse in practice.

"It was largely a comfort pick for me; I've been doing well consistently with and qualified for my first Pro Tour with a similar deck," he explained. "Play your deck at 95% rather than a 'better deck' at 75–80%."

That was advice repeated among the top players in the tournament, and dozens of players found success with their pet deck. For example, Jake Bailey, who innovated with Samwise Gamgee Combo on his way to a 4-1 Modern record. And there were many spicy decklists beyond that.

"I'm a creature combo player, either Yawgmoth or Samwise, and I had some great tech for Samwise this weekend," Bailey explained. "I added the Ajani Cat package to shore up the fair matchups."

While the top of metagame at the close of Friday didn't shock many—there was the expected smattering of Boros Energy, Broodscale Combo, and Izzet Affinity—we also saw surprises further down the field. Jody Keith went 4-1 with his innovative Living End list (Superior Spider-Man, along with the evoke Elementals from Lorwyn Eclipsed and more one-mana land cyclers plus filter lands to smooth out draws), and Rasmus Enegren, who recently won a Prague's Regional Championship, turned around a disastrous 0-3 start into a 5-3 finish thanks to a perfect run with his own Song of Creation deck. "I'm already qualified for the World Championship," said Enegren. "I had to play my pet deck!"

1 Wrenn and Six 1 Otawara, Soaring City 1 Forest 3 Scalding Tarn 4 Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student 4 Misty Rainforest 1 Hedge Maze 1 Stomping Ground 1 Breeding Pool 3 Repeal 4 Mox Amber 2 Island 2 Bruce Banner 2 Shifting Woodland 3 Engineered Explosives 4 Mox Opal 2 Six 4 Song of Creation 3 Emry, Lurker of the Loch 4 Mishra's Bauble 4 Malevolent Rumble 1 Tormod's Crypt 2 Steam Vents 1 Urza's Saga 1 Jace, Wielder of Mysteries 1 Endurance 2 Flame of Anor 1 Wrenn and Six 1 Blood Moon 1 Lightning Bolt 1 Force of Negation 1 Strix Serenade 2 Narset, Parter of Veils 1 Tormod's Crypt 1 Haywire Mite 1 Urza's Saga 1 Swan Song 2 Unholy Heat

Eight incredible rounds later, Day One of Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes finally came to a close, with exactly one player leading the field at a perfect 8-0 after a 6-1 run in the draft and a 10-3 performance in games with his well-tuned Boros Energy deck, which seemed to effortlessly shrug off the loss of Phlage, Titan of Fire's Fury to return to the top of the metagame in Amsterdam.

Looking Ahead

Martin Juza will lead the field when we return Saturday morning for the second of three drafts at the Pro Tour, but, as always, the margin for error is incredibly thin. Lurking just behind includes Timo Bertram with a 7-0-1 record, who also posted a perfect Modern record. And with a host of talented players at 6-1, the Top 8 will remain wide open deep into Saturday's rounds.

We'll have 220 players back to battle on Saturday, and you can watch them all battle it out with the Top 8 line!

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