You don't have to look very far to find excellence in the Dutch Magic community. It's a thriving scene—Jelco Bodewes said as much in this week's Metagame Mentor—and there have been examples of great Magic players from the Netherlands going back to the very beginning of Magic's history.
Tom van de Logt was already a three-time national champion by the time he won the Magic World Championship in 2001, but his win in Toronto told the world what Europe already knew: the Netherlands had a strong contingent of players. That tradition was continued on the world stage by a run of Pro Tour Hall of Famers in Karsten, Kamiel Cornelissen, Jelger Wiegersma, and Bram Snepvangers. Julien Nuijten's victory at the 2004 World Championship in San Francisco, achieved at the age of fifteen, also remains a milestone for Dutch Magic, underscoring the country's ability to produce top-tier talent. In recent years, Brent Vos has carried the banner at the international level, and all the while, there has remained an active community of current and past Pro Tour players working to produce the next potential champion.
After the Regional Championship for Europe at the Ultimate Guard European Magic Series last weekend, it looks like they have one.
Congratulations to Jelco Bodewes, who blazed through his Regional Championship with Izzet Prowess! See you at the Pro Tour and World Championship! 🏆 #RCBologna https://t.co/JOxMVP9FBk
— PlayMTG (@PlayMTG) April 27, 2025
Jelco Bodewes is a longtime Magic player and no stranger to the Pro Tour, having competed in seven Pro Tours between 2014–2020, including a Top 16 finish at Pro Tour Ixalan. Personal circumstances forced him out of the competitive scene after that, but Magic always remained near to the 31-year-old's heart. As high-stakes tabletop events have returned and grown over the last few years, that competitive itch eventually had to be scratched. Bodewes went back to the beginning and returned to Regional Championship Qualifier play last year.
Not long after that, he was not just playing in RCQs but winning them. He qualified for the Regional Championship in Lille and won a qualifier at a nearby store in Hoorn to advance to last weekend's tournament. Once he qualified for Bologna, Bodewes and the rest of the Dutch Magic community went to work.
"Now that paper events have really started picking up again in the last couple of years, I've been playing more and more events myself again. It's really reinforced my drive for competitive Magic," the Maarssen native explained. "I was lucky to prepare for the event with nine other Dutch players. Our testing in the weeks leading up to the event was pretty much purely on MTG Arena, and we set up a message group so we could discuss reshares and share our own lists and any strong brews we were running into. I want to shout out the Dutch competitive community as a whole; I'm lucky to live in such a small and dense country for local events."
It's especially fortunate for Bodewes now that he has so many events to prepare for.
"This means a lot, with the highlight for me being the qualification for the World Championship," he said. "Going into the Regional Championship, my main goal was to try and improve on my last RC, I think I went 3–4, and try to make Day Two. While I felt familiar with the different options and decks in the format, I wasn't really expecting to make it into the prizes for this event, let alone have the amazing weekend I ended up having."
Amazing is a good word to describe Bodewes's run through the field of over 1,000 players. Making the Top 8 required a phenomenal record in an untested Standard format, so the Dutch crew was at the forefront of that testing in the final days leading up to the event—even if that testing yielded a less-than-unanimous conclusion.
"As a team, we ended up on a very diverse set of decks, including several people on Steel Cutter Aggro but also Jeskai Control, Oculus, Omniscience, Pixie, and Mono-Red. I myself only locked in the exact deck I wanted to play on Friday afternoon," Bodewes admitted. "And during the event, the deck just felt super powerful for me, even stronger than during testing."
Congratulations to the Top 8 players of the Ultimate Guard European Magic Series - Regional Championship! Let's meet the players and their Standard decks 🧵 #RCBologna pic.twitter.com/4yZoC0LgfM
— PlayMTG (@PlayMTG) April 27, 2025
The Magic world looked to Bologna to see just how
"While the deck sometimes stumbled, it was amazing at punishing any [opponents'] stumbles or awkward draws. I was lucky enough to get a rare turn-three kill with the deck during one of the last rounds of Swiss," Bodewes recounted. "I was especially impressed by
"The most fun games, for me personally, were the slower games where you spend your early game plotting several copies of
"Honestly, during the Swiss rounds, I was just happy with how well the event was going but didn't really think about the final result. Then, a teammate mentioned I was locked in for a Pro Tour invite at the very least, and shortly after, I suddenly was already at the point where I could ID and make the Top 8. After I managed to win in Round 14 and ensure I was on the play for any Top 8 matches, I realized I might actually have a shot at qualifying for Worlds. It happened very quickly."
Ending things quickly is
Where things go in Standard from here is open for debate, but where Bodewes goes from here is clear. He's going back to the Pro Tour for the first time in six years.
"It's started to set in, though it still feels strange," he reflected. "The last few days have been great, but they went by in a flash. I was lucky enough to have some time to wind down and explore Bologna itself after the event; I hadn't visited the city before, and the food was excellent. The most surprising thing over the weekend for me was having players I haven't met before congratulate me on the win out in Bologna or at the airport. I'm super happy to have it all pay off on a weekend like this."