When Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven opened on Friday, it was ushered in by the reigning Pro Tour champion: Christoffer Larsen, the great Dane who put together the greatest run yet in an illustrious career when he won Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed back in February. If the second Pro Tour of the year could live up to the first, the over 300 competitors and more than 20,000 attendees at MagicCon: Las Vegas were in for a treat.

Fast forward two days, two Secrets of Strixhaven drafts, fourteen rounds, and thousands of games (not to mention a lot of landfall triggers) and there we were, watching Christoffer Larsen battle former World Champion Nathan Steuer—who was making his own triumphant return to the top of the Pro Tour—for a spot in another Top 8.

And when the dust settled on that epic Round 15 match, Las Vegas suddenly started looking a lot like Richmond did. Larsen is back in the Top 8—alongside a star-studded group—and is now on the verge of running down a second straight Pro Tour victory.

🔥Congratulations to @ChrisTheDaneLa1, the next competitor to make the #PTSOS Top 8 – and this puts a back-to-back Pro Tour wins in reach for the reigning Pro Tour Champion!🔥

One more round remains on Day 2, live now at https://t.co/GF4H5s6srS pic.twitter.com/BXi5nl8XIm

— PlayMTG (@PlayMTG) May 3, 2026

To accomplish that Budde-like feat, Larsen and the breakout Selesnya Landfall deck that he and other members of Team Cosmos Heavy Play brought to the desert would have to battle through a Top 8 filled with plenty of other decks running Sazh's Chocobo.

• Rui Zhang (Izzet Lessons)
• Matt Nass (Selesnya Ouroboroid)
• Stefan Schütz (Mono-Green Landfall)
• Christoffer Larsen (Selesnya Landfall)
• Maxx Kominowski (Izzet Spellementals)
• Nathan Steuer (Selesnya Landfall)
• Matthew Stefansson (Mono-Green Landfall)
• Zevin Faust (Azorius Tempo)

In a tournament that began with Izzet Prowess lapping the field, the Swiss rounds ended with the blue-red machine putting up a fairly average win rate overall and in fact failing to convert to the Top 8 at all. That now sets up a thrilling conclusion to a Standard metagame that refuses to conform, and follows one of the better draft sections of the past year.

Here's how we got here.

Strixhaven Study Hall

From Bulk Up builds to lean Golgari life gain decks to Prismari spell loops, Secrets of Strixhaven has earned high praise and brought out a number of innovative strategies. The most popular of these was Tackle Artist plus Bulk Up, but thanks to the trample from Monstrous Rage, there was also the potential build-your-own trampling creature. Some players, like Thierry Ramboa, even went so far as to play a four copies of Ancestral Anger in their deck.

"I saw JED [Jean-Emmanuel Depraz] draft it once in the house, and I thought it was a good backup plan if things went wrong,” explained Ramboa, who said he would play up to seven copies of Ancestral Anger if he had them. "These cards are usually not very good, but they came around late for me in pack 1, and it came together in pack 2.”

Ramboa was one of the dozens of players who excelled in the Draft rounds of the tournament, always a key bloc given that Draft opens both days of the Pro Tour and is key for setting up later tiebreakers, not to mention early vibes.

Congratulations to the three 6-0 drafters of #PTSOS!

They are: Rui Zhang, Stefan Schütz, and Jacob Mitchell-Rabaey, and their decklists are below! pic.twitter.com/PCYuqYl7Je

— PlayMTG (@PlayMTG) May 2, 2026

Another underrated archetype at the Pro Tour? Golgari (or Witherbloom, to any Archivians). The life gain-centric strategy was chronically underdrafted heading into the event, and players like Jack Potter—who didn't drop a game in his Friday draft with the strategy—came ready to take advantage of this opening.

“You really need the enablers to make it work, but when it all comes together, the black decks can snowball better than any other decks in format,” Potter explained.

Overall, Secrets of Strixhaven proved to be a Limited environment where setting up engines—rather it was the aforementioned combo kill, near-creatureless control plan to simply outlast opponents, or Quandrix ramp—was the biggest difference between success and failure for the field of 300-plus competitors.

A Ferocious Standard Sprint

The leader of Day One, Nathan Steuer, went 2-1 in his second draft, dropping his first match of the tournament but setting himself up perfectly for a run through Standard to lock up an early Top 8 berth with a twelfth win. But the clinching win was elusive, and instead Steuer suffered through a string of losses, including ones to eventual Top Finishers Kominowski, Nass, and Larsen.

