The mightiest Magic players in the world are prepared for Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering® | Marvel Super Heroes, featuring hundreds of Magic's best, Modern Constructed, and (most importantly) a Top 8 draft on Sunday to decide our champion! Our third and final Pro Tour ahead of the World Championship promises to be an action-packed showdown where Limited and Modern will cement a new player into the history books. Join us at MagicCon or online on July 17–19, where we'll witness the rise of Magic's newest Pro Tour champion!
Looking for the behind-the-scenes scoop on the players, teams, and schedule of this Pro Tour? We've got all the details right here.
What Is the Pro Tour?
The Pro Tour is the culmination of many paths—all competitive—to one of Magic's most prestigious tournaments, with a $500,000 prize pool (and a trophy), invitations, and points to qualify for the annual Magic World Championship all up for grabs. The invite list is available online (and subject to change).
What Are the Formats and Prizes?
Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes will feature Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes Draft and Modern Constructed. In addition to the $500,000 prize pool, players will compete for invitations to Magic World Championship 32 and the stunning Pro Tour trophy. To cap off this unforgettable weekend, Sunday will feature a Top 8 draft that will deliver us our new champion. This is a new structure of Pro Tour that's been hotly anticipated by players, fans, and casters alike. The Top 8 may feature Limited, but the hype? That's unlimited.
Each competitor will receive a non-foil Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student promo card featuring art by Ampreh. Competitors will also receive a non-foil Quicksilver, Brash Blur with art by Junggeun Yoon. The Top 32 players at this Pro Tour will also receive traditional foil copies of each of these promo cards.
Competitors who finish Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes with 30 or more match points will be invited to the first Pro Tour of 2027. All players compete for their share of $500,000 in prizes, with the Pro Tour Champion winning $50,000. All competitors will receive at least $500 regardless of their final placement. A full prize table will be published the week of July 13.
Where and When Can I Watch the Pro Tour?
Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes will take place in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on July 17–19, during MagicCon: Amsterdam. Join us on the show floor to watch the action live and cheer on your favorite players! If you're tuning in from the comfort of your home, you can stay up to date on all the action with our coverage, which will be streamed all three days of the event at twitch.tv/magic and youtube.com/@Play_MTG. Follow the players, their fans, and all the coverage on social media or with the hashtag #PTMSH.
On Friday and Saturday—July 17 and 18—the stream starts at 5 a.m. ET (11 a.m. CEST/6 p.m. JST) with three rounds of Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes Draft followed by five rounds of Modern Constructed.
On Sunday, July 19, the stream starts at 4 a.m. ET (10 a.m. CEST/5 P.M. JST) with coverage of the Top 8 draft, followed by all four quarterfinals matches, the semifinals matches, and the finals of Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes.
For Pro Tour fans attending MagicCon: Amsterdam, there will be a special Pro Tour Sunday Watch Party on July 19, starting at 2 p.m. Watch the final games unfold live, mingle with some of the Pro Tour's most famous faces, and join us for the crowning of the Pro Tour's newest champion!
The Story of Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes
"To bury the lede: to hide or delay the most important, newsworthy, or interesting piece of information in a story by placing it too deep within secondary or distracting details."
Today, I shall not bury the lede.
Top 8 draft.
Top 8 draft, Top 8 draft, Top 8 draft.
Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes features a Top 8 draft. Pick one card at a time. Building a 40-card deck. No metagame edges. No four-copy, deck-killer sideboards. Just eight Limited decks around an elite draft table for the ages, where each deck is made one nerve-shredding pick at a time. Every choice decides whether you win or lose in a monumental Top 8 on Sunday.
Did I mention Top. 8. Draft?
Mission accomplished. Now we can talk about all the other ways that this Pro Tour is going to be super sweet.
Christoffer Larsen
"Chrrrrr-ISS-to-ffer LAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR-sennnnnnnnnn."
That's how Cedric Phillips introduced the Danish maestro at the conclusion of Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed, and he certainly deserved every syllable. Larsen is a super-popular member of the Pro Tour community and has been for many years. An incredibly supportive teammate, he won at the start of the year and was greeted by near-universal acclaim (presumably some of his opponents were a tad disappointed). It didn't do any harm, of course, that Larsen was winning "the right way," piloting a cool Dimir Excruciator deck that people were excited by. This blue-black build created blockbuster moments on camera by the bucketful.
I used to think "regression to the mean" was for people who overwatched 2000s comedies, but it's actually just a math term that says that "what goes up, must come down." Logically, Larsen's incredible win would be followed by Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven obscurity, as all the little bits of luck that went his way first time around cost him a couple of key wins.
Not a bit of it. Larsen nearly went back to back, falling in the finals to his teammate Nathan Steuer. Teammate, you say …
Two Titanic Teams
Team Cosmos Heavy Play went into the final of Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed with a fifty-fifty shot of claiming the trophy, and Larsen obliged. For Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven, they went one better, guaranteeing the title by having both finalists on their roster, with former World Champion Nathan Steuer claiming another trophy. Of course, Team Cosmos Heavy Play was (once again) the big winner. But slightly lost in the shuffle was the fantastic performance of Team Handshake Moxfield. However good your team is, putting a member into the Top 8 is a big deal. To put two in, like Cosmos did, is superb. Handshake Moxfield managed to get three players into the Sunday mayhem. Not only did Maxx Kominowski, Stefan Schütz, and Zevin Faust reach the elimination rounds, but they did so with completely different decks: Izzet Spellementals, Mono-Green Landfall, and Azorius Tempo, respectively. That bodes well for a diverse Modern field.
