The run of a lifetime continues for William Araujo.
Araujo burst onto the Regional Championship scene in 2023 by winning the City Class Showdown in Sao Paulo, qualifying for the Pro Tour. That's a perfectly suitable end to a player's Magic journey, but it was just the beginning for Araujo. His 2024 was somehow even more impressive, as he didn't just set personal bests, he turned into one of several Regional Championship endbosses in Brazil and probably the most consistent of them all.
There were three City Class Showdown events in 2024, serving as the year's three Regional Championships for Brazil—and Araujo made the Top 4 of all of them. That year, he played in every Pro Tour and the World Championship, accomplishing his aspirational goal for the year (and then some).
Then, back in January, he added another Regional Championship Top 8 to his resume—bringing him to a total of five consecutive Top Finishes at his Regional Championships. He described his 2024 Magic year as "insane" and entered 2025 with the same goal: play in all the Pro Tours and Magic World Championship 31. It was to be a tall task—without a deep Pro Tour run, Araujo would have to rely on his Regional Championship dominance to qualify—and that set the stakes for Araujo as he headed into Pro Tour Aetherdrift earlier this year.
"My goal, once again, is to play the whole season, but I am fully aware the path is rough," he said of that event. "It's been a dream to play all these events over the past two seasons."
I've been talking for years now about how the Regional Championship circuit is the future faces of the Pro Tour, and in all of my conversations with the vibrant Magic community of these City Class Showdown events, they kept pointing to Araujo as one of the players on the shortlist to experience massive Pro Tour success. Testing with him for almost every event, players like Jonathan Lobo Melamed saw what was coming, and by the time the dust had settled at Pro Tour Aetherdrift, the rest of the Magic world knew, too: a Top 16 finish announced Araujo's ascension on the Pro Tour, and he now heads to this week's Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™.
Araujo's dominance at the Regional Championship level also belies his biggest strength as a Magic player, the trait that has allowed him to flourish on the Regional Championship circuit that is crucial to sustained Pro Tour qualification.
"My strongest side was always Constructed," explained Araujo, who has played Magic since 1996 but really began chasing the Pro Tour in earnest again when the Regional Championship first sprung up. "From the moment I started playing tier-one or well-positioned decks, I started putting up better results."
That Constructed prowess has served Araujo well but remember that Constructed is only 60% of the Pro Tour. The rest? That would be Limited, and Pro Tour regulars see success in those rounds as the biggest place to gain an edge on a data-heavy field that by and large knows what's going on in the Constructed format of choice.
That's where players like Andrea Mengucci and Helena Brake exceled, converting perfect 6-0 Limited records at Pro Tour Aetherdrift into a finish strong enough to qualify for this weekend's event at MagicCon: Las Vegas. While Mengu is a champion and Pro Tour regular when he's on the grind, the Draft success for Brake came in a first Pro Tour appearance after working with Team Sanctum of All. It offers a pathway to success on the Pro Tour circuit for players breaking in, one of many that you begin to see the more you peel back the curtain of just who "makes" a Pro Tour or World Championship.
There's the Regional Championship Top Finishers from across the globe. The Top 8 from the Magic Spotlight Series that launched this year. The Top Finishers from the last Pro Tour, or those qualified on match points from the previous few Pro Tours. There are digital qualifiers from Magic Online to Magic Arena, Hall of Fame invites, and a handful of other avenues. The point is, no two paths to the Pro Tour look the same, as Magic holds a mighty big umbrella.
Just ask Chase Masters, a first-time Pro Tour competitor who has perhaps put more raw miles into his competitive Magic journey since the days when Planeswalker Points qualified you for the Pro Tour.
"I've moved a ton in my life, including to Manila in the Philippines," he explained. "For the past 12 years, Magic has provided the most convenient and most consistently pleasant social networks I could have access to. I moved to Arkansas at the start of high school, and some of my stuff got stolen. But the kids around the corner were happy to introduce me to a group of friends who taught me how to play this game. I split Duel Decks: Elspeth vs. Tezzeret with my friend Race, then we split a box of Theros and started attending Prerelease events that were 45 minutes away at the closest LGS in Hot Springs.
