The world we know now looks very different from February 2020, when Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa claimed the title of Magic World Champion over Márcio Carvalho in Honolulu.
Since then, we've seen a season of complexity, challenge, and change:
- Seven League Weekends of play featuring the best players in the game
- Three Championships, including top rising and veteran stars
- The postseason of three Gauntlets to winnow down to the best
Now it's time for that pinnacle event: Magic World Championship XXVII. The tournament itself will be online through MTG Aren, removed from the sun and sea that made last year's event so iconic. Even so, the latest iteration of Magic's greatest event continues, ready to remind us all why we love this game so much.
For all the things that change, some things stay the same and there's one question we will always ask: who wins?
If we look back at that February 2020 Sunday stage, three of that Top 4 are back again. Let's start with the reigning Champion himself, Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa of Brazil.
"The Greatest Of All Time"—the GOAT—is a title that is always the cause of prolonged debate, but a reasonable place to start is with players who are among the best at a particular time in the game.
You can see the start of that for Damo da Rosa in 2006, where he reached the World Championship Top 8 in Paris as a teenager. Add World Championship Top 8s in 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, and of course 2020. Note Pro Tour titles in San Juan 2010, and Kyoto in 2017 at Pro Tour Hour of Devastation. Bolster the impeccable roster with more Top Finishes in 2008, 2009, 2012, 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2020. Throw in a slew of Grand Prix success, with titles around the globe, including the sweet victory of Grand Prix Sao Paulo on home soil in 2015. Pick any year since 2006, and Paulo has been one of the half dozen best players in the world. Every year, for fifteen years. Fifteen.
While Damo da Rosa has been part of some of the greatest teams ever assembled to try to dominate a Pro Tour or World Championship format, for this year's assault on the title, he's testing with fellow competitor Sam Pardee.
"I think having a group supporting you for the World Championship is definitely helpful, but not as important as for a big tournament where everyone is testing together. In a Pro Tour, you can have groups of ten or twenty people who are all qualified and who are trying their best to win, which basically multiplies the amount of information your team can have by this many people—it means that collectively you can test a lot of different decks, cards, and strategies," Damo da Rosa said. "Most of the testing is just going to be done by the people who are qualified, and it'll be up to us to figure out almost everything."
Figuring out almost everything is something Damo da Rosa routinely does, and, if he wins the title, claiming it back-to-back—and, make no mistake, he is the favorite coming into this—then the GOAT conversation may be done.
Finishing in third place at Magic World Championship XXVI was Seth Manfield. Like Damo da Rosa, Manfield is a Hall of Famer. Like Damo da Rosa, Manfield is a former World Champion—he claimed the title in Seattle in 2015. Like Damo da Rosa, he has other major titles, with victories at Pro Tour Ixalan in Albuquerque and the 2020 Mythic Invitational—and the similarities continue. Manfield's Top Finishes extend into double digits and he has wide Grand Prix success including a victory in 2007 at Grand Prix Daytona Beach over, yes, Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa.
As he attempts to go one match further than in 2020, Manfield finds himself working alone for this event. Is that a weakness others can exploit, or an opportunity to be unpredictable?
"I do think not having a team puts me at a small disadvantage, as this will be my first time playing Worlds without one," Manfield said. "There is a lot of ground to cover between Limited and Standard in a pretty small window of time, and I have other obligations so I can't just play around the clock. However, I have a wealth of experience to rely on that a lot of the competition does not have, and hopefully that plays to my advantage. I think it means I have to work even harder than I normally would, but being alone can be beneficial if you successfully find a very good deck against the field."
And that's the thing that fifteen potential opponents will be worried about. Manfield has an almost-unmatched ability to find the right deck for the right occasion, tied to his willingness to play almost any style if another choice will give him the best chance.
Despite a stellar career, Manfield isn't firmly in the conversation for the greatest of all time—yet. Claim a second World Championship title? Yep, that would start some conversations.
Hall of Famers get there for a reason, and, although his unquestioned sartorial elegance can't hurt, Gabriel Nassif didn't get there just by wearing a yellow hat. Nassif has had fifteen Top Finishes spread across almost twenty years. But that twenty-year span hides what are essentially two careers.
The first ends in 2009. By then, Nassif had Pro Tour Top 8s in Venice, New Orleans, Kobe, and a Pro Tour title in Kyoto; a Team Pro Tour title from Atlanta 2005; plus World Championship Top 8s in 2004, 2006, and 2007. Remember that idea of being among the best at a given point? The 2004 Player of the Year can certainly claim that. Except, that's only for 'Career Number 1'.
The sequel begins with a nostalgic throwback Grand Prix Lille Top 8 in 2018, where we assumed we were just seeing someone remind us who they used to be. Turned out Nassif was just warming up: Mythic Championship V, Players Tour Online 4, 2020 Mythic Invitational, 2020 Season Grand Finals, Magic World Championship XXVI—whatever you called it, there was Nassif, knocking out yet another Top Finish, among the very best once more.
