The Sunday stage of the Pro Tour, the players who make it there, the decks they pilot, and the teams they represent all capture the attention and imagination of Pro Tour competitors and spectators alike and often dominate the Pro Tour discussion both during the weekend and in its immediate aftermath.

However, a different type of story took shape in the Swiss rounds of Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed. A story focused not on the distinguished accomplishment of an individual competitor or two rising above the field but of an entire team taking the event—and the Standard format—by storm. Their Constructed deck was the breakout deck of the tournament, and all fifteen of the competitors on Team The Boulder Merlion made it to Day Two. On Saturday, fourteen of their fifteen players reached the 30-point threshold to qualify for the next Pro Tour. It was a flavor of success that reflects the team's underlying ethos: a commitment to process over ego.

Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed saw the debut of Team The Boulder Merlion (named after Sisyphus's eternal toil), but its origins stretch as far back as Pro Tour Aetherdrift. That's when a set of players who would eventually form the core of what would become the breakout team of the event first floated the idea of working together. In the tumult of testing, qualifications, and obligations to other teams, however, it would take a year for the team to come together.

The team roster in Richmond included Andrew Elenbogen, Adam Brace, Alexander Kans, Allen Wu, Andy Garcia-Romo, Avi Lessure, Dan Weiser, Dom Harvey, Evan Sonnenberg-Rhim, Huaxing Bai, Jacob Nagro, Liam Etelson, Matt Sikking-Johnson, Paul Green, and Phil Li.

"I've learned that you really have to move quick," said the team's captain Andrew Elenbogen. "You need your roster soft locked by the time of the RCs, and so we moved quickly. We got everyone together, and that was a group of about seven or eight members, and from there we did public hiring. Allen Wu and I sat on calls with a lot of candidates and we talked over what our team was doing, what our process was going to look like, what they bring to the table, and we ended up adding a bunch of people, some who worked out really well.

"When we're hiring, what I tend to try to do is look for areas where I think we are weak, where we don't have enough people who are good at some particular skill. Maybe we don't have enough deck builders, we don't have enough strong technicians, we don't have enough whatever. Then we try to hire in such a way that we fill those weaknesses while still hiring people that align with the team vision, want to work hard, and want to have good process."

While adding teammates to shore up group shortcomings isn't unique, the centering of the team at each step of the process is something that comes up far less often in testing-team discussions.

"When we were looking for more people, we wanted to recruit people that we knew would try not to just work for themselves but build out a good process and care about testing and helping the team, and that we would try to build a kind of culture where everybody could trust each other and trust that they would be listened to," said Paul Green, a team member who, like Elenbogen, had been testing with the group that would become The Boulder Merlion before its official start in Richmond. "And I think we got a pretty good group of people for that.

"Before Richmond, Dan, Jacob Nagro, and I sat down and before the tournament started said this is the best team any of us has ever worked with. We know we're all going to do great because we all actually followed the vision. We trusted each other and worked selflessly, and we knew that was the key to doing well. I've been just so happy to work with everyone on this team."

"What The Boulder Merlion is trying to be is a team of good processes and hard work," Elenbogen said. "We're trying to be this team where everyone comes together and become more than the sum of our parts. Maybe we don't necessarily have any of the top-ranked players in the world, but the thing is, together we can be more than they can be alone. All teams are trying to do this to some extent, but I think they aren't doing it as hard as we are."

One of the places where that volume of process becomes key is in deliberately using each player's strengths to develop team strategy. If a rising tide lifts all boats, this team's process finds and maps those tides for the good of the fleet.

"Something that I really believe about this game is that Magic isn't one skill, it's many," Elenbogen said. "I would say I have made a successful career in Magic out of pretty mediocre technical play. Relative to most people that have won a Pro Tour or made the Top 8, I don't play games of Magic that well. And I have done that because I think I am aces at deck selection. I think that my preparation is top-notch. I think that I understand a lot of information so I'm not thinking about all of it when I'm actually at the table. And I think that I can bring some of those strengths to the team. It is very valuable to the team that I can run deck selection to some extent, that I can have a lot of impact on what deck we should play, because that is where I shine.

