"I'm not treating this like the other tournaments. This is the best chance I will ever have to win the Magic World Championship, and I'm treating it as the only World Championship I'll ever get to play in."

That's how Pro Tour finalist Ian Robb described Magic World Championship 31—which is right around the corner, happening on December 5–7 in Bellevue, Washington—and it doesn't get any more succinct than that. Sure, there are some similarities between the World Championship and the Pro Tours that lead into it. They're gatherings of some of the best Magic players in the world, there are massive prize pools on the line, and their combination of stress and stakes has made these events the pinnacle of competitive Magic.

But when you ask those several hundred players about the World Championship, you'll find that, in some very important ways, it's nothing like the other Pro Tours. This is the big one, the grail among grails for the best to ever shuffle up 60 cards, and it's the one that goes down in the history books as the most important event every year. It will crown someone as a Magic World Champion for life—and for the defending champion, Javier Dominguez, he may become the only three-time champion ever—and it's a title that past winners will attest to simply being different than any other tournament.

It's also the event that will determine who wins the 2025 Magic Player of the Year title. Because if there weren't enough on the line for the World Championship itself, there's also the fact that, as the final premier event of the year, it's the last opportunity for those Pro Tour players having a great season to earn points in the yearlong Player of the Year race, with the Kai Budde Player of the Year trophy going to the top overall 2025 finisher at the conclusion of the World Championship.

Javier Dominguez won both the World Championship and the Player of the Year title in a dominant 2024.

The level of seriousness that Robb—who has two Pro Tour Top 8 appearances, including a finals spot in Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™—is bringing to the World Championship is typical of a field normally smaller than the Pro Tour. And unlike the Pro Tour, which boasts an assortment of players who have performed well at various qualifying events, the World Championship field is almost exclusively filled with players who've experienced success at the Pro Tour. There are never any easy matches at a Pro Tour, but the World Championship is a different ball game.

That's the environment that will decide who the 2025 Player of the Year will be, and with dozens of players technically in contention to varying degrees, the race for the coveted title is as open as ever heading into the final event of the year. This has yielded some truly incredible finishes in the past. Notably, the 2010 and 2017–18 seasons saw ties at the top, even at the conclusion of the World Championship. That famously resulted in two playoff matches between Guillaume Matignon and Brad Nelson in 2010, followed by a match between Seth Manfield and Luis Salvatto in 2018, the latter of each match walking away with the title of Player of the Year.

Will 2025 bring that kind of drama, or will we see another two-title finish like we did last year when Dominguez defeated Marcio Carvalho in the World Championship finals, sweeping up the title and the Kai Budde Play of the Year trophy in one go? The last two years have had close races down to the final day, with Dominguez narrowly clipping Manfield (again) by a total of four points (72-68) last year and Simon Nielsen capping his own incredible run two years ago by edging out Reid Duke 61-57 on Player of the Year points.

Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY champion Ken Yukuhiro is atop the 2025 leaderboard heading into the World Championship, but more than three dozen players on the leaderboard could surge to victory over the course of the weekend. Here's the Top 10 heading into the World Championship:

With up to 27 Player of the Year points available at the World Championship, the title race will likely go down to the wire. The titles of Player of the Year and World Champion are the most all-encompassing titles you can win in Magic: The Gathering. There are more than a hundred Pro Tour champions, but only a few dozen can lay claim to one of those titles.

Now you know why Ian Robb—who is just a touch behind Yukuhiro on the Player of the Year leaderboard—is taking things so seriously.

"Ever since preview season started, I've been playing Standard. We even started testing with the cards before the set was out," he explained. "It's been an amazing year, and it's kind of crazy that I'm even in this situation, so I want to put 120% effort in. I'm not treating this like the other Pro Tours, where I kind of qualified randomly at a Regional Championship—whether I go 0-4 and drop or win the tournament, I want to say I have no regrets. The reality is this is something that's already been really magical and I'm lucky to do, but to be frank my goal is to win the World Championship. That's what everyone is striving for. This will be my best chance, and I don't want to waste it. I'm excited to see how it caps off."

