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The Week That Was: The Bonds of Brotherhood at Magic Spotlight: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

March 13, 2026
Corbin Hosler

Team Scrapheap just keeps picking up wins. The Magic team came together over the last few years. In many ways, they represent the current state of the competitive Magic circuit. For many years, those of us following the tournament scene were familiar with the biggest teams and names, and many are still familiar sights today. (Looking at you, Team TCGplayer, and your continual breaking of formats.)

But competitive Magic teams don't just exist at the Pro Tour. Today, teams may be more prevalent outside of the Pro Tour. That's because the Regional Championship circuit that qualifies competitors for the Pro Tour happens just as consistently as the Pro Tour itself. As the series has grown internationally, the level of respect associated with a Regional Championship Top 8 has only grown. In smaller regions, the scene's best measure against each other's Top Regional Finishes like they're counting Pro Tour Top 8s, because winning the Regional Championship against the best competition in your area correctly feels like an accomplishment to itself. It's not just a path to the PT; it's a landmark event on many players' Magic calendars.

That regularity has allowed teams to form at the Regional Championship level. And in today's world, where many excellent players can be qualified for one Pro Tour but not the next, the Regional Championship circuit offers a baseline competition that everyone on the squad is invested in, often leading to offshoot teams that take on the Pro Tour. Some of the best tales at Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed—a team name referencing Sisyphus rolling ahe boulder comes to mind—have come from these teams. Their rosters consist not just of old-school Pro Tour veterans but also of the new blood coming onto the circuit.

And that brings us back to Team Scrapheap. Led in part by brothers Joseph and John Puglisi Clark, the team has cropped up again and again over the last year. From Quinn Tonole crushing it every week with Mono-Red, to Percy Fang winning a Regional Championship, to Vinnie Fino doing the same—and John Puglisi Clark finishing in 2nd place at that tournament, just behind Fino—to Joseph Puglisi's own 2nd-place finish at last year's Regional Championship in Las Vegas (leading to back-to-back finals appearances for the brothers), Team Scrapheap just keeps coming.

Of course, by now, the team is quite used to the Pro Tour experience as well as the Regional Championships and everything that comes with them. Heading into 2026, the group was already among the best in the US, but after John Puglisi Clark's incredible run last weekend, the team's stature is growing even more. Because the squad came out in force to Magic Spotlight: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in Richmond last weekend—and they left with a trophy.

The Magic Spotlight Series offers players a direct path to the Pro Tour. Making the Top 8 earns you an invitation to an upcoming Pro Tour. There's no qualifying tournament, and players just need to enter the main event. Longtime Magic players will recognize that as similar to the Grand Prix system of old, and that draw brought out more than 600 players to Richmond for the release of Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The set brought a number of new players to Standard in a wide-open field that saw the renewed rise of decks like Izzet Prowess and Rakdos Rummage (sometimes featuring Tokka & Rahzar, Terrible Twos), to the breakout of Mono-White Momo, to a Day Two field where the largest grouping of decks belonged to the "other" category and surprise sleeper Leatherhead, Swamp Stalker was actually the most-played card from Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

After a weekend of tournaments across multiple continents—check out Frank Karsten's Metagame Mentor article for all the details—Standard refuses to be solved. But if anyone's come close, it was Puglisi Clark and the rest of Team Scrapheap, who eschewed any new additions from the latest set to pare down their Mono-Green Landfall list to its most powerful essentials: the mana engine and late-game finishers.

"I knew I was going to play Landfall no matter what. I had the most reps with it, and I knew it was good. At worst, I thought it would be the second-best deck," explained Puglisi Clark. "We tried some of the new cards, but we didn't like them very much. We didn't like Sapling Nursery, so we didn't play that and played Esper Origins instead. We liked it in the Prowess matchup, and it was great against [that deck] all weekend."

4 Badgermole Cub 4 Icetill Explorer 4 Llanowar Elves 4 Mightform Harmonizer 4 Sazh's Chocobo 2 Surrak, Elusive Hunter 4 Esper Origins 2 Royal Treatment 4 Earthbender Ascension 2 Meltstrider's Resolve 14 Forest 4 Ba Sing Se 4 Fabled Passage 3 Escape Tunnel 1 Promising Vein 4 Mossborn Hydra 3 Soul-Guide Lantern 2 Eumidian Terrabotanist 2 Meltstrider's Resolve 2 Pawpatch Formation 1 Scrapshooter 1 Surrak, Elusive Hunter

The Eumidian Terrabotanists were so good against the aggressive decks that the team compared the card to Platinum Angel. While Puglisi Clark did scoff at that notion, he understands where the sentiment comes from.

"The Prowess deck isn't inevitable, and if you gain 3 to 6 life in a game it's hard for them to kill you," he explained. "Shoutout to Team Seedcore for the Eumidian Terrabotanist tech 5 minutes before the tournament. The main deck copies of Meltstrider's Resolve were also always great."

Mono-Green was certainly the right call. An extremely diverse Top 32 yielded four Mono-Green Landfall decks in the Top 8 (and three into the Top 4)—but even among those decks there were the significant divergences in the choices Puglisi Clark mentioned. Half of the Top 8 lists (Puglisi Clark and Jesse Piland) abjured the Sapling Nursery. Both Michael Paluta and the tournament's last remaining undefeated player, Anthony Pepe, played three copies of the enchantment.

In other words, even if players agree that Mono-Green Landfall is the best or second-best deck, they might not agree on the optimal way to build it. That's a reflection of the thriving Standard metagame that has developed in 2026, from the emergence of Izzet Lessons at Magic World Championship 31 to the rise and fall of Badgermole Cub to the soaring of Sunderflock to the grinding of Mono-Green. And as Puglisi Clark's pair of mirror-match victories in the Top 8 on the draw demonstrated, those card choices mattered.

Puglisi Clark's victory completes the arc that he set up for himself with his 2nd-place Regional Championship finish last year. He now has one of the most stylish Spotlight Series trophies ever produced to show for it—and of course bragging rights over his brother and his 2nd-place finish. But Joseph will have his chance (both brothers are qualified for Magic World Championship 32), and more of their family is along for the ride. Puglisi Clark's dad tunes into every stream and counts permanents in play to determine who's winning since he doesn't play Magic himself. It's a winner's story worthy of a champion—and that's what John Puglisi Clark is.

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