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The Week That Was: Putting the Spotlight on Orlando

August 29, 2025
Corbin Hosler

There are many roads to the Pro Tour, including (but not limited to) earning invitations at Regional Championships to competing in digital events on Magic Online, MTG Arena, and Pro Tour Qualifiers held at MagicCons. In other words, if a player wants to play on the Pro Tour, there are plenty of paths they can take—even if it's not quite the days of traveling the world to grind Planeswalker Points Multipliers (which I'm sure the thought of makes the Magic boomers among us cringe).

But a few more paths to the Pro Tour never hurt.

The Spotlight Series debuted this year, and it looks familiar to those aforementioned Magic boomers who remember Grand Prix events. We saw the first of these events in early 2025, and Magic Spotlight: The Avatar is scheduled for early next year. There are a few defining features of main events at Spotlight Series: they're open to the public with no need for players to qualify, they have large prize pools, and they award Pro Tour invitations to Top Finishers.

That's another path to the Pro Tour. And as hundreds of players prepare to travel to Magic Spotlight: Planetary Rotation this weekend, they'll need to be ready to compete against some of the game's best players.

"I currently have zero Pro Tour qualifications," said Jonathan Lobo Melamed, a Regional Championship Top 8 regular in Brazil who is heading to Orlando with his friends Lucas André and Willy Edel, both of whom are powerhouses in the Brazilian Regional Championship circuit. "I've been looking to play Grands Prix my whole life, and in the Spotlight Series era it's no different. I keep track of all the Spotlights that are manageable. Orlando has a direct flight from my hometown Brasilia."

The lifelong Magic competitor and former Pro Tour Top 16 finisher knows what he's talking about. Melamed made three Top 8 appearances in those Grand Prix events—including a pair of Finals appearances—before claiming three Regional Championship Top Finishes over the last several years, including a win. With his resume established, what is Melamed's goal for this weekend's Spotlight Series event that features Edge of Eternities Standard?

"My goal is to qualify for more Pro Tours," he explained simply.

Melamed's crew isn't the only one traveling in for the event, and they aren't the only ones getting something special from the event.

"It's very hard for a lot of people in Latin America to make it to the Pro Tour," said Luis Carlos Tenorio, who will be traveling in with a pair of friends from El Salvador for the rare opportunity. "For us, Nationals was the way to get to the Pro Tour, and now we don't have that anymore. So it's the Regional Championship and this. I want to play in big events and be able to travel from El Salvador to Florida, so it was a great opportunity. I've played in few Regional Championship events in Mexico before, so this gets me motivated to do more."

Tenorio is the kind of player that's poised to break into the Pro Tour through the Spotlight Series. A great poet of our time once wrote that "the greatest films of all time were never made." I think that for all the meritocracy in the Magic world, regional or demographic differences mean that some players simply have more opportunity to break through the variance that's also inherent in the Magic world. Tenorio's best performance to date is a Top 32 appearance at a recent Regional Championship, and he'll head to Orlando hoping to take the next step.

Notably, he'll be doing it without the fastest format boogeyman we've maybe ever seen.

"I'm not playing Vivi Ornitier. I know it's the best deck by a wide margin, but it doesn't fit my play style," he admitted. "I tried it a couple of times and didn't feel comfortable, so I'm playing Esper Pixie. It has been my favorite deck and has a chance against Izzet Cauldron."

Vivi Ornitier
Agatha's Soul Cauldron

As Frank Karsten covered in this week's Metagame Mentor, Izzet Cauldron represents a large portion of the winner's metagame, with Dimir in the distance and everything else (including Azorius Control, Esper Pixie, Izzet Prowess, and Mono-Red Dragons) well below those. Arena Championship 9 was a small-field tournament of 37 players that was held right after rotation, but more than half of the field played Izzet Cauldron. The Nerd Rage Gaming Championship Series Standard event featured seven Izzet Cauldron Players in the Top 8 (Dylan Brown played Azorius Control). It's clear that Spotlight: Planetary Rotation will revolve around one basic question: to Cauldron or not to Cauldron?

