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Magic World Championship 31 Day One Highlights

December 06, 2025
Corbin Hosler

The Magic World Championship is here.

Millions of hours, thousands of games, several dozen Regional Championships across the globe, and three Pro Tours have all led here, to the place where it all began. This weekend, 126 of the best Magic players in the world have gathered to compete, all putting in feverish amounts of work to prepare for this moment. This is their chance to etch their names into Magic history by becoming the 29th World Champion since 1994—and winning the new Black Lotus trophy and the $100,000 1st-place prize that comes with it.

Welcome to Magic World Championship 31.

As the competitors gathered just outside of Seattle for the culmination of the 2025 competitive Magic season, they realized this is an event for everyone. Whether they got here by winning a Regional Championship, making the Top 8 of a Pro Tour, or crushing a Magic Online or MTG Arena event, they had earned their spot at the most prestigious Magic event there is.

And that dedication was apparent in the weeks leading up to the event. From detailed Draft prep to sifting through scores of Standard stats, players went all-out for this event. One even skipped a vacation to Mexico; Pro Tour champion Corey Burkhart’s partner had to demand that he start getting more than four hours of sleep a night. As every competitor knows—and every former champion can attest—the World Championship is just different. It’s the only tournament that could result in your own face staring back at you on the bus.

The cold and rain outside the tournament hall in Bellevue couldn’t dampen the spirits of anyone inside. That fire was only stoked when pairings for Round 1 of Magic World Championship 31 arrived, featuring a matchup that had exactly a .8% of a chance of occurring:

A 2024 Magic World Championship finals rematch.

In a thrilling opener, the defending World Champion and Player of the Year, Javier Dominguez, once again defeated Carvalho. Just like that, the World Championship was off and running, with both returning players and more recent standouts.

The Draft Stakes of Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™

More money was on the line than just the $100,000 on the line for the World Champion. The $1,000,000 prize pool carries higher payouts for the Top 62 finishers, and the tension was palpable as players sat down for the first Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™ draft. With no MagicCon next door, the intimate worlds venue offered a quiet—or perhaps better described as focused—atmosphere.

With fewer Constructed rounds in this tournament (both days of competition are three rounds of Booster Draft and then four rounds of Constructed), the impact of the Draft rounds was higher than ever. Heading into the event, there was some consensus among teams about the better Limited archetypes in Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender—namely that white and blue among the stronger colors—that shared knowledge meant that teams needed to find additional angles if they wanted to gain an edge in the most important draft of their lives.

"Coming in, we thought the multicolor Lessons deck was underdrafted, and we found some interesting ways to play it. We were also higher on three-color Ally decks," explained Team Cosmos Heavy Play Limited leader David Rood, a former Pro Tour champion making his first trip back to the World Championship in two decades. "21 years ago, I missed my Top 8 win-and-in at the World Championship. I'm an old man now; I just enjoy these moments—I figure I'll play Worlds every 20 years or so."

Cosmos Heavy Play wasn’t the only team looking to gain an edge. Knowing where exactly you can gain that edge that becomes key in a field as talented as this. Knowing what the best decks are is one skill; knowing when not to draft those decks is another.

"I waffled hard in pack 1, and after four picks I had four colors, with none of them being black," explained Edgar Magalhaes, who ended up playing the white-black sacrifice archetype. "After that, the black cards started flowing, and I wheeled a Cat-Gator. At that point I knew I would be in black. Then in pack 2, I got passed Tolls of War, which is a super important card for the sacrifice archetype. I also knew that if it got opened in pack 3, I would get it, and it was [in pack 3]."

The double-Tolls of War deck that Magalhaes drafted helped him to a 2-1 record, with the powerful enchantment playing a role in almost every game. The finish helped propel him to Day Two, demonstrating that while the ceiling of the Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender draft format may be high, players can still find wins by following the same drafting advice from 30 years ago: draft what your seat shows you.

Fourteen players emerged undefeated from the Draft rounds, including Player of the Year contender Toni Portolan. That moved things forward on to the much-anticipated Standard rounds that would feature the first major event since the banning of the Vivi Cauldron deck and the release of Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Adding Up Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender

Just how impactful was the set? For that, I’ll turn things over to the metagame mentor himself, Frank Karsten.

