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Magic World Championship 31 Day Two Highlights

December 07, 2025
Corbin Hosler

The Magic World Championship rolled on Saturday. The biggest event of 2025 kicked off on Friday with 126 competitors all battling for their shot at the Top 8 and chance at Magic immortality–there have been only 28 previous World Champions in the game's storied history, and any of the 61 players who finished 4-3 or better to return for Day Two of the tournament still had the opportunity to lay claim to the title and the $100,000 1st-place prize that comes with it.

But first, the final seven Swiss rounds of the 2025 season remained. It began with a Magic: The Gathering®—Avatar: The Last Airbender™ draft and the final sprint came through the refreshed Standard format that would feature a lot of Otters and Lessons over four rounds. When the dust settled, we had our Magic World Championship 31 Top 8.


The first of those qualifiers would come early: Sam Pardee—the six-time Top Finisher with a title at the Strixhaven Championship in 2021 on his resume—completed the task in just eleven rounds (his lone loss came back in Round 3 to Max Dore). He was soon joined by his teammate Seth Manfield, who turned a disastrous 0-2 draft start into a 10-2 run that, by Round 13, left him sharing the good news rather than playing for his tournament life.

The dominant deck that sent them both there was Team TCGplayer's Izzet Lessons build. And after two days of wide-open Standard competition in the new format, it sure looks like the pantheon of players who broke open formats on teams like Team ChannelFireball had done so once again.

Like many formats, breaking open the mana generation engine provided the key to the team's run through the event. With a number of playable Lesson spells including key early removal pieces, it's easy to assemble the amount of spells required for Gran-Gran to discount your spells and turn Accumulate Wisdom into Ancestral Recall.

Gran-Gran
Accumulate Wisdom

As the Top 8 filled out with several more Izzet players, Player of the Year hopeful Ken Yukuhiro also made it to the Sunday stage with a Sultai Reanimator deck that flew somewhat under the radar this weekend but went 6-1 in Standard. This deck gave the winner of Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™ a chance to add another trophy to his haul this year.

It will all play out on Sunday morning on the biggest stage with the biggest stakes. Here's how we got here.

The Heartfire Hero Wins Player of the Year

Ken Yukuhiro came to the World Championship with more opportunity than any other player in the field. Not only is he already a Pro Tour champion this year, but he led the field in the race for the Player of the Year title. And while the large amount of points available at the World Championship meant that he would need a strong performance to keep that lead, it meant that he alone fully controlled his own destiny in the quest to earn the Kai Budde Player of the Year trophy.

And with his Top 8 finish, consider that destiny controlled. None of the other would-be winners could keep up, and with the Top 8 finish, Yukuhiro is your 2025 Player of the Year.

Ken Yukuhiro


Moriyama Masters Draft

After the first day of competition and the debut of Magic: The Gathering—Avatar: The Last Airbender draft at a premier event—a format that earned near-universal praise from competitors—a few trends had emerged. Most players had targeted some combination of blue and white for their decks, but the problem with most players targeting something is that very few of them will attain it.

That was the major story of the Limited rounds, and it was players who could best pivot and adapt who enjoyed success. Edgar Magalhaes, for instance, ended up putting together a strong Day One run with the white-black sacrifice archetype even though it was near the bottom of his list of archetypes. But the beauty of Magic draft is that when something is open, it's open. And when your pod opens two copies of Tolls of War that pass around the table to you, it's very open.

The lone undefeated drafter at the World Championship was the co-captain of Team Moriyama Japan, Masahide Moriyama, and he credited the same for his 6-0 run.

"I practiced a lot of both Standard and Draft, but after I submitted my decklist I focused mostly on Draft," he explained. "I arrived in the US earlier this week and have been playing a lot of MTG Arena drafts to prepare for the tournament. I came in wanting to draft white and blue. That didn't entirely happen but I was able to get strong white cards in both drafts."

With six Draft rounds and only eight Constructed rounds (instead of the usual ten), the importance of performing well in the Limited portion was statistically higher than in any previous tournament this year. As a result, teams put in more Limited work than ever before, especially given the smaller team sizes and time to prep.