"I spent two years there, then I moved to Richmond, Virginia, after graduating high school at 15 years old. So, what am I going to do? Well, that was the summer of Magic Origins. The owner would drive me to and from my house. Some money from allowance and cutting grass was enough to play Friday Night Magic and grab food from Weezy's Kitchen."
This cuts to a different truism that genuinely makes the Pro Tour a special place: this is not just a tournament—as I say often, Magic's greatest strength is that it's many things to many people—but competitive Magic is also one of the very few experiences in the world that can bring together players from around the globe and allow them to share a common tongue.
"Magic is a language you can pick up with someone like you never left off at all. In Magic, there's a shared experience where you know almost precisely what their experience has been like, and that's very cool. It's cool, because we care about it, probably more than we should. So yeah, Magic has been really big for me. It introduced me to my very best friends, who have persisted through the moves."
Now, the Pro Tour at MagicCon: Las Vegas is the next Magic experience that Masters will get to share with his peers. And it's a long time coming for a player who has been hard at work in the background of many of the biggest events of the past year, toiling away all in an effort to help his friends and teammates who were able to achieve what Masters has been chasing since the advent of Regional Championships: a Pro Tour invite.
"Something my friends would joke about is that I would self-nerf by bringing totally unplayable garbage. 'As long as he doesn't nerf himself, he's in a good spot. But he's gonna nerf himself every time," Masters reflected in the days leading up to the Pro Tour that he finally secured with a strong run at the Regional Championship in Charlotte earlier this year. "My friend Mason said it was like I was Red Skull, leading others to a treasure I could not possess.
"But since I started playing real decks, things have gotten substantially easier."
It's certainly humorous to look back as Masters now prepares for the next long-coming step. He made two Grand Prix Top 8 appearances in 2019 before tabletop play took a hiatus, but the road back to this point has been filled with near misses.
But that hasn't stopped Masters from contributing to the Pro Tour. In fact, his fingerprints are found at least in part on several major developments over the last few years, from Reid Duke's legendary run at Pro Tour Phyrexia to some last-minute changes that Raja Sulaiman made to his Esper Blink deck while headed to the Magic Spotlight Series in Indianapolis last month, which traced its origins back to a Masters car ride with Nathan Steuer on the way to the event.
Masters's own break finally came. Now, the consummate teammate is jumping deep into the action himself.
"Getting to the Pro Tour is huge, I've been in a spot where I've been able to consistently qualify for everything but the Pro Tour. I could help get people to the Pro Tour and to do well at [World Championship 31], but I couldn't get over the first hump myself," he said. "I've learned a lot over the last few years. I am always trying to figure out the ways to punish other players for the good things they're incentivized to do, but a fault I had in my prep was being too reactive; I would do things that required people to play into my conception of what the winner's meta would look like, and that's just not true. But with how little time I have—I work full time as a consultant and I'm trying to get into law school—trying to manage things can be quite the juggle."
In this, Masters represents yet another class of player—and path to the Pro Tour: the Thinker. It may sound a little trite, but time and again it's what the top players in the world seem to talk about when I ask them what makes them so great. World Champion Javier Dominguez plays thousands of games, sure. But when he's not jamming games, he's thinking about those games and what really made them tick. It's this thinking about the game at a deeper, structural level that drives many innovations in the furious two weeks leading up to a Pro Tour, and something that gives players who may not be able to grind weekly events the opportunity to play competitive Magic in a way that works for them.
"MTG Arena is nice because I can practice during the bevy of low-intensity times I need to be in my chair. But I don't always have the chance to get in the reps, so I do the homework," he explained. "I get the data on what the best things to do are, what the best players are doing, and where there is an opportunity. I do a lot of scrolling through Scryfall."
Whether you're a Regional Championship regular or an Arena ace, all roads lead to Las Vegas—and Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY.