There are other teams to watch, of course. Team TCGplayer and Team Moriyama Japan remain competitive, and Teams like The Boulder Merlion, Sanctum of All, and Rampant Growth are among those looking to make their mark once more. But with just one Pro Tour to go before the World Championship, Cosmos and Handshake are two truly titanic teams battling to be the undisputed number one.
Modern Format Overview
A fantastic format in its own right, Modern really is Magic dialed up to eleven. Whatever strategy you employ in Modern, you're doing it like you really, really mean it. Players get burned to a crisp by ruthlessly efficient red spells. Poisoned players come down with a bad case of dead in a blizzard of ick. Midrange grinders nickel and dime you with tiny little incremental pieces while you desperately try to handle the four separate advantages they've managed to gain from a single card.
Planeswalkers show up, but not just any old planeswalkers. The best of the best find a home in Modern. Blue players get to use counterspells that make opponents think about crying, packing up their cards, and heading home. In Modern, making opponents cry can be a real, attainable life goal for control mages. Intricate combos and interactions abound in Modern, and even if you've been playing for 20 years, you'll still find new ones to be amazed and aghast at.
Then there's the sideboards. This is where entire strategies come to die. Modern sideboard cards don't just hurt your opponents' chosen strategy. They don't just wound opponents, they punish them for breathing. If you think of most sideboard cards as having flavor text like, "I hate you, you have brought a knife to a gun fight, and now I am going to ruin you," you wouldn't be far off.
Yes, I love Modern. Can you tell?
Limited Preparations
The change in Top 8 format doesn't just impact Sunday. Traditional Pro Tours see numerous successful Constructed players at 5-3 or 6-2 overnight, desperately hoping to survive the Saturday morning draft before they can unleash their Constructed monster in the afternoon. That dynamic is still at play, but this time, it's the Constructed cards that get set aside once Sunday begins. Now, every player dreaming of winning the Pro Tour in Amsterdam knows that they will have to do so with a 3-0 draft deck. That changes so much in terms of preparation. You can't hope to go 4-2 in Limited, or maybe sneak a 5-1 record. You have to be prepared to run the tables. With a ton of Modern data already available to players, sometimes across decades, the temptation must be to put extra weight on Limited testing. Many of the big teams have "professors" of Limited that train the team on the best 40-card strategies, and those coaches are going to be at a premium in Amsterdam. Getting Limited right has never been more important.
Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes Draft Overview
Limited is always a key part of the Pro Tour; a solid performance during rounds of Draft can help carry a player into the Top 8. But here, the Top 8 playoff will feature Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes Draft! All eyes will be on our best players as they weigh key removal spells, draft archetypes, and pick spicy build-arounds that could turn games on their head. Let's take a look at Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes Limited!
Kang, Temporal Tyrant
Madame Hydra
Hulk, Gamma Goliath
Black Panther, Vanguard
Black Widow, Double Agent
Iron Man, Master of Machines
Killmonger, Scourge of Wakanda
Thor Odinson
Ant-Man, Colony Commander
Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes is a return to traditional Limited environments at the Pro Tour, as this set features ten two-color draft archetypes with their own signpost uncommon cards. Where it differs from the norm, however, is how synergy-driven each draft archetype is. The best cards in your deck will fuel one another. Your standalone, unsupported cards might be good, but the ones you drafted with a specific synergy in mind? Those are your greatest cards.
We Say Thee Nay!
Cruel Alliance
Lightning Strike
Undercover Skrull
Look for what your draft archetype wants you to do and find the cards that reward you for doing it. In Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes, there are plenty of cards that give you a bonus (and sometimes more) for executing your chosen plan.
Villainous Hideout
There are also two key creature types that matter in this set: Heroes and Villains. Heroes care about going wide and buffing your team with noncreature spells while Villains employ a macabre, graveyard-centric strategy. Not every deck will explicitly care about Heroes or Villains, but drafters should keep an eye on whether their deck is more of a do-gooder or a ne'er-do-well. Find your strengths, seek out your synergies, and you'll be well on your way to victory—and perhaps even the Top 8.
Meet the Casters of Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes
As you can tell, we are a bit excited about the prospect of bringing you a Limited Top 8 Sunday. Marshall Sutcliffe and Paul Cheon will call the drafts for you, alongside additional match coverage with Eilidh Lonie and Corey Baumeister. At the news desk, Maria Bartholdi and Riley Knight will keep you up to date with everything that moves. This weekend, they're joined by Hall of Fame member Frank Karsten, who will keep Modern fans happy with a ton of special features and insights.
When Will Decklists Be Published?
Modern decklists for the tournament will be published on the Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Super Heroes event page on Friday, July 17, at the beginning of Round 4 gameplay.
Top 8 decklists for Draft will be published on Sunday, July 20, at the beginning of the quarterfinals. Draft decklists from Friday and Saturday will not be published.
Can I Co-Stream the Event?
Following Twitch's Content Sharing Guidelines, you can co-stream the Pro Tour broadcast from twitch.tv/magic using OBS or XSplit. This allows anyone on Twitch to cover the event in their voice and with their community. To be clear, co-streamed content is not endorsed by Wizards, and we expect anyone who participates in co-streaming to follow Wizards's Fan Content Policy.