B2B pro tour top 8s

— Ian Robb (@Ian__Robb) June 22, 2025

For Robb and many of the other World Championship competitors, the sprint toward worlds actually began almost a month ago. As soon as previews for Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™ began hitting the internet, Robb wasn't the only gamer slotting these new cards into their Vivi Orinitier-less decks, even ahead of the official announcement that set the Standard format for Bellevue in two weeks.

But for Robb, that was just the first step. Instead, with the three most important Draft rounds of his life ahead of him, the renowned trading card game player has gone back into the lab.

"I felt like I wasn't as polished at Pro Tour Edge of Eternities as I was for previous events due to not getting enough drafts in. It just didn't feel right. So, I'm trying to get in a lot more drafts before the World Championship," he explained. "For Standard, I'm mostly satisfied with where I am. It's mainly information gathering. If someone discovers something, we want to be prepared, and we're throwing everything against the wall, which is very good.

"With a lot of these sets, it's hard to tell if the themes are pushed or a little weaker, and you don't want to miss something where if someone else finds it you don't you fall behind. You don't want to get caught behind the rest of the pack, and some of these weirder decks are starting to pop up online. You'll never know when there's actually one that's so far ahead you might gain a massive edge."

Shaun Henry is hard at work producing some of those decklists. The two-time Regional Championship Top Finisher and former Magic Online Championship Series competitor has been on the practice grind, putting in up to ten hours of Magic a day between Draft and Standard. Henry has been working with James Moore and members Team Scryhard and has come a very long way in a short time after a momentous 2025.

The season began with Henry producing an incredible Top 25 finish at Pro Tour Aetherdrift, followed by an even more impressive (if not heartbreaking) 10th-place finish at Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY where Henry missed the Top 8 on tiebreaks. And while a less-stellar finish at Pro Tour Edge of Eternities left Henry feeling nonplussed about the Player of the Year title, it's something still very much within his grasp. Henry enters the World Championship tied for 6th on the leaderboard.

If the Player of the Year title is up for grabs, that's great. But for Henry, whose path to the top of the leaderboard looks quite different from the Pro Tour winners and Top Finishers around him, there's a simpler goal in mind.

"My year in Magic for 2025 was good. I started the year testing with just a group of friends, but I was able to turn that into a Pro Tour result," he explained. "Results-wise, the most important thing to me is to finally make a Top 8 since I didn't get one at Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY."

One of those champions near Henry on the leaderboard is Michael DeBenedetto-Plummer, who won Pro Tour Edge of Eternities back in September. In case you still don't believe that preparing for the World Championship is different than any other event, I'll let the champion and his hopes for the Player of the Year title explain it one more time.

"My World Championship prep is the same as my prep for any event, but more intense. I'm spending all the time I can playing Draft and Standard; I chose to skip a family Thanksgiving trip to Mexico so I could get to the testing house early and get live drafts in. For Pro Tour Edge of Eternities, I never did a paper draft before the event and forgot I had warped a card, which cost me a match," he explained.

Like I said, this is the big one for these competitors. And for DeBenedetto-Plummer, who is on the run of his life, a missed vacation is well worth the opportunity to continue his dream in 2025—and prove one of his (playful) doubters wrong.

"This year has been insane for me," said DeBenedetto-Pummer. "I started by playing in my first paper Pro Tour, and then a few weeks later I came in 2nd at the Regional Championship in Minneapolis and qualify for the last Pro Tour of the year and the World Championship. I played Pro Tour Edge of Eternities with no real expectations and somehow ended up in the Top 8 with one of my friends and then winning.

I won the #pteoe! freeeee
huge thanks to team SPO for all the help testing, esepecially @LauriKazugafor the deck list and deck guide
and thank to my close freind @ItsAmeBassel for keeping me motivate

— killah_suv (@topchimp420) September 28, 2025

"For the rest of the year, I want to prove to myself that it was not a fluke and that I can continue to play at a high level against the best players in the world. Becoming Player of the Year seems very far away still, I would need an insane weekend, but I never even thought I would be in contention until after I won the Pro Tour. My friend Steven, after I made the Top 8 in Minneapolis, said that 'I did not think this year could get better for Michael.' That has kept me going to prove him wrong."

Steven's predictions may not be on much of a heater, but DeBenedetto-Plummer sure is—and it will all come together at Magic World Championship 31.