His network of support throughout the season that got him to the World Championship included a behind-the-scenes armada that have many, many trophies on their combined mantelpiece: William Jensen, Reid Duke, Andrew Cuneo, and Shahar Shenhar, plus two more to consider in the GOAT conversation with Kai Budde and Luis Scott-Vargas. For Magic World Championship XXVII, that narrowed down to joining forces with formidable fellow competitors Eli Kassis, Matt Sperling, and Jan Merkel.
It's an all-star list of the best-of-the-best. What does Nassif make of this astonishing roster of talent all in his corner?
"I wouldn't say any of it was really a conscious decision, it's just fortunate I'm friends with some of the best players," Nassif said. "It's definitely a huge advantage to be surrounded by such an amazing group of players. It feels unfair in someways to have the network advantage and makes it so that it's easier to stay at the top once you're there, but I guess it's true in every game/sport, and life in general. A big thing is you know you can trust them when they say something and don't have to second guess everything (even though we're still going to be wrong sometimes.)"
It's true that everyone is wrong sometimes. But a look at the history books tells us that Nassif, just like Manfield and Da Rosa, is right more often than just about anyone else.
Here's some simple math:
Our sixteen players spend Friday morning playing three rounds of Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Draft. Day One closes with two rounds of Standard—a Standard that looks very different from that of only weeks ago. Five more rounds of Standard for everyone happen on Saturday, with seven wins enough to send any competitor skilled enough to get there straight to the Sunday Top 4. Now here's the important bit: even if—and it's a big if—all three of the rightly-vaunted Hall of Famers deliver yet another virtuoso set of performances, the door to World Championship glory is still open. Who is equipped to barge through and steal the Sunday spotlight?
Encouragingly, the short answer is, everyone. Let's start with Japan, a nation with a formidable competitive Magic past, and, increasingly, even more competitive Magic present.
Separating our Satos: Keisuke Sato survived three straight elimination matches to come out of the Challenger Gauntlet. If he wins, he'll be able to look all the way back to December 2020 and the start of his competitive journey in an MTG Arena Qualifier Weekend. Rei Sato has spent the season in the MPL among the elite, building on two Grand Prix titles from five Top 8s. Win or lose, watching Rei is great fun—and he always lets you know how he's feeling.
Rei is testing with the two best-known Japanese players, Yuta Takahashi and Yoshihiko Ikawa. Takahashi has long been known as "The King of Faeries” since few players have more successfully harvested the power of the iconic
Ikawa stands tall with five Grand Prix Top 8s alongside two Top Finishes. And then there's Noriyuki Mori, the newcomer maverick who has perhaps the most reliable game plan of all—sleep, study, Magic, repeat.
For European fans, three countries send two players to the biggest stage of all. Fellow Frenchman Jean-Emmanuel Depraz joins Nassif. With three Top Finishes and a Grand Prix title, his finest moment came when winning the World Magic Cup with his fellow countrymen in 2018.
From Germany comes the two-generation threat of Jan Merkel and Arne Huschenbeth. Merkel won Pro Tour Kobe in 2006, a full fifteen years before Huschenbeth claimed his victory at the Kaldheim Championship. And then there's the Czech mates, chess master and Pro Tour Return to Ravnica Champion Stanislav Cifka plus Mythic Championship VI winner Ondřej Stráský. Expect the Czech decks to be outstanding—Cifka has a long list of deckbuilding accomplishments.
That leaves three Americans looking to emulate Manfield and claim a World Championship trophy.
Sam Pardee, as we've noted, has one of the best testing partners in the business in Damo da Rosa. Pardee's victory in the Strixhaven Championship was an overdue breakthrough, and his qualification from the Challenger Gauntlet arguably even more so.
Both Eli Kassis and Matt Sperling are part of Nassif's testing group, so they, too, will not lack for teamwork. Kassis—soft-spoken, studied, and understated—quietly spent the season dominating a talent-packed Rivals League, sewing up his seat at the earliest opportunity. He was soon followed by Sperling, one of the most interesting competitors here. With many years in some of the greatest playtest groups of all time, Sperling (who finished 13th, 19th, and 3rd in Championships this season) may be finding it increasingly difficult to follow the strategy of "play with people better than you if you want to learn" as there aren't many players left who are better than Sperling—and he's using everything he's learned to play at a level this field may find hard to handle.
And that, of course, is the glorious thing about such an exclusive field—everyone is really good. Anyone can win it. Yes, there's a "Big Three," but someone in this intriguing line-up is a 'Big One," ready to make their mark on the ultimate Magic competition.
Make sure you see history made, as Maria Bartholdi and the team bring you all the drama, tension, passion, and sheer excellence of the Magic World Championship XXVII. The world may be very different, but the World Championship remains—enjoy it live October 8–10 beginning at 9 a.m. PDT (12 p.m. EDT; 6 p.m. CEST) each day at twitch.tv/magic.