Skip to main content Download External Link Facebook Facebook Twitter Instagram Twitch Youtube Youtube Discord Left Arrow Right Arrow Search Lock Wreath icon-no-eye caret-down Add to Calendar download Arena copyText Info Close
Magic: the Gathering | Esports Magic.gg Logo
Magic: the Gathering | Esports Magic.gg Logo
PLAY ARENA NOW

The Week That Was: Back in Brussels at the Magic Spotlight Series

July 31, 2026
Corbin Hosler

Jasper Grimmer hadn't touched a Magic card since 2019. The world changed shortly after Grimmer made the Top 4 of Grand Prix Amsterdam alongside teammates Thoralf Severin and Arne Huschenbeth—the fourth Grand Prix (GP) Top Finish of his career—and Grimmer's life changed along with it. Life moved on, and the live event grind faded into the comfortable past for the Berlin native who was content to have ended his journey with what was far and away his best season of Magic results. He teamed up with Severin for all five team events that season and finished in the top eight teams of all but one of them.

But Magic didn't go anywhere in the interim. And if there's one thing that covering the Pro Tour and dozens of team events over the years has taught me, it's that a life intertwined with Magic has a way of coming back together, a rubber band that snaps back like Ondrej Strasky coming out of retirement. Whether it's the chance to get the band—or the Scottsdale Foundation back together—or the categorically impossible-to-decline request from your children to play together—it's hard for those who have had a taste of success at the highest levels to resist dipping a toe back in, should the stars align.

So, when Severin—a 2019 Pro Tour winner who has become a highly successful Magic content creator—approached Grimmer with a simple pitch ("do you want to return to the battlefield for one last ride?"), there was no hesitation. He fired up MTG Arena and spent the next month grinding drafts to round back into form.

Severin had already looped in Oliver Rausch, who had circled the team event the day the 2026 Spotlight Series schedule was announced. And so, they formed the team that would go on to drop just a single match at Magic Spotlight: Marvel Super Heroes in Brussels last weekend, defeating a team in the finals with two Pro Tour winners in Christoffer Larsen and Martin Dang and their teammate and Pro Tour Top 8 finisher Rasmus Sibast.

"Last summer, I set the goal to play at the Pro Tour again," Rausch explained. "I played some Regional Championship Qualifiers and lost in some finals to not qualify myself. That was until the Spotlight Series event in Lyon, where I managed to qualify for the 2026 Regional Championship in Turin through a Friday Regional Championship Qualifier event."

Rausch would go on to make Day Two of that tournament. And while it wasn't enough on that day to get him back to the Pro Tour, the fire was lit and when the 2026 schedule came around, he was looking for others to share it with.

"Once Wizards announced the Spotlight Series schedule for 2026 and I saw that they were running Team Sealed—which is my favorite format—it was only natural to ask my very close friend Thoralf to play that one together," he recalled. "And playing with Jasper was a no-brainer as long as he wanted to play, as he hadn't played Magic for the seven to eight years leading up to this event. We are all friends, and we made a team event Top 8 together already in Team Unified Modern Constructed, which made the team building easy."

As the coverage of the Spotlight Series and its multitude of titles highlighted, everywhere you looked across the tables in Belgium, you were liable to find a storied name from Magic's history. With more than 1,500 players competing, there were a lot of tables to look over.

The squad of Rausch, Severin, and Grimmer was no different. There is so much shared history between them. Rausch and Severin first met at the Pro Tour in Hawaii in 2012 and have been friends and occasional testing partners ever since. In an environment with as many moving parts and so few edges to be gained on the top teams, chemistry is often overlooked, but it is obviously important to the best team event squads.

"I have a Team Sealed Top 8 from the Grand Prix in San Jose in 2012, and Thoralf and Jasper have made the Top 8 of several team events, so the experience competing at a high level was there," Rausch explained. "We all prepared individually when Magic: The Gathering® | Marvel Super Heroes first released and played a lot of Sealed and Draft on MTG Arena. With some base experience with the cards, their interactions, and some draft archetypes, we moved on to meeting in person for three days to crack some boosters, build sealed pools, and practice with friends from Berlin."

Not bad for a one-off event, but this team's story does encapsulate the competitive Magic world over the last several weeks. The world came together in Amsterdam for Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes, celebrated the announcements of MagicCons in Japan and Amsterdam next year, and briefly went their separate ways around Europe—before coming back together for the Spotlight Series event in Brussels.

All of which meant that the competition was not just populated by many of the best players in the world sticking around after the Pro Tour, but it would be full of those players bringing the lessons they learned in their Pro Tour preparation to the table, something that wasn't true of the Magic Spotlight: Marvel Super Heroes event in Las Vegas in late June.

"We start sorting the sealed pool by color. While doing this, we also separate all very strong cards, bombs, multicolor cards, any fixing, landcyclers, and so on. That way we can quickly identify which cards we want to maximize playing with and what colors work well together or benefit from multicolor cards," Rausch revealed. "Then it starts depending on the cards a bit, but usually one person lays out white and another lays out blue, as those colors are very deep in this environment and there is a good chance you can split one of them. And if it's not possible, that's also very important to know. The main goal from here is to fit as many of the very powerful cards as possible while trying to find three working decks."

That's the recipe, but in a field of over 1,500 players, sometimes you have to ad lib.

"That's where looking for niche strategies and combos comes into play," Rausch continued. "On Day One, for example, I played a deck that revolved around playing a lot of noncreature spells in blue-red, and that deck included The Scarlet Witch, Namor the Sub-Mariner, and two copies of Death to Our Enemies. From practice, we knew that it was a playable archetype, but it was usually weak. Without seeing that deck, we would not have made Day Two as it would have led to butchering our pool too much."

With the win, Rausch's immediate goal of qualifying for the Pro Tour had been accomplished.

"I want to say thanks to all the people that always believe in me and are very supportive," he said. "It feels very good to finally prove they have been right all along."

For Severin, the Pro Tour is still familiar. It won't be quite so for Grimmer, but the 37-year-old is thrilled to stay on this ride for as far as it takes him.

"Even though I got multiple Grand Prix Top Finishes and Magic players are trained to care about consistency over big wins, it feels nice to finally earn a title," Grimmer confessed. "The friends I got to meet again after such a long time at the event joked that now I have to come back to competitive Magic, but I am pretty sure I will not and only play the Pro Tour I qualified for with this win. However, I want to at least get back in shape so that my play is not as awful as it was in Brussels. So that means I will consume content, learn, and play more until the Pro Tour rolls around. Whatever happens there, happens."

Share Article