  • Although eleven decks (some Jeskai Control, Jeskai Artifacts, and Sultai Reanimator builds) did not include any Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender cards, the vast majority—115 decks (91% of the field)—use at least one new Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender card. That's not an unusual ratio of cards from the newest set appearing in decks; it was 93% at 2023’s World Championship, 100% at last year’s World Championship, and 71% at Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™.
  • The sheer number of Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender cards that are getting sleeved up is notable. With comparable numbers of competitors, the 2023’s World Championship featured 792 new cards from Wilds of Eldraine (10.0% of all cards across Standard decks), and World Championship 30 featured 979 new cards from Duskmourn: House of Horror (11.6% of all sleeves), which were the latest sets at the time. At Pro Tour Aetherdrift, 5% of cards in sleeves were new. At Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY, 3.1%. This weekend, there are 1,472 new cards (15.6% of all cards across submitted decklists) from Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is definitely a step up.
  • In particular, in Izzet Lessons—the most-played deck in the field—at least half of its spells come from Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender.
  • The four most popular decks (Izzet Lessons, Temur Otters, Bant Airbending, and Izzet Looting, which together comprise over half the field) are all effectively "brand-new" in competitive Standard.

However you slice it, Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender is defining the new Standard.


The Izzet Lessons deck broke out online in just the last few days before the World Championship began, but the truth is that the majority of the World Championship testing teams were not only aware of the deck, but actively preparing to play it into a field of Badgermole Cubs. It turns out, however, that many other teams had the same plan. The result was a field that featured plenty of copies of Badgermole Cub, but also plenty of teams aiming to beat the Cub and the Bant Airbending deck that many had pegged as the deck to beat coming into the weekend.

Standard Standouts

It was also a field that shocked nearly everyone. Time and again, teams expressed surprise at the Lessons deck being the most-played, and at the overall shift Standard has gone through in the last month. As Mono-Red "one-trick" (and Magic World Championship 30 Top 8 finisher) Quinn Tonole put it, "Well, if I was happy registering my deck into the field I expected, I can’t complain about this one."

He certainly can’t—Mono-Red Master Tonole is headed to Day Two after a perfect 4-0 run in Standard. The other two Mono-Red players in the field, Percy Fang and William Araujo, are also known enthusiasts of the archetype. When the dust settled, they had gone a combined 9-3 against the field.

No conversation about the standout cards of the day is complete without Gran-Gran.

Gran-Gran

This innocuous one-drop has seemingly flipped Standard on its head. With the Lessons suite available in Standard quite capable in a blue-red shell, Gran-Gran becomes a low-downside play that comes with just enough stats and looting power to make it passable on the first turn. And after that, when the deck trivially fills its graveyard with Lessons, Gran-Gran’s value goes off the charts–and so does Accumulated Knowledge.

The two cards together form a build-your-own Ancestral Recall.

The deck helped Derrick Davis to a perfect 7-0 record, the only undefeated player remaining in the field after seven rounds of play.

8 Island 4 Gran-Gran 2 Eddymurk Crab 4 Stormchaser's Talent 2 Starting Town 4 Boomerang Basics 4 Combustion Technique 1 Roiling Dragonstorm 2 Iroh's Demonstration 4 Multiversal Passage 4 Firebending Lesson 4 Accumulate Wisdom 4 Abandon Attachments 2 Stock Up 3 It'll Quench Ya! 4 Riverpyre Verge 4 Spirebluff Canal 2 Negate 1 Essence Scatter 2 Abrade 2 Torpor Orb 2 Ghost Vacuum 2 Iroh's Demonstration 1 Roiling Dragonstorm 1 Stock Up 2 Spider-Sense

Derrick Davis


The other major takeaway from the Constructed rounds on Day One? Just how successful the Temur Otters deck was. It was the second-most popular archetype coming into the tournament, and turned out to be the most-represented deck at 6-1 or better, with three of the seven players on the deck including Rei Zhang, Masataka Hori, and Player of the Year candidate Toni Portolan. The other three spots went to Kenta Harane (Sultai Reanimator), Charles Wong (Golgari Ouroboroid), and Sam Pardee (Lessons).

You can find the World Championship metagame breakdown here, the spiciest decks in the field here, and all Standard decklists here.

Looking Ahead

There are 61 players qualified for Day Two, and the remaining World Champion hopefuls will return at 9 a.m. on Saturday for a final Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender draft, and then the final Standard sprint that will deliver us the Top 8 of Magic World Championship 31. And while Davis has the edge, with such a small field and limited number of rounds, things are truly wide open for the remaining competitors at the World Championship.

You can catch all the coverage at twitch.tv/magic when the stream goes live at 11 a.m. PT on Saturday, December 6!

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