Joshua Willis set his phone down on the table, ignoring it buzzing away incessantly as everyone he ever played against at Friday Night Magic messaged him congratulations. There was enough going on in the room, as his teammates and opponents from throughout the last two days lined up to do the same. It was the big moment, and it was a lot to take in.

After the biggest match of Magic in his life, it wasn't the big moment that Willis needed—it was a private one.

"Whenever I beat Max McVety in the semifinals, it was just a flood of emotions. I just couldn't [deal] with everything right then," Willis explained. "So I left my phone on the table and went outside. I sat on the rocks next to the water in San Diego and bawled my eyes out."

As the quote goes from one of my favorite novels (and a Magic set coming later this year), "I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are an evil." And so was the case here—more than 10 years after he first picked up Magic at the middle school lunch tables jamming Return to Ravnica and learning about the Pro Tour, Joshua Willis was qualified for the both the Pro Tour and the World Championship after that.

"There's a great picture of me hugging my teammate William and letting it all out," Willis explained. "I've been trying to make the Pro Tour for a decade now—as soon as I drew into the Top 8 I started crying the first time. My teammates were around, everyone was hugging me and texting me, it was amazing."

Joshua Willis clinches a spot at the Magic World Championship with Rakdos Reanimator! #mtg pic.twitter.com/LthYZhIgZh

— Robert Taylor🔥🔜MagicCon Minneapolis (@fireshoes) April 10, 2023

The idyllic setting for the final Regional Championship of the cycle at Dreamhack San Diego offered a perfect retreat for Willis. Watching the waves roll in, Willis tried and failed to take in all that this Magic journey has brought him. From the time he and his sibling Niko Willis were "broke teenagers trying to do well enough at Draft to buy into Standard," to the time after Journey into Nyx when he first began regularly attending FNM and learning just how deep the rabbit hole of competitive Magic really went. He remembered when Niko had qualified for Pro Tour Aether Revolt in Dublin, Ireland in 2017, and how excited he was to help them prepare for the Pro Tour, a favor now able to be returned—"Niko is a fantastic deckbuilder and is already brewing for Minneapolis!" he revealed.

Willis thought back to the first year he moved to Arlington and decided to play in the Hunter Burton Memorial Open, a large regional tournament that's a big deal in Texas and beyond. That was one of his first forays into the larger tournament scene—he copied a Saheeli Rai/Felidar Guardian combo list—and spiked his way into the Top 8 of that event, kickstarting a network of friends and playtesting partners in the area as well as the person who would become his friend and coach.

"Josh has been an amazing part of the community for over a decade, and none of us in the Dallas-Fort Worth community would be where we are today without Josh's support and generosity in all things, inside and outside of Magic," were the first words from that friend, William Dou, when asked about Willis' impact. "I'm honored to call him my teammate and one of my best friends in the world. No one deserved this more than he did."

Willis thought about his last Regional Championship experience, the disaster 0-4-and-drop tournament that he decided to turn into a positive by overhauling his testing process. He had brought the most-popular deck in the field and the de facto "best" deck (Mono-Green Devotion), and he had prepared well with it on Magic Online. But the path to the Pro Tour is a different ballgame altogether—"every single player in that room knew exactly what they wanted to do against Mono-Green, and I learned a lot from that testing and tournament experience," Willis later admitted.

He thought about the hours he would never get back, from the nights spent deep in Standard sideboard strategy to the days he found his mind wandering to Sheoldred counters during class. It had all been worth it, for this opportunity.

"Ever since they brought back the Pro Tour, whenever I wasn't supposed to be thinking about Magic, I was," he said. "We all hopped back on the grind, and I was testing a ton of different decks. I tried the aggro decks, Mono-Red, Esper Legends, everything. But mainly Grixis. I play Jund in Modern and love Midrange Thoughtseize/Duress decks."

With his friends finally calling him back inside to play the finals (the other semifinal match had gone very long), Willis gave one last look across the water and took a deep breath.

"When I came back, I was cool and ready to play, my mind reset for the finals," he said. "I had another match left to play."

To play, and to win. Willis faced Isaac Sears in a Rakdos Reanimator finals, a resounding confirmation that it was an excellent deck choice for the weekend. And in the final match, all those moments spent envisioning this moment paid off—Willis completed his dream run 10 years in the making. Next stop? Pro Tour March of the Machine at MagicCon: Minneapolis.

One of the eternal truths about Magic—and most competitive things in general—is that the first step to winning lots of games is to lose a lot of games. It may sound trite, but it's an adage for a reason. In this case, Willis directly traced his success in San Diego to his failures in Atlanta with Mono-Green in Pioneer.

"There, I just played what I perceived to be the best deck and played a million matches on Magic Online, but everyone at that tournament was prepared to beat Mono-Green," he explained. "Then this season, I was on Grixis for a long time—until the Canadian Regional Championship happened. I think Grixis would have been a great metagame call three weeks ago, but after that event everyone started moving to Rakdos, with fewer counterspells and more Duress.

"I felt like the next step was that Duress was better when you're doing something degenerate—I love Jund midrange, but Duress has historically played better in a deck like Reanimator."

Those shower brainstorming sessions paid off, and Willis entered the DreamHack San Diego field with something all those Magic Online matches with Mono-Green hadn't given him: a clear plan and some revelatory insights into the field.

• Fewer counterspells for The Cruelty of Gix
• Mono-White—the deck that won the Canadian Regional Championship Willis was referring to—had a very difficult matchup against Reanimator, especially after sideboard ("Playing older Standard formats is what gave me the idea—Temur Energy for instance became a totally different deck to play against when they brought in Negate over Harnessed Lightning," Willis explained."
• One of the natural counters to Reanimator is The Stone Brain, but a sideboard plan of Toxrill, the Corrosive showed how much thought had gone into Willis' 75 and provided a way to dodge the hate.

"This deck choice was the best audible I've ever made for a tournament," Willis said. "I had a moment where I looked at all my matchups in the Top 8 and all of them seemed very good to me. I was honored and humbled to play against one of the best in Max McVety for a slot at Worlds. The entire Top 8 was really fun, and there were a lot of tricky-to-navigate situations that made for good games. I went back and watched my games, and it felt so validating for someone like Todd Anderson to describe what they think the best line of play is, and then to watch the video and see me making that play 60 seconds late."

Willis says it hasn't completely sunk in that he's qualified for both the Pro Tour and the World Championship later this year. And that's okay—he's on the clock, with Pro Tour March of the Machine just three weeks away, May 5-7 in Minneapolis.

"It's been a whirlwind, and it hasn't completely caught up to me," he admitted with a laugh. "I flew back on Monday and then drove home just in time to make it to class the next day. I'm going to take a couple of days to celebrate, but once March of the Machine drops it's back to the testing grind and playing all the drafts I can. I didn't travel much for Magic before—but I'm excited for the Pro Tour so I guess I am now!"

Looking Ahead

Willis' victory marks the end of this cycle of Regional Championships. We've seen a dozen high-level events showcase a surprisingly dynamic Standard field, and weekly innovations became the norm as thousands of players across the globe all vied for the few hundred spots available at the Pro Tour. Of course, there's more going on in competitive Magic than just the Pro Tour, so next week we're going to dive into a very special event that brought together the entire European Magic community!

Meanwhile, we're just three weeks away from cracking that first March of the Machine pack and the Pro Tour head judge announcing, "it's time to draft!" The draft and Standard formats both look to make for an exciting event, and Willis is just one of the hundreds of players who will live out their Pro Tour dreams for either the first or 100th time—it never gets old.