The Magic circuit never ends.
We focus a lot around here on the Pro Tour—and of course the upcoming Magic World Championship 30—for good reason. It's the Pro Tour. There's three decades of history. It's the ultimate goal for every competitive Magic player who ever asked the question "Hey, can I play Magic on Saturday instead of just Friday night?"
That line of questioning leads to the Regional Championship circuit. The global, invite-only tournament series not only represents the most common path to the Pro Tour, it also awards direct seats to the World Championship. But not every Pro Tour story starts on the RCQ circuit or online qualifiers. More and more players have gotten their starts from tournaments series like the NRG Series.
The NRG Series—alongside other premier event offerings across the world including SCG CON—gives players a chance to hone their skills on a week-in, week-out basis that can be a major boon for players already qualified for their next Regional Championship but are looking for practice, or players trying to level up to make it to their first Regional Championship—or are looking ahead to the Magic Spotlight Series coming next year.
If you build it, Magic players will come,and the NRG Series has built a traveling show that attracts hundreds of players to compete across the midwestern United States. Last weekend, that meant a trip to Louisville, Kentucky, where more than 100 players met to test out the refreshed Modern format as well as the recently rotated Standard. The result was one of the best and biggest sources of tournament data for high stakes gameplay, and we got a glimpse into how players are approaching the format at live events.
And perhaps no one can be considered more at the bleeding edge than Logan Underwood, who turned in incredible back-to-back Top 8 performances in both Modern and Standard.
Had an incredible weekend at #NRGLOU! I top 8ed both the modern 10k and the standard 5k. The death shadow deck was awesome to play and I'm excited to continue tinkering with the deck to make it better. Shout-out to @mtg_derrick, @nosfertraptu and @VayuTTV for loaning me cards! pic.twitter.com/FEIiedXDFg
— Logan Underwood (@bolascitadel) September 17, 2024
These kind of dominant weekend performances, thoughneither run ended in a trophy this time, are truly rare. But, the NRG Series has featured many of these stories in recent years as the best grinders in the United States flock to their events. That includes Underwood, who also has a Top 8 at the 2021 SCG Invitational to his name.
"It isn't very often that we have a tournament circuit come to Louisville or Kentucky in general, so it's nice to be able to sleep in my own bed prior to competing. It was an extremely relaxed weekend overall," Underwood recalled. "Was I expecting to do this well? No. Did I hope to do this well? Absolutely!"
Underwood is a noted
- Jeskai Dress Down
- Boros Energy
- Samwise Gamgee Combo
- Mardu Energy
- Grixis Shadow
- Eldrazi Tron
- Esper Goryois Vengeance
- Dimir Murktide
"The Grixis Death's Shadow deck I played this weekend was a blast. Playing decks that I enjoy was made way easier without Nadu and
Underwood followed up this virtuoso Modern performance by returning on Sunday and sleeving up Dimir Midrange with the help of his local community. He came through with another Top 8 finish, an incredible ending to an incredible weekend for the Carrollton native, his
"For me, this performance goes to show that it is possible to perform well at large events while balancing a career that isn't related to Magic," Underwood reflected. "But this performance has fueled my desire to perform even better at future tournaments, like the RC coming up in a few weeks."
That would be the next US Regional Championship, taking place October 5 at SCG CON Washington DC. Another player in attendance will be Fletcher Johnson, who has also been excelling across multiple formats. He earned his Regional Championship invite with Nadu last month and then turned to Standard to prepare for the NRG Series. That promptly paid that off, too, with a victory coming from Azorius Control.
"I felt very good about the deck but I hadn't played it as much in paper because I do a lot of my testing online. So, my experience was ''a lot of matches that went to time," Johnson joked. "I ended up going to time in a lot of rounds but ended up getting there a lot of the time off the back of a level three of
"Going into this weekend, my goal was to get enough NRG points to feel comfortable about my chances of qualifying for the NRG Champs. I made the championships last year and was third place in points, needing to make the top two to make it again," Johnson explained, setting the stakes that begin to build on the path to high-level Magic and the Pro Tour—which he missed out on by just one match at his last Regional Championship.
"This weekend was the best possible finish. This was my second NRG win and sixth Top 8. I never really thought I would find this much success in this game. My results surpassed my expectations a long time ago."
The 20-year-old Minnesota native may need to adjust his expectations if he keeps improving at this rate—in fact, the kind of motivating loss he experienced is how many Pro Tour success stories start. For thousands of Magic competitors across the world, the next opportunity will be the Regional Championship and Regional Championship Qualifier season coming up.
The Road to Magic World Championship 30
Of course, while all parts of the Regional Championship circuit will be in full swing over the next two months, we're quickly coming up on Magic World Championship 30 at MagicCon: Las Vegas on October 25–27. While the past year has belonged to the incredible run put together by Simon Nielsen, the defending World Champion and consummate professional is Jean-Emmanuel Depraz is as favored to defend his title as anyone ever has been. Depraz has been that good over the years.
We'll have plenty of World Championship content coming up in the future, a future we're all looking forward to because of the three decades of World Championships that have brought us here. Very few competitions of any kind, much less in gaming, reach back through 30 years of competition. To commemorate that milestone, Frank and I have been looking back at each of the previous World Championships, from the very beginning when the game belonged to Kai Budde to the more recent years of iconic champions honored in card form.
This week takes us back to 2020 in Honolulu, where the Elite Spellbinder was born.
This Player Spotlight card belongs, of course, to Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, the Brazilian legend who many consider the best to ever play the game, Budde and Finkel included. He's tied with Finkel for the all-time lead in Top Finishes with seventeen, and his three trophies in such events trails only three players.
The most meaningful of those trophies came in the World Championship stage debut of MTG Arena. The World Championship field yielded a Top 8 including PV, Márcio Carvalho, Eli Loveman, and Seth Manfield. It was a double-elimination format on Sunday, but PV never needed it. He dispatched fellow Hall of Famer Manfield in the opening match before beating Carvalho, who'd go on to fight his way back through the bottom bracket to meet PV in the final match.
The victory cemented the legacy of one of the game's unquestioned GOATs and reframed an old conversation in a way no one thought possible 15 years ago. Today, for many longtime Magic historians, the question left is "Kai, Jon, or Paulo?"