And while that work paid off for some, even the best Magic players in the world can run into a bad draft. It didn't come together for Pro Tour finalist Ian Robb, who had hoped to level up his draft game heading into the event, and even one the most on-fire players in recent memory can find a draft come up a little short at this level.

On the other hand, a rough draft was not the end of the story. Both Seth Manfield and Ken Yukuhiro emerged from their first draft at 1-2. But 36 hours later, both of them had earned their spots in the Top 8 and were celebrating their victories.

The reason for that? Their dominant Standard runs.

Standard Learning Lessons

The Standard format for Magic World Championship 31 is the most open in recent memory. With not only rotation but a round of bans occurring since the last Pro Tour—along with the large expected impact of Magic: The Gathering—Avatar: The Last Airbender—there really was nothing to draw on for World Championship metagame expectations. Only a handful of people played Dimir Midrange, what many prognosticators had pegged as a key deck in post-rotation Standard, and much of the hype cycle heading into weekend was focused on Badgermole Cub (although Dimir ended up performing fairly well).

As a result, Gran-Gran and the Lessons deck filled with Magic: The Gathering—Avatar: The Last Airbender commons and uncommons flew largely under the radar. It didn't begin populating in large numbers online until just the final days before decklists were due, and teams had no real concept of where the others squads were at in those final hours. As a result, there was widespread surprise among the field when the final metagame numbers were released.


"Standard is way more backbreaking now than it used to be," explained Team Cosmos Heavy Play captain Anthony Lee. "Every deck can turn the corner really quickly when it wants to."

That certainly applied to the breakout Izzet Lessons deck.

But Lessons wasn't the only deck to find breakout success, and the final Top 8 count featured four different archetypes. And while several shared parts of the same blue-red base, as usual it was Ken Yukuhiro who did the improbable with the unlikely. The Sultai Reanimator deck he took to the Top 8 with a 6-1 record was dismissed early by much of the field.

1 Swamp 2 Willowrush Verge 2 Underground Mortuary 1 Hedge Maze 2 Harvester of Misery 4 Awaken the Honored Dead 4 Bringer of the Last Gift 4 Breeding Pool 1 Island 3 Wastewood Verge 1 Cavern of Souls 3 Blooming Marsh 3 Ardyn, the Usurper 4 Superior Spider-Man 4 Bitter Triumph 4 Broodspinner 1 Multiversal Passage 1 Undercity Sewers 3 Analyze the Pollen 4 Oblivious Bookworm 3 Watery Grave 1 Terror of the Peaks 4 Overlord of the Balemurk 1 Webstrike Elite 3 Deep-Cavern Bat 4 Intimidation Tactics 1 Urgent Necropsy 2 Glarb, Calamity's Augur 1 Cavern of Souls 1 Disruptive Stormbrood 2 Soul-Guide Lantern

The impact of Magic: The Gathering—Avatar: The Last Airbender went beyond the top two decks. The Bant Airbending combo list, considered by some one of the scariest archetypes in the early days following Magic: The Gathering—Avatar: The Last Airbender's release, largely struggled at the top tables while the Temur Otters list headed up by Stormchaser's Talent held its own, ultimately putting Shaun Henry and Arne Huschenbeth into the Top 8.

But beyond that, the impact of Magic: The Gathering—Avatar: The Last Airbender was felt all over the field, leading to some very memorable World Championship moments on camera.

When it came to rogue builds, some credit must go to Ben Stark, the renowned Limited expert who took Golgari Dragons to a 6-2 record. Ouroboroid builds struggled across the board, while the Jeskai "Burn" Control list that Jennifer Rose-Holloway showed off in a memorable Day One match helped the Regional Champion to a 5-3 Standard record and a Top 35 finish.

All in all, Magic World Championship 31 showed off everything Standard had to offer, from the aggressive (Mono-Red, led by Day Two representative and Quinn "Red One-Trick" Tonole, performed above average), to the combo (Sultai Reanimator also fared well), to the "Grancestral" decks, there's a lot going on in Standard, and still plenty more to come.

Looking Ahead


The Top 8 is set, and the competitors will return tomorrow morning for a celebration and culmination of the 2025 Magic season. Coverage goes live at 10 a.m. PT at twitch.tv/magic and on the Play MTG YouTube channel!

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