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The Week That Was: Team Main Phase Chases the Pro Tour

September 25, 2026
Corbin Hosler

Chris Kral is a standout Magic player, an end boss in his region in the southern United States. He's a Pro Tour regular and two-time Magic Spotlight Top 8 competitor. He helped innovate the Mardu Discard deck that his team found success with at the Pro Tour earlier this year, and he's qualified for the next slate of upcoming Regional Championships, Pro Tours, and even the World Championship. He is, as many tournament grinders would put it, living the dream. He can advance from major tournament to major tournament drafting to his heart's content, all without having to worry about scraping through qualifying events.

So, on any given weekend this fall, why is Kral knee-deep in a Regional Championship Qualifier, sweating every play as if it's the finals of the PT?

"Chris is already qualified, but he watched me play Mardu at the Regional Championship Qualifiers this weekend, just because I hadn't played it in a while and he wanted to help me out by talking through lines in between rounds," explained Doug Bailey, a member of Team Main Phase who is still trying to join Kral and several of the other members of the Texas-based squad on the Pro Tour circuit. "Chris will dedicate days to work with you, to watching over your shoulder and helping you improve. This group is not about individual success, it's about team success, about pushing each other forward together."

That's the ethos of Team Main Phase, the collection of the best players in Texas. They turned out in force at Magic Spotlight: The Hobbit, had several players make deep Day Two runs, and generally showed out as the "home team" of the event. Competitors in the region are quite familiar with each other, and events like the Magic Spotlight Series aren't the only game in town. In fact, Team Main Phase first came together in 2024 at the Hunter Burton Memorial Open, a charity tournament that has been going on for a decade and annually attracts hundreds of competitors in a tournament modeled after the kind of Magic Pro Tour that Austin 2009 semifinalist Burton loved: high stakes, no splits, and doggedly competitive. The event is a fixture on the calendar, and Top 8s in the main event—always Modern—grace the pages of Top 8 profiles right next to Grand Prix titles or Spotlight Top 8s.

"We started off as a Regional Championship team when we became an actual team at the Hunter Burton in March 2024 as a group of people trying to make it to and do well at the RCs," Bailey explained. "But after Pro Tour Edge of Eternities, we had multiple people qualified for the Pro Tour—that's when we switched the goal from getting everyone into the Regional Championship to getting everyone onto the Pro Tour."

The group (Alan Hubbard, Doug Bailey, Chris Kral, Jason Cornell, Jacob Koshak, Gabe Nicholas, Gabriel Joglar, Joshua Willis, and Gavin Meagher) is still working on that goal. Two years in, the team has become more than Magic mercenaries, they're a tight-knit group of friends. That's what comes when you're putting in three nights a week of dedicated Magic playtesting, with two members of the team playing while a third observes the match and both hands to gain insight into the matchup or notice mistakes that one teammate or the other is making. In this way, their testing process is somewhat unique; it's approaching the testing process holistically rather than simply as an exercise in generating data to crunch on a spreadsheet.

It goes back to the team's original goal: They want to be a Pro Tour team not because they gather players on the Pro Tour into a team, but because this team of friends from Texas made the Pro Tour together. It's a goal that's still a work in progress, but no group is working harder to progress than Main Phase.

"We've had ongoing successes and lack of success, but as a team we've turned from RC grinders, into everyone putting themselves in a position to make it to the Pro Tour. We're still not at our goal of everyone being on the PT, but we have a lot of fire to do that.

"I've been burning the midnight oil for the last two months, playing as much Magic as I can. The way I look at it, even if I'm not winning, we are still getting better as a group. A lot of us are very hungry, with good finishes but not what I wanted pushing it."

The team's biggest moment so far came at Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven, where they brewed up the Mardu Discard list featuring Marauding Mako, Moonshadow, Hardened Academic, and Practiced Offense (in what would be the first, but not the last, sighting of that powerful sorcery in Standard). Kral was among the players who found success with it, going 11-5 as the team proved it had what it took to keep up at the Pro Tour level.

4 Concealed Courtyard 2 Erode 4 Iron-Shield Elf 2 Inspiring Vantage 3 Burst Lightning 1 Cecil, Dark Knight 4 Starting Town 4 Practiced Offense 1 Mountain 1 Shardmage's Rescue 1 Multiversal Passage 4 Moonshadow 4 Hardened Academic 4 Marauding Mako 4 Sacred Foundry 4 Cool but Rude 1 Blazemire Verge 3 Tersa Lightshatter 4 Bloodghast 4 Blood Crypt 1 Godless Shrine 1 Inti, Seneschal of the Sun 2 Strategic Betrayal 1 Seam Rip 1 Shoot the Sheriff 2 Case of the Crimson Pulse 1 Erode 3 Voice of Victory 4 Leyline of the Void

Gabriel Joglar knows what it takes to play at that level. After all, he won Grand Prix Orlando in 2018 and played in several Pro Tours before tabletop play shut down. Since its return, he had a Top 4 finish at the $100,000 Limited Open a few years ago and has been a fixture at the Regional Championships despite not yet finding his breakthrough. But after a Magic Spotlight run that saw him lose his Top 8 win-and-in and a 10-5 finish at the Regional Championship, like Bailey, Joglar is clearly right on the doorstep of the Pro Tour.

"I'd say it's encouraging, but it's also more nose-to-the-grindstone to get those extra couple of wins and back onto the Pro Tour train," Joglar explained. "I've played Magic for a long time, and I just love the game and all aspects of it. What I love about Main Phase is that it's a bunch of guys who really love competitive Magic and improving at it; I always want to get better, and seeing Chris's success has me keep going as well."

That last point drives home how much pride this group takes in each other's successes, and Joglar believes the closeness of their tight-knit crew—even when they're testing together, they're still competing in fantasy football—has made them a better Magic team as well.

"We're all driving for the same goal in comp Magic," Joglar explained. "One thing I like about being on a team with close personal friends is that I can share stupid ideas and not feel bad about it—and sometimes those ideas turn into something fruitful."

Upcoming for the group is the Regional Championship in Los Angeles next month. While only a handful competed in Baltimore, the full group will be competing in California and ready to go at the top of their game.

"In addition to our regular testing, before big events we have weekend bootcamps where we just rock a lot of playtesting, sideboard mapping, and so on. It's a really fun event that everyone enjoys, and that's a big part of being a team. Not only do we test and learn a bunch and make it purposeful, we also enjoy ourselves."

In many ways, that's the secret sauce when it comes to building a successful Magic team. And with the Regional Championship just around the corner, we may soon see even more members of Team Main Phase on the Pro Tour.

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