This is the second of a three-part series highlighting an elite Magic trait possessed by each of our three Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame inductees. Today, we look at a pro's pro on the Pro Tour, two-time World Champion Javier Dominguez. The Spaniard is a captain on Team Cosmos Heavy Play and known for his expertly built decks over the decades.

There are no secrets on the Pro Tour, really, but there are some things they don't tell you.

I'm talking, of course, about the minimum amount of cooking skill needed to not embarrass yourself in front of your testing housemates. (I suggest learning a basic, repeatable breakfast item.) Also, this little nugget that 2027 Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame elect Javier Dominguez dropped as integral to what has made him such a force over two decades of Magic.

"The deck building never ends."

Good thing, then, that Dominguez loves nothing more in the game than building decks.

Javier Dominguez won his first of two Magic World Championships in 2018, making the most of his return trip to the finals a year after finishing as the runner-up to William Jensen.

"I truly love deck building—it's maybe the thing I do the best in Magic—and sideboarding is just deck building on the fly," explained Dominguez, who with eleven career Top Finishes is the top ten player of all-time in that defining statistic. "The deck building never ends, until the tournament does. That's what makes tournament Magic so interesting."

Anyone who has interacted with the jovial Dominguez at events knows there's a confidence that can only be earned. Win or lose, good draw or mulligan into oblivion, Dominguez keeps an even keel on the battlefield and in the player's lounge after the round. It's a confidence that comes from having a complete and comfortable understanding of everything happening in the games being played at a level deeper than any individual game. He never panics when things don't go according to plan—because they never do; he has a plan for everything. Usually multiple.

"You're going to face moments you've never seen before, and that's why I try to understand what every card in my deck is doing, and think about what my deck needs while I'm in the process of building a sideboard," Dominguez elaborated. "I want to know how much I can stretch things. Can I cut down on creatures, on lands? What if I cut all the creatures? What if I added lands? Can I sideboard into something else?"

In an era of instantly disseminated decklists and purchased sideboard guides, there are fewer and fewer players doing such ground-level work. And while it may seem trite to say that Dominguez's superpower is "testing," that's exactly how his peers described the process that leads to the picture of professionality that the pro's pro exudes.

"When my teammates and I are trying to invoke the toughest possible opponent we might face in any given event, we use Javier's name," said Hall of Famer Reid Duke. "A huge part of that is his unbreakable mental game."

In a career that stretches all the way back to 2006 when he won the National Championship for Spain at the age of nineteen, time and again Dominguez has done something that's impossible to predict in advance but impossible to deny in retrospect: He has simply played circles around the field. And—as he put it after winning Magic World Championship 30 in 2024—not because of any prodigious technical skill (like, say, Jean-Emmanuel Depraz), but because of the deck building choices he made as he went.

Something that comes through when talking about the best Magic players in the world about key matchups or moments in a format that may decide the flow of trophies, not to mention thousands of dollars in prize pool winnings, is how rarely they bring up individual sideboard cards. The key to winning against Deceit decks in Standard is not Rest in Peace—it's understanding conceptually the role each deck wants to play in the matchup, and how individual choices, all the way from the initial 60 to the sideboard games and the stealth changes made between Game 2 and Game 3, affect the flow of that matchup and its natural conclusion.

In that context, Rest in Peace is simply one stop along one avenue to achieve that outcome. And sometimes the right question to ask isn't what the best stop on the street is, it's whether you needed to go down that road at all. Like Dominguez said, what if you changed things drastically and attacked on a whole different angle? What if you changed out your approach between games two and three, and between rounds two and three? And what if your opponent had no idea what you were going to do each time?

Put even more simply: Who's the beatdown?

Dominguez won his second World Championship title in 2024, piloting a modern masterpiece in his Dimir Demons deck.

"I think Javier would say his superpower is testing, and he prides himself on the deck building," revealed longtime friend and teammate Anthony Lee, who remembers when Dominguez first joined his team as "Marcio's friend" but quickly distinguished himself far beyond that. "Javier is brilliant at having unexpected plans; he can catch even very strong players out of their preparation. He's really good at figuring out new angles in deck building and gameplay."

If you're wondering what all of this looks like in practice, there's one example that came up over and over again: the 2024 World Championship Dimir Demons deck that Dominguez pioneered.

"At the World Championship, [Top 4 opponents] Seth Manfield and Márcio Carvalho weren't able to play the matchup the way they wanted because Javier's plans were very unintuitive," Lee recalled. "A lot of his success comes from opponents not knowing how to play against him."

That's the power of Doomsday Excruciator, but also of the well-oiled machine (complete with Dreams of Steel and Oil) Dominguez built around it.

"The World Championship in 2024 is what comes to mind immediately when thinking about decks or tournaments where I felt I had the biggest advantage in deck building," Dominguez remembered. "The deck wasn't particularly powerful, but the sideboarding was extremely good because it was hard for our opponents to attack the deck. We could board out the combo, the creatures, or both."

Doomsday Excruciator

Dominguez sees art in crafting the perfect deck for a given tournament, and it's the passion he has for his pieces that has kept the masterworks coming year after year. As far back as his first World Championship title, the narrative around Dominguez is that he got home from the World Championship, took almost no time at all to bask in that worlds glow, and was instead right back at it in the MTG Arena streets. He credits that passion for leading to better results, and at this point those results speak for themselves.

"It's been incredible, honestly, to watch. He just got better and better and better," Lee marveled. "He went from no-name player to winning worlds the first time, then winning the second time, then being elected to the Hall of Fame. I know how much it means to him, and it's an honor to be next to one of the greatest players there is."