For Filippo Chiappini, the Pro Tour starts with the decklists.

Every path to the Pro Tour is different, and players at the highest level of competition come from all over the globe, every walk of life and way of playing Magic. From Pro Tour veterans to Regional Championship grinders, dedicated online competitors, Standard experts, and Limited specialists, the Pro Tour brings together the best of Magic under one roof.

But what does it mean to be a "Standard expert?" And why were decklists so key to Chiappini's Magic Online Championship Series breakthrough that qualified him for Pro Tour? And just what does a guy named "fireshoes" have to do with all of this?

"Setting a daily or weekly deck to beat is a great way to explore a metagame, as it allows you to build your decks with it in mind while tracking what could be cyclical meta shifts. In the last months, Izzet Lessons was my deck to beat. It was the most played and probably the most consistently powerful deck. If I wanted to try a new deck for a tournament, it had to pass the 'Lessons test,' or beat it at least 50% of the times in testing," Chiappini explained. "Standard needs continuous attention, as it's extremely subject to new releases and the subsequent meta shifts never stop since there are plenty of viable strategies. Playing daily on Magic Online and MTG Arena is a great way to keep up with the metagame, as one will always have a feel about what is perceived as good by most people, which usually coincides with the 'deck to beat.'"

Again, I'll stress that the Pro Tour bringing together the best in the world usually means the best deck builders are included as well.Whether you're a player who looks to refine the current top decks in Standard or you're Matt Nass throwing everything against the wall—and sometimes with a literal game-breaking Krark-Clan Ironworks combo—there's no single way to approach building a deck for an expected metagame, just like there's no single way to qualify for the Pro Tour.

But there are ways that have worked for those on top of the Standard metagame—and the final piece of Chiappini's strategy was to return to something so fundamental that its importance is paradoxically well-understood and poorly appreciated.

"When I started considering the decklists as the main subject in my learning journey, technical play felt more and more natural to me. Knowing why the cards were there in the first place allowed me to know how to use them correctly more often than not when I had them in hand," Chiappini elaborated. "This has, of course, a lot to do with metagame study and adjacent subjects."

Won the Standard Showcase Qualifier and qualified for the MOCS and my first Pro Tour!
Played a teched out Prowess list for the UR metagame, paid off as i beat 3/3 mirrors. pic.twitter.com/A9VFdPAg15

— Filippo Chiappini (@filpin_mtg) March 30, 2026

In an age where everyone has heard and internalized the strategy "just play the best deck," questioning that assumption led Chiappini back to the decklist stage of his preparation. He credited this understanding for his Pro Tour breakthrough.

"Many different archetypes and different strategies arose after the World Championship, and I started trying all of them on Magic Online to get a feel for the format while learning a lot from every single deck," Chiappini explained. "After Lorwyn Eclipsed released and the first Regional Championship of the season in Portland,I took up an innovative variation of the Four-Color Rhythm deck I had spent lots of time practicing for Lyon and won the whole thing with, just one week before the Pro Tour. I instantly fell in love with it and started playing lots of Standard Leagues, just for fun.

"But then the Pro Tour showed that the deck was very beatable thanks to many new cards, and my beloved Rhythm deck had a win rate of around 40%. It seemed that whenever I thought a deck was busted, these big tournaments would come to tell me that I was wrong, and that almost every 'broken' deck can be beaten. That is the beauty of Standard, and the way I started approaching it. There must be a better deck or a better build of an established deck somewhere, a deck that's well-positioned in the metagame. I, as a competitive player, just have to discover it. Something suddenly clicked. I understood I had roles in every matchup that I needed to follow to succeed, and those roles had been chosen since the deck-building discovery phase."

Lo and behold, a month after the Pro Tour, Izzet Prowess burst onto the Standard scene (again). Chiappini recognized that this could be the "better deck," and he was an early adopter. With the insight he had gained from playing such a wide variety of decks and putting in the work to understand them from the deck-building phase on up, he was able to knowingly navigate matchups thanks to his experience on the other side of the table and present questions that decks optimized for previous weeks just couldn't answer.

"The rise of the Prowess deck is noteworthy, since it mostly came out of nowhere and without any new game-changing printings. This one really felt like a bug in the matrix, as if the meta was not prepared to face it at all, especially in the first few weeks after its breakout performance in Milwaukee. I just kept playing it and made a 5-0 appearance in a Magic Online Showcase Last Chance event, qualifying myself for the Standard Showcase Qualifier. About 24 hours later, I was qualified for the MOCS and my first Pro Tour. This is an incredible achievement for me, both as a player and as a human being," Chiappini marveled. "Especially since I am pretty 'new' to the game—I started pursuing competitive Magic in 2025—I think my story can teach a lot to new players approaching the format for the very first time with competitive ambitions. It takes time, dedication, and continuous attention to the slight shifts in the meta to be able to succeed at a high level of competition, and Standard is probably the most rewarding Constructed format to do so."

Outside of playing a lot of Magic Online queues, how does one gather enough of the right information to put all of this together?

"If you can't play every day, you should try to look at Magic Online Challenge results to have an idea of what people are playing the most and what's winning the most," Chiappini explained. "If a big tournament happened before the one you're preparing for, analyzing the metagame and the win rate of the decks thoroughly is a great way to nail deck selection. You will have an exact picture of what people thought were the best decks and how they performed, so you'll be able to either try to beat them or join them in glory."

Magic Online decklists are a great place to start. But to Chiappini's point, they're far from the only events inputting data into the field. And while looking at the last big event is often illustrative when preparing for the next one, it's not necessarily the place where the latest innovations or sideboard tech can be found; savvy Standard stars have their spots.

"Big picture, following a format means you are looking for two things: the play rate of each deck and the win rate of each deck," explained Australia/New Zealand Regional Championship Top 8 competitor Samuel Maher. "Social media accounts that post data for events as they occur, like Frank Karsten (@karsten_frank), Robert Taylor (@fireshoes), and sites that publish decklists, are very helpful."

Once you've got the data, Maher recommends the same thing that Chiappini highlighted: ask why the data is playing out this way.

We are in the home stretch of the Swiss rounds at the ANZ Super Series in Sydney, with just three players left undefeated: Samuel Maher on Temur Prowess, Simon Linabury on Mono-Green, and Levi Lambley on Rakdos Monument. The Top 8 is in sight! pic.twitter.com/MvFCz7PvEl

— PlayMTG (@PlayMTG) March 14, 2026

"Pro Tours will have a drastic impact on the metagame, introducing new decks or shaking up the established order of things. Otherwise, your best data comes from Regional Championships and the Spotlight Series. Try to ask why a particular change happened," Maher explained. "If the Lessons play rate really dropped off, why? Maybe it's because players figured out the matchup against Prowess was bad, so they jumped to that instead. If Simic Rhythm was beating Lessons at previous events but did very badly at this event, why? Are there more Pyroclasms in sideboards? Do players know how to play the matchup better?"

The specific answers to those highlight specific questions that matter week to week in what Maher described as the fastest-shifting Standard metagame he's ever seen. If Pyroclasm is the reason for the matchup percentages to shift, is there a way to adjust that sidesteps the Pyroclasm problem? It's finding the answers to such questions deep in the format's long list of legal cards that creates the week-to-week churn Standard is known for. In other words, finding the right deck for a given tournament isn't always about creating good matchups—it's often about salvaging bad ones just enough to push a deck over the edge, and to send players like Chiappini and Maher to the Pro Tour.