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The Week That Was: Atlanta's Digital Magic All-Stars

October 10, 2025
Corbin Hosler

Magic Online remains undefeated.

Before there was Reid Duke, the legendary Pro Tour Hall of Fame player, there was reiderrabitt, the legend of Magic Online. Before Player of the Year Brad Nelson was crowned at 2011's Pro Tour Paris, there was 2010's Magic Online Championship competitor FFfreaK. A full decade before Logan Nettles's first appearance in a Pro Tour Top 8, Jaberwocki was the most fearsome Magic Online end boss around. Shota Yasooka is one of the most accomplished Pro Tour players in history; yaya3 is a Magic Online Championship finalist.

The list goes on and on. It turns out that the list of Magic Online and MTG Arena players who went on to find tabletop success is quite long—and quite storied.

For as long as Magic Online has existed—since 2002—it's been lauded as one of the best ways to improve at Magic. Back then, when Y2K was still a recent scare that humanity narrowly avoided, playing online was a luxury for very few; I remember logging on to Magic Online for the first time in 2008 and learning to navigate its byzantine corridors.

Early screenshots of Magic Online are a portal to the past.


For a game that, at the time, was riding high on the stars of the late '90s and early '00s, the Jon Finkels and Kai Buddes of the world who became great at Magic almost exclusively through the college dorm games and hotel lobby testing, the influx of online talent ushered in a new era of competitive play, and a new generation of competitive players. After enough years of sustained success by online-first talent including rising stars like Tom "The Boss" Ross, Josh "Wrapter" Utter-Leyton, David "Webster" Ochoa, and many others, Magic Online became not just a way to play more Magic, but the way to play the most meaningful Magic outside of the Pro Tour circuit. From qualifiers to on-demand drafts, the platform offered new ways for players to condense years of improvement into months of Magic Online.

Fast forward 20 years or so to MagicCon: Atlanta and the finals of Pro Tour Edge of Eternities. The format was Modern, and the final match featured Goblin Charbelcher versus Isochron Scepter and Orim's Chant, with Tezzeret the Seeker playing a key role in Belcher making it to the finals. Everything old is new again, as they say, but one thing never changed.

Here were two Pro Tour finalists, masters of their craft, and players you're just as likely to find in the Magic Online lobbies or the MTG Arena draft queues as you are at Friday Night Magic or a local Regional Championship Qualifier. Michael DeBenedetto-Plummer and Francisco Sánchez, are also known by their Magic Online names, killah_suv and Patxi respectively. And, if your opponent is known by their Magic Online name, it's a surefire sign that you're in trouble. The finals between the two was a thrilling show that ended with DeBenedetto-Plummer making history.

For Sánchez, there are only so many opportunities to play in person in Spain. Before Atlanta, he helped lead Team Pluto, a squad filled with many of Spain's best players and featuring former Pro Tour winner Matias Leveratto, and prepped for Modern with the goal to just chain another Pro Tour onto the list, something he's been doing successfully since Pro Tour Modern Horizons 3 in Amsterdam last summer. With extra time to prepare for Modern, Magic Online's Patxi dove in fully.

"I love playing in person, but I mostly play online. The thing is, when you're trying to compete at the highest level, sometimes there's just no time to go to the local game store," he explained. "But since we had plenty of time to test for this tournament, I tried every possible option. I didn't really like any deck in particular, so I stuck with my pet deck."

That pet deck turned out to be the Azorius Control list that he had run the Magic Online streets with, and it translated to tabletop with resounding success.

"It turned out there were other Blue-White Control fanatics on the team, and once we concluded it was a solid choice, we didn't think twice," said Sánchez as he reflected on the deck that took his Pro Tour performance to heights he's only dreamed of, qualifying him for every Pro Tour for the next year. "The way we looked at it, I mean, if I play Blue-White Control when it's bad, imagine playing it now that it's at least decent!"

The impact of online play was felt beyond the finalists. One of the Top 8 competitors, Mikko Airaksinen, has two small children, and when his wife was pregnant, he made the decision to step back from competitive Magic for a few years to better manage things. But while you can take the gamer away from the tournament, you can't always get the tournament away from the gamer.

"I made a commitment to stop playing any in-person events to get us through the first baby year," he explained. "I did play some MTG Arena, though, and a Play-In turned into a Qualifier Weekend that turned into an Arena Championship where I reached the finals and ended up qualifying for the Pro Tour and the World Championship. Luckily, our daughter is a year and a half old at this point, so travel is a little easier."

As if the long chain of events that led to the finals of Arena Championship 7 weren't enough to prove that the former Finnish National Champion still has it in his return, Pro Tour Edge of Eternities locked it in. Testing as part of Team Vents and describing himself as the old guy of the group, Airaksinen spent months leading up to the Pro Tour testing out different decks online before leaving it all up to a literal SWOT analysis the week before the event. Belcher won, and so did Airaksinen, whose second Top Finish in the last year makes him one of the most intriguing players of 2025 heading into December's World Championship.

The Pro Tour Edge of Eternities Top 8 and the rest of the field around Airaksinen only further proved the point that many of the best Magic players in the world aren't created in a lab but in a cozy gaming chair as they terrorize all drafters and run up the trophy count.

As for Airaksinen's quarterfinals opponent Jonny Guttman? He's known as ginky_mtg, an online Magic expert who literally had to work on his physical dexterity with the cards as he emerged from the Covid-era online Magic to tabletop games. He's one of a number of modern-era standouts who have kept the tradition of hopping from Magic Online and MTG Arena to Pro Tour pipeline going strong.

Piotr "Kanister" Głogowski is a prolific streamer and online player who put together three Top Finishes between 2019–20 across both MTG Arena and tabletop play. David Inglis captained the best team in the world for a time after rising to prominence as Tangrams across impressive finishes on both Magic Online and MTG Arena. Lucas Duchow is one of the most consistent players in the world today, and it's because he never missed a beat taking his game from his desk to a desk anywhere around the globe. Charis "Mogged" Kikidis won the Magic Online Championship earlier this year and is poised to become the next digital hero to break through, and when he does so, he'll be following in the footsteps of noted deck builder Rei Zhang, who earned standing as the online combo master cftsoc (short for "combo for the sake of combo") before moving on to making the Top 8 of Pro Tour Thunder Junction.

The more you look around at the Pro Tour, the more you find it's filled with familiar faces and familiar names; many players on the Pro Tour have played their opponents dozens of times online before, and the respect carries over. And by the time the Top 8 is announced, even unfamiliar names to viewers at home are well-known to the best online players in the room. That's what it takes to find success at the highest level of competitive Magic—the time has to be put in, the same as it ever has, but there are simply more ways and places to do so than ever before.

And they all lead to the same place: the Sunday stage of the Pro Tour, Magic Online Challenges, the Arena Championship, or even the World Championship.

"It honestly feels unreal. I've been chasing a result like this for so many years; I've had a few good results here and there, mostly online, while trying to stay consistent, which is really hard," Sanchez reflected after his run to the Pro Tour Edge of Eternities final. "I've been chaining all the Pro Tours since Amsterdam, so having the whole next year already locked in feels like a huge relief. This Top 8 feels like a reward for all the work I've put in."

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