No matter where you go in competitive Magic, there's one thing that players have been talking about recently. And no, I'm not talking about how hard it is to play Amulet Titan.
I mean
While large portions of fields across several high-level tournaments chose to play the combo brew, many players could and simply chose not to pilot the deck—and some of them were rewarded with huge tournament titles, Pro Tour invitations, and seats at the World Championship, like the winner of Magic Spotlight: Spider-Man in Baltimore, Alexandre MacIsaac, who leaned into the Leylines to win in the United States. Others, like the winner of Liverpool's Magic Spotlight: Spider-Man, Alexey Paulot, leaned fully into a weekend of expected mirror matches and were similarly rewarded.
🕸️Congratulations to Alexandre MacIsaac, winner of Magic Spotlight: Spider-Man!🕸️
— PlayMTG (@PlayMTG) October 27, 2025
MacIsaac beat the field and took home the Infinity Gauntlet trophy playing Rakdos Aggro (with a single Poison Dart Frog in the sideboard🐸) pic.twitter.com/jKTGRqBxVt
Congratulations to Alexey Paulot, champion of Magic Spotlight: Spider-Man! 🕸️🇫🇷
— PlayMTG (@PlayMTG) November 2, 2025
After showcasing the power of Agatha’s Soul Cauldron with a 9th-place finish at Worlds 2023, he’s now claimed the Infinity Gauntlet trophy with his signature artifact! 🏆 pic.twitter.com/ATuwyMdkjV
It's an age-old Magic question that's been reignited in 2025 and the Regional Championship and Spotlight Series circuits: should you play the best deck or a deck you think beats that deck?
It's a question that has kept some of the best players in the Magic world arguing late into the night and long past the time they should have locked in their decklist. Despite all the data flooding in for anyone seriously playing competitive Magic in the year of our Lord Skitter 2025, it remains a personal choice that every player has to make. What are they going to play this weekend?
It's a critical question for competitors who are heading to Regional Championships in Las Vegas (for the United States), Calgary (for Canada) this weekend, Yokohama (for Japan), and Antwerp (for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa). And while the Modern format may not offer players such a clear choice between "best deck" and everything else, it is the format that has long epitomized the idea that playing an archetype you are familiar with and enjoy playing is worth more percentage points than any sideboard optimization.
In many ways, this question itself has come a long way from where it began. When most of the high-level Magic testing took place at Carnegie-Mellon University in the '90s, there simply weren't enough games played for players to truly answer these kinds of esoteric Magic philosophy questions. In a world of Magic Online Challenges, Leagues, instant results after bans or rotations, and millions of games generated between Magic Online and MTG Arena, we know the answer to many of these questions; the best deck is the best deck because it wins the most games.
But winning a tournament is not always the same as doing well in a tournament, and so for that and many other reasons, the question of what deck you should play this weekend remains a deeply personal choice.
Paulot, for instance, said he would never choose to play Mono-Red, even if it were considered the best deck. In his words, he "just wouldn't have the