But the former World Champion came through in the final round, dispatching Thierry Ramboa and earning the sixth Top Finish of his young and already storied career—and his first since he won Pro Tour March of the Machine in 2023. He did so with one of the breakout decks of the weekend, a refreshed look at a familiar archetype that showcased the next evolution of a Standard format that refuses to be solved.

pic.twitter.com/nXONwapZgS

— PlayMTG (@PlayMTG) May 3, 2026

4 Erode 1 Surrak, Elusive Hunter 2 Lumbering Worldwagon 2 Bushwhack 4 Earthbender Ascension 2 Temple Garden 7 Forest 4 Sazh's Chocobo 2 Icetill Explorer 1 Keen-Eyed Curator 4 Llanowar Elves 4 Badgermole Cub 4 Fabled Passage 2 Dyadrine, Synthesis Amalgam 4 Hushwood Verge 4 Mightform Harmonizer 3 Escape Tunnel 2 Plains 3 Ba Sing Se 1 Mossborn Hydra 2 Surrak, Elusive Hunter 3 Sheltered by Ghosts 1 Restoration Magic 1 Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar 2 Mossborn Hydra 3 Rest in Peace 2 Snakeskin Veil 1 Voice of Victory

With Izzet Prowess expected to run the tournament—it easily lapped the field with a 30% metagame share entering the Pro Tour—we feared we could be in for another weekend of Steam Vents. That notion was quickly bashed when Izzet Prowess underperformed expectations on Friday, posting a solid, but unspectacular, win rate right around 50%--with no one advancing with the deck to the Top 8.

That opened the door for other decks to make gains, and that's exactly what Landfall did.

The deck broke out shortly after the last Pro Tour and did so in Mono-Green form. Since then, we've actually seen the rise of a second Mono-Green Landfall deck that shared just the core of the deck, and since then both builds have enjoyed a high degree of success. Well, we can now add a new variant in: Selesnya Landfall.

Brightglass Gearhulk

Larsen made the Top 8 with the same list, while Matt Nass punched the ticket on his fifth career Top Finish with a different green-white deck: Selesnya Ouroboroid. This classic Llanowar Elves deck can turbo out a quick Ouroboroid, a card that Standard players will recognize as a kill-on-sight threat.

And how about Azorius Tempo?

4 High Noon 4 Floodpits Drowner 1 Restless Anchorage 4 Aang, Swift Savior 2 Avatar's Wrath 4 Starting Town 4 Aven Interrupter 2 Get Lost 4 Floodfarm Verge 4 Hallowed Fountain 4 Skycoach Conductor 4 Island 4 Voice of Victory 2 Spell Snare 2 Multiversal Passage 1 Beza, the Bounding Spring 1 Airbender Ascension 2 Abandoned Air Temple 4 Plains 3 Quantum Riddler 2 Disdainful Stroke 2 Seam Rip 1 Pyrrhic Strike 2 Ghost Vacuum 1 Beza, the Bounding Spring 1 Spectacular Tactics 2 Annul 2 Flashfreeze 1 Quantum Riddler 1 Petrified Hamlet

Talk about a deck no one had on their radar. In fact, very few people outside of Faust believed in the deck at all. But Team Handshake Moxfield was a huge proponent of it heading into the last Pro Tour, and it delivered Faust a 9-1 finish at Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed.

Faust ran it back at Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven, and it worked out even better. His victory over none other than Shota Yasooka in the final round of the event was the capstone of his Day Two. With the benefit of some friendly tiebreakers Faust was able to secure the second Top Finish of his career with a deck that no one believed in.

Further down the standings, the innovations continued. Alex Rohan, the Team Worldly Counsel Heavy Play member who almost perfectly pinpointed the eventual metagame, came armed with a perfectly tuned Jeskai Control list that featured a new engine piece from Secrets of Strixhaven: Tablet of Discovery, which Rohan described as a gamechanger for the archetype that allowed it to not lose tempo while still accelerating into a turn-five Jeskai Revelation. The deck was also juiced by the new printing Flashback, which enabled devastating Jeskai Revelation-into-Jeskai Revelation sequences that helped him finish 7-3 in Standard and 12-4 overall.

As a result of all this and more, the resulting Standard metagame heading into Sunday is as fractured as it has been all year. It's the second Pro Tour of the year where the most popular deck fell below the metagame's lofty expectations, and the resultant chaos has made the meaningful Standard churn of the past five months some of the best we've seen in years.

Looking Ahead

We began Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven with over 300 competitors, and the large field has now been whittled down to just eight players who will be back on Sunday morning for the Top 8 and their chance at a Magic trophy—or in the case of Larsen, to the chance to make very rare Magic history.

Coverage begins at 10 a.m. PT on Sunday, May 3. Your attendance is requested for the final exam—and the finals—of Pro Tour Secrets of Strixhaven, so tune in on twitch.tv/magic or the Play MTG YouTube channel.