The nervous buzz—or maybe more accurately the nervous silence—permeates the room before the start of a big Magic tournament. You can almost see the hope of hundreds of players all eyeing the same trophy, and you know that in just a few short minutes battlefields will be joined (and an hour after that you're going to have half of the room stand up disappointed). But for those glorious few moments when everyone is gathered before they shuffle up, everyone is on the same page: feeling good, if more than a little nervous.
No amount of tournament play gets rid of those jitters. At least not entirely. Even the best in the game—world champions like Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa and Javier Dominguez—have talked about how those nerves come back at the beginning of every tournament, and with Pro Tour Phyrexia kicking off a week from now on February 17 at MagicCon: Philadelphia it won't be long until we have a new room of renewed Pro Tour dreams.
And in every one of those faces, a story. Many are familiar to longtime Pro Tour viewers—the mainstays, the content creators, the faces of the game. But many more are unknown, no less fantastic for their lack of familiarity. And the beauty of the Pro Tour is that any one of those stories may belong to our eventual winner.
And some stories are truly wonderful. Take, for example, Alejandro Sepúlveda—who came from a small community of Magic players on the strength of a country of competitors working together and his favorite Pioneer deck (that he began tinkering with the moment the Regional Championships were announced) to win the South American Regional Championship, despite being part of the half of the field that leaves Round 1 bitterly disappointed.
"At the Regional Championship, I started out losing the very first round. So from that point on, basically every round a must-win for me," he recalled.
Most of the time, an 0-1 start leads quickly to the lunch bracket, and you're out of the tournament in a few hours and off to find something to eat that isn't convention center fare. But rarely, it's something much more—and that's where the best stories lay. Former Magic World Championship Yuta Takahashi is proof enough of that. His incredible run to the 2021 Worlds title began with not just a bumpy track but a full-on train wreck—and yet he was able to turn around his disastrous 0-3 start to a perfect 7-0 run afterward and a Top 4 berth, where his Dragons flew like Faeries to carry him to victory.
Well, if it's good enough for a World Champion.
"I proceeded to make it to the Top 8 by winning seven rounds in a row, including beating the boogeyman of the format Rakdos Midrange three times," Sepúlveda continued. "I know there might be better decks in the format, but I played the best deck for me."
That deck? "Red Deck Wins" (an aggressive red deck) is a far cry from the most popular brews in the Pioneer format. But it fit Sepúlveda's playstyle, and it was what had qualified him for the Regional Championship in the first place. It was an unconventional choice for an unconventional path to victory, but at the Pro Tour they don't ask you how you won; they ask you if you won. And something that has been true across the field of 100-plus competitors is this: each of them got there their own way. For Sepúlveda, that meant going with his gut—and then trusting in it when things went wrong.
"Pioneer is my favorite format. I got into it when it was announced and it's super popular in my country. I enjoy putting my own touch on the decks I play, usually a random card that might look weird but makes perfect sense when you see it in play," he explained. "This was the best deck for me because I was fully aware of the lines and the matchups, and the
"Winning the tournament felt awesome. It's my greatest Magic achievement to date and I really hope it's the stepping stone I need to post more great tournament finishes in this return to competitive paper play. I'm working with Team Dominus for the Pro Tour, and the Chilean competitive community has been very helpful, especially when teaching me to play decks I don't have a lot of experience with."
Sepúlveda's qualification story begins with that community in Chile, and his friends back home will be close to his heart when play kicks off in Philadelphia.
Michael Letsch's story begins in a bowling alley.
"I started playing when The Dark came out, and a card store happened to open up at the local bowling alley, where my and my friends played in the kids bowling league on Saturdays," the self-described "two-time Friday Night Magic winner" recalled. "The guy who owned the pro shop also owned the card store, so that's where we would go after league days at the bowling alley. When Invasion came out, that set hooked me for like and I started playing PTQs and Grand Prix. I've been trying to make the Pro Tour ever since."
Fast forward a few decades and a lot of back-to-back League games (bowling, then Magic), and Letsch has come a long way—but he's still rolling strikes. How else to describe his called shot at the United States' Regional Championship in Atlanta, where he arrived armed with an innovative Green-White Auras brew that featured some very good matchups… and some very bad ones.
"I worked with my friends from Tampa—Ryan, Ryan, Brennan, Dakota, and Ricky—for the Regional Championship. From my experience, I'm usually the beatdown player of the group. I enjoy combat math and putting my opponent to the test to have the answers," he explained. "So I leaned on my experience playing beatdown decks and rolled the dice on getting good matchups."
It worked. Letsch finished 7-2 with the brew, qualifying for the Pro Tour after 28 years and demonstrating that the format once thought solved still had plenty of room for innovation.
And there's one more fork in Letch's path to the Pro Tour, one that will be on all of our minds when Round 4 begins and we turn from Phyrexia: All Will Be One Draft to Pioneer.
"We knew Mono-Green Devotion was going to be the most popular deck at the event, and I thought Auras was the go-to to beat it. We were right—and I played against Mono-Green seven times in 12 rounds," he marveled. "Day 2 was pretty wild: I played against Mono-Green every single round before the Top 8. I was on the draw against all of them, and I won my matches pretty easily each time. It felt a little surreal."
Letsch expects the Pro Tour Phyrexia metagame to look quite a bit different than that Regional Championship, especially with Phyrexia: All Will Be One hitting the format just a week before decklists are due. But fear not—he's already deep into testing a handful of brews in the "hope that something sticks."
"I can't wait to play at the Pro Tour against the best in the world, at a high-level event with only a few hundred players," he reflected. "I feel like it's going to be a culture shock for me, but I'm going to do the best I can. I've always seemed to come back to Magic, and it isn't until this last Regionals that I finally get a chance to play on the Pro Tour. I still can't believe this will be first one."
Nestled within the expanse of the compleated MagicCon at the cavernous Philadelphia Convention Center, this is a heck of an introduction to the Pro Tour.
While Letsch was going rogue in Pioneer to carve a path to Philly, on the other side of the world a Pro Tour vet took the opposite approach to punch his ticket.
Miguel Castro was a rising European star before the pandemic, notching two Grand Prix Top 8 appearances and a handful of Pro Tour appearances. When events returned they brought back with them a renewed passion, and the Madrid native's team that includes two-time GP Top 8 competitor José Luis Velázquez quickly fired things back up.
Fast forward a few months, and now Castro and Velázquez are both joining Letsch and Sepúlveda at the Pro Tour as the world comes together to celebrate the gathering. Each took their own journey here, and for Castro that was thousands of hours perfecting his piloting of what has become one of Magic's most recent classic decks: Izzet Phoenix. The
"After winning the Regional Championship Qualifier and playing the Regional Championship with Izzet Phoenix, I've worked so much on it that it's become my specialty and I hope I can play it at the Pro Tour," he explained. "It performed very well for me at the Regional Championship, and the finish meant a lot to me. It's my biggest Magic accomplishment so far, and it's given me the chance to play at the World Championship later this year. It was very special to qualify that way, surrounded by friends who cheered for me and supported me all through the tournament."
Next up for Castro and the rest of the Spanish contingent? A week of grinding Phyrexia: All Will Be One drafts in Philadelphia for final preparations, and every minute counts. The countdown is on, and the Pro Tour begins in less than a week.
Watch it live, February 17-19 at twitch.tv/magic!