"On the other hand, when we need a matchup played extremely well and precisely and we need to know all the nuances, I can turn to Paul Green, who I think is one of the strongest technical players in the world right now, and say, 'Paul, I want you to play this matchup and have you tell me how to play it. I won't tell you that. I will tell you what deck to play. You tell me how to play it.'

"Obviously, I'm oversimplifying everything, but that's the vision, right? We have different strengths and all play to those strengths."

His teammate, Paul Green, echoed this sentiment. "The way I've been pitching it is, it's constructed selflessly or constructed the hard way," said Green. "Everyone knows that they're not working alone, they're working for the team. We all know that if we work together, it works out well for everyone. We also know that everyone is there because we care about each other's voices. We can come up with things and know that everyone trusts each other and can incorporate that without anyone going off and doing their own thing and ignoring everything the rest of us have to say. That was at least the aim, was to try to get people who wanted to understand and not just submit their own deck and have their own result."

Another place where The Boulder Merlion's commitment to process became apparent in their results was in their Standard deck. The team arrived at the Pro Tour with Spellementals, a blue-red deck they felt was particularly excellent against Badgermole Cub decks without giving too much ground to the rest of the field.

Eddymurk Crab
Hearth Elemental
Abandon Attachments

"Amid testing, I laddered against what was essentially Spellementals," said Jacob Nagro, the initial champion of the Spellementals list. "I didn't see their entire list, as they were pretty short games, but I saw the concept of playing Hearth Elemental, Eddymurk Crab, and Sunderflock with cheap spells. They even had Winternight Stories! It was an impressive thing, and I thought it was worth trying, so I built a deck that probably wasn't even that far off. All the small choices matter, especially in a blue deck that sees a lot of cards. That list that I first built was probably like five spells different than what we ended up registering."

"It's hard to tell the story of The Boulder without telling the story of the Spellementals deck," Green said. "We had the breakout deck of the tournament, we were the only people who submitted it, and that never ever would've happened except that, even though it sounded crazy, everyone took it seriously. I think that the only reason we succeeded in Constructed at the last Pro Tour was because we trusted that [Spellementals] was worth it but didn't just believe Jacob at face value. We made sure to be rigorous about it. Because we went through the process, we were pretty confident we had a good deck."

Fifteen teammates all on the exact same Constructed list for the Pro Tour is a special kind of achievement all its own. Between differences in opinion, experience, play style, and more, landing on a list shared by every member has eluded even the teams that have arrived at previous Pro Tours with a deck that would become notorious for its absolute dominance over the rest of the field.

"This was one of the best team experiences I've ever had because I got to communicate with my team about how things were going with Spellementals in the testing house and they were giving me a lot of feedback," Nagro said. "That was really refreshing because I've played decks at the Pro Tour that I've tested with a team and ones I've tested by myself. Even if you think your deck is really promising, it's hard to be confident in it.

Glacial Dragonhunt

"But we were getting a lot of data on the deck, which was slowly building the entire team's confidence. There were still a lot of people wavering, or who didn't think it was very good, and even on the day before deck submission we changed some cards that we thought made the deck a lot better. We basically added Glacial Dragonhunts on the last day.

"I think what was unique is that the whole team had eyes on it by the end, and everybody was working and thinking about sideboard plans. I think on other teams I've been on, we've had decks kind of like this that are new brews and in the same timeframe leading up to the Pro Tour, but it felt like only half the team cared about it. So, I think that was pretty unique, that eventually everybody was on board and everybody played the deck."

Their wild success at Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed wasn't entirely complete, however, since the team fell short of putting one of their players into the Top 8. That's a milestone that calls out to every Pro Tour player and every team.

Now sponsored by Merlion Games, Team The Boulder Merlion is studying for Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven with a handful of changes to the roster. That could be in part because their focus on process yielded overwhelmingly positive results, but the draw to return wouldn't exist if, like the team itself, the process hadn't created an experience that was more than the sum of its parts.

"For the most part, it just feels like I'm having a great time with my friends," said Green. "It's a lot of effort. We all work hard, but it mostly just feels like I'm hanging out."

Whether it's that the team's spectacular success at Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed was the genesis of their next trial, since it qualified nearly the entire team for the next Pro Tour, or that, having summited one mountain, they discovered another, higher peak still calling them, The Boulder Merlion knows that there is always more to be done.