5 Mountain 4 Agatha's Soul Cauldron 4 Fear of Missing Out 4 Island 4 Proft's Eidetic Memory 4 Riverpyre Verge 4 Spirebluff Canal 4 Vivi Ornitier 4 Winternight Stories 4 Marauding Mako 3 Into the Flood Maw 3 Steamcore Scholar 2 Abrade 2 Soulstone Sanctuary 2 Thundering Falls 2 Tersa Lightshatter 2 Starting Town 2 Quantum Riddler 1 Torch the Tower 2 Torch the Tower 2 Spell Pierce 2 Fire Magic 2 Annul 2 Broadside Barrage 2 Disdainful Stroke 1 Abrade 1 Obliterating Bolt 1 Quantum Riddler

"You need to play Izzet Cauldron or have a plan to beat it," explained Reed Alexander, a Lake Charles, Louisiana, native who prepped with his squad Team Mirrorbreaker. That team is sending Michael Plummer, Devon Straub, Richard Neal, Drew Debevoir, and Alexander's longtime friend Matthew Johnson to the event. "We have found that the other decks' plans to beat [Izzet Cauldron] aren't actually very good at doing that, so most of us have elected to just refine our plans with Vivi."

Alexander is also qualified for an upcoming pair of Modern Regional Championships that he's looking forward to—he's become quite the Mono-Blue Charbelcher aficionado—but he couldn't pass up the opportunity to play for the Pro Tour.

"I'm primarily after Pro Tour invitations. I generally enjoy two-day events and love meeting different people who I can keep up with over a long period of time," he said. "I generally don't play in large events that don't have a path to the Pro Tour, so my goal is to make the Top 8 and earn a Pro Tour invite. It looks like a good opportunity because attendance might be a bit lower due to the format. Hopefully by the time the tournament comes around, I can be more refined in my gameplay."

There's no doubt that a great many of the competitors in Orlando are planning for the same. But not everyone.

"No Vivi Ornitier for me, I'm playing Blue-White Control," said Joshua Willis, an Arlington native and San Diego Regional Championship winner. "It might be a mistake. I have the means to play it and am relatively practiced with the deck. The deck is very strong, but I do think it's beatable, and I'm generally more comfortable with a tier-two deck. An important part about beating [Izzet Cauldron] is knowing how to play the deck yourself. It's an incredibly challenging deck to play against, so having experience with it helps you shut down their synergies."

While others look for the last few cards for Izzet Cauldron, Willis has added this event to a very important calendar of events for him. He's in Orlando this weekend, Pro Tour Edge of Eternities next month, and then Regional Championships in Houston and Las Vegas in the following months. All four of those events could award him an invitation to next year's Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed.

"I wasn't planning on playing, but I changed my mind for two reasons," he explained. "One, I'm actually just enjoying playing Standard quite a bit right now. Two, my friend Jack Doucet is taking a break from Magic soon but is attending, so I wanted to see him again. I look forward to enjoying some games and the company. It's important to me that the events I play in eventually lead to the Pro Tour, as it feels like there are real stakes that I care about.

"My goal for this tournament is just to learn. I'm taking a risk with my deck, so feeling out the consequences of that will be very instructive."

That is the real magic of the Spotlight Series: it brings together players in a communal way that doesn't require each player to have won an RCQ or have formed a team of Pro Tour players. The Spotlight Series offers the chance to hop in the car (or a plane) with your friends and head to an open-field event where one of you may just leave with a Pro Tour invitation.

"The Pro Tour is the pinnacle of competitive Magic. It has created so many fond memories for players, commentators, and viewers at home," said Jack Doucet, who recently competed in Pro Tour Aetherdrift and won a Modern event at SCG CON Las Vegas. "Having open events with Pro Tour invitations on the line adds to the stakes and lets dreams become reality."

Magic Spotlight: Planetary Rotation kicks off this Saturday. Tune in on YouTube to watch the event live and see who becomes the next Spotlight Series champion.

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