The first Pro Tour Top 8 Booster Draft in fifteen years.

That's the one-sentence pitch for the Top 8 of Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering® | Marvel Super Heroes, and honestly, is there any more needed? The purest form of Magic, played by the best in the world at the highest level for the highest stakes. That was the scene at MagicCon: Amsterdam this weekend. For the eight competitors left at Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes, it was time for the biggest draft of their life.

And it couldn't come at a better time: the announcement of the Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame's return this weekend reignited interest from both fans and Hall of Fame hopefuls who have been competing at the Pro Tour since Reid Duke was the last inductee in the one-person Hall of Fame class of 2019. You can find all the details on the updated Hall of Fame qualification and voting process here.

Entering the tournament, every major testing team put in hundreds of collective drafts to best prepare for Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes's heavy synergy clusters and robust suite of aggressive threats. Every squad pegged white-based decks as the most powerful, but knowing that everyone would be angling for the same archetypes, many players came with a backup plan. Now, the draft on the Sunday stage would test each member of the Top 8 to see how well their plans could hold up against the best Limited players of the weekend. The combined draft record of the Top 8 in the Swiss rounds was a blistering 39-8-1 (81%). Would the Top 8 change their thought process in this winner-takes-all pod?

Notably, they didn't know who they were playing against beforehand. While the seeding heading into the draft was known, the seating at the draft pod itself was randomized, meaning pairings would be as well. That resulted in several surprises, including the first and second seed meeting in the quarterfinals, but also teammates being forced to play against each other: Lorenzo Gruppi and Mattia Oneto from Team NOVO TCG eBay. As one longtime commentator succinctly put it, this was the first time in Magic's history that all of the "arcane" aspects of a Top 8 draft played out live on camera.

And so it began.

By the time the smoke would clear on the draft, a few things were apparent: the Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes Limited environment—which was thought to be dominated by white-based lists—ended the Pro Tour in a very different place than where it entered, and the players who best navigated their spot in the draft would be advantaged.

Opening Earth's Mightiest Heroes or Mjölnir, Hammer of Thor doesn't hurt, either. Those are what top seed Eduardo Sajgalik and Team Worldly Counsel's Limited lead Bernardo Torres found when they opened their first Play Booster of Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes during the draft.

It was fitting, then, that they would meet in the quarterfinals in an unlucky pairing that matched the first and second seeds of the event. Sajgalik was sporting a prototypically strong white-based deck, paired straightforwardly with red, which had been established as a strong secondary color and fallback plan for many. Torres was rocking a black-red deck that splashed green for Wolverine, Fierce Fighter. Both decks were stacked with ways to gum up the board and deter aggression—unless it was their own.

But the games played out in a flurry of trades, and the duo split the first four games of the best-of-five set–a theme that would continue all throughout the Top 8. In their fifth and deciding game, it was the Portugal native Torres who pulled away, with Wolverine, Fierce Fighter carving out a path to victory as Torres progressed past the quarterfinals in his second Top Finish.

While Sajgalik and Torres were battling it out for the right to be on the play for the rest of the Top 8, the top table was locked in the middle of one of the most epic matches to ever grace the Sunday stage, at least if you measure by time.

The best-of-five between Pro Tour champion Ken Yukuhiro—the winner of Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™ last year—and Team Lingering Souls member Timo Bertram, who was making his first career Top Finish, took just under two-and-a-half hours, making it one of the longest untimed matches in recent Magic history.

But long doesn't mean slow, and the games between the two were feisty, back-and-forth matters that kept viewers on the edge of their seat–and the final fifth game was no different. Yukuhiro landed The Coming of Galactus, threatening to unleash a massive Elder Alien in several turns. But first he had to survive Bertram's aggression, which was reaching a peak as Monica Rambeau transformed into Photon, Living Light. Either way, there would be fireworks.

With the marathon match eventually going to Bertram, coverage flew in and out to catch the final turns of the other two quarterfinals, all of which went the maximum five games. In the battle of Team NOVO TCG eBay teammates Gruppi and Oneto, Agent Phil Coulson made the difference in the final game of the match. In the last quarterfinal, Yuuki Ichikawa prevailed in a five-game set over Alex Rohan thanks to an incredible reverse sweep that would be a harbinger of things to come.

Ichikawa's run only picked up steam from there. As he headed into a pivotal fifth and final game against the surely exhausted Bertram in the semifinals, the most exciting card of his draft came in clutch: The Ruinous Wrecking Crew. The black-red rare Villain, as it did throughout Ichikawa's Top 8 run, came over the top on the late turns to help bury the game, and deliver our first finalist into the championship match of Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes.

Now all that remained was to find Ichikawa an opponent. And for the first time in the Top 8, we saw a match that did not go the distance. In fact, Gruppi went on to a clean 3-0 sweep over Torres, who ultimately simply could not answer the incredibly powerful Cosmic Cube that Gruppi landed in the last, critical turns of their third game.

And with that, the finals were set: Ichikawa against Gruppi in one match to take it all.