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: Lift-Off for Team Cosmos Heavy Play

September 19, 2025
Corbin Hosler

Anthony Lee has been in the room where it happens, time and again. The Toronto resident has had a long career. Lee is a longtime Magic player who has participated in the Pro Tour community for more than a decade. In that time, he's competed on some of the most accomplished and, frankly, legendary teams in Pro Tour history. He's witnessed the discovery of breakout decks, and his competitive journey, which began with a Grand Prix Top 8 finish in 2016, has remained one of the steadiest on the circuit.

As anyone who has made faraway event travel plans knows, competitive Magic is very much a circuit. That means juggling travel, time zones, jet lag, and the logistical nightmare that comes with coordinating a dozen people from very different parts of the world. Since his original breakout performance, his consistency has defined his journey. Lee is known as an affable statesman of the game, and those who have worked with him are quick to praise his contributions to the Pro Tour.

Anthony Lee won an Australia-New Zealand Regional Championship in 2022 and has been a mainstay of the Pro Tour since.


In that time, he's worked with many of the best players not just in the world, but in the history of the game. Two-time (and reigning) world champion Javier Dominguez works with Lee at every opportunity. When he was a free agent before Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY, Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa ultimately chose Lee's team to prepare with before the tournament. The result of that collaboration was the first major performance of the Izzet Cauldron deck that has taken over Standard in the past few months.

While Lee, the 2022 Regional Championship winner from the Australia and New Zealand zone, may not yet be a household name—his lone Top Finish so far was a Top 8 at the Magic World Championship in 2023—he has been one of the most consistent competitors of the last three years. In fact, with a 23rd-place finish at Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY, Lee has now made Day Two of the Pro Tour in nine of his last ten starts, a level of sustained success that speaks for itself.

This long history has also allowed Lee to consider what works for a team over the long-term—and what doesn't.

And that brings us to the team Cosmos Heavy Play, which is gearing up for another run together at the upcoming Pro Tour Edge of Eternities taking place at MagicCon: Atlanta from September 26–28. After working with the once dominant Team Handshake for a number of events, Lee looked for a fresh challenge, and nothing is more challenging than organizing and managing a startup Pro Tour team, especially one with goals as ambitious as Lee had for Cosmos Heavy Play.

"I've been part of an established team with a lot of history before, and at times it was kind of constraining. I wanted to try and bring a bunch of different people together and see if we could do some new things that hadn't been done with a more flexible approach," he explained. "For instance, I think the Japanese players have traditionally been very underutilized. I've been wanting to work with players like Yuta Takahashi for a while. It's hard to make that work with the established language and cultural barriers, but it's been worth it.

"The most important thing to me is to be able to highlight bringing people together from different backgrounds and seeing how it all works out. I'm really enjoying seeing the combination of people that we've had, and it's been very effective."

Running a Pro Tour team is hard. Running a new Pro Tour team is harder. Running a new and successful Pro Tour team while coordinating players from very different places in the world is almost impossible—but it's exactly what Lee and Cosmos Heavy Play have done through two events so far. The squad was one of the most successful groups at Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY, and Lee watched like a proud parent when the Pro Tour broadcast highlighted Cosmos Heavy Play's incredible group performance.

Hopes are high for Pro Tour Edge of Eternities. Because, to Lee, the veteran of so many acclaimed Pro Tour teams, the proof that this thing is working is right there in Discord.

"I knew things were going okay when a player from Japan was joking around and playfully making fun of Quinn and everyone was having fun together; the team is working well together and that's important. It's a strange combination, but it's great and having a front-row seat to all of it is a lot of fun."

"Fun" is a good way to describe Cosmos Heavy Play. After all, how many super-serious Pro Tour squads do you see putting out social media hits like this?

Like Lee, Cosmos Heavy Play has serious skills but isn't afraid to have fun. And at the Pro Tour where players are playing for tens of thousands of dollars in prizes and potential life-changing opportunities? As Lee's long career shows, a little levity goes a long way to offsetting the pressures of the Pro Tour.

That's one of the lessons that Lee has built into the fabric of Team Cosmos Heavy Play, keeping things grounded with his perspective. It's also one of the reasons that this team doesn't look exactly like some of the top teams of previous years. Sure, there's probably the most impressive collection of World Championship talent in the field— Dominguez, Jean-Emmanuel Depraz, Yuta Takahashi, and Luis Salvatto—but there are also newcomers like Quinn Tonole and Victor Hawkins, who made his first Pro Tour Top 8 this year and soon found himself testing alongside Magic players he grew up admiring.

"Paulo went from asking 'Who is this guy? I've never seen him play before,' to 'Wow, this guy is great! How did you find him?'" Lee recalled with a laugh.

"That was a big moment for me. It was a gamble to take someone going to the Pro Tour for the first time and put them with the big names, but it worked out really well. It feels awesome to be able to facilitate that sort of thing, and it drives home why I think a lot of us do this highly competitive Magic thing in the first place: [Andrea] Mengucci said a long time ago that the best part of tournament Magic for him was seeing people come together from across the world and work and play together.

"Pro Tour Aetherdrift was our first event, and we did okay. We really came into our element for Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY, and our process also produced the Izzet Cauldron deck. It was a good event for us. We got an early start on Modern testing for Atlanta, and I'm optimistic about things."

One of the reasons Lee is so optimistic is that another one of the team's newcomers was a Top 4 finisher at Magic World Championship 30 and a Mono-Red expert: Quinn Tonole. As a member of Team Scrapheap, Tonole has been one of the masterminds behind several tournament-winning red decks of the past year, including Percy Fang's Regional Championship win with Mono-Red earlier this summer. Tonole is working with Team Cosmos Heavy Play for Atlanta after doing so in Las Vegas earlier this year.

"This upcoming Pro Tour is my eighth Pro Tour, and this is the first time I haven't swapped teams," he explained. "A lot of my previous teams have just been groups of people I'm friends with; Cosmos is my first so-called official, 'big-time' team. I got hooked up with them because I became friends with Anthony after I beat him in both my first Pro Tour (Pro Tour March of the Machine) and my second (Pro Tour The Lord of the Rings). He invited me to join the team, and my first impression was that it was very impressive how productive the team was while still having a lot of camaraderie."

It was a high-stakes choice for Tonole, who broke through in a major way with a Top 4 finish at the World Championship last year and is now looking for at least an 8-8 finish in Atlanta to secure enough points for invites for two additional Pro Tours next year. And it's one he hasn't regretted at all.

"I was understandably a little bit intimidated, but when legends like Marcio Carvalho ask me for my thoughts on Limited card evaluations and Javier wants to play a long set of Omniscience against Mono-Red with me, the nerves dissipate pretty quickly," Tonole revealed. "The thing I like most about the team is that while we are all working hard, we are also very sociable. We have Discord channels and talks that are lighthearted and joking. It's not all business."

Now, this team has set their sights on Atlanta and Pro Tour Edge of Eternities. Tonole can't wait.

"I'm looking forward to the same things I always am: the competition and the people. I love the Pro Tour because I get to see my friends from all around the world, but also for the competition—I hope I get the 8-8 I need to requalify, but also I know it's no easy feat."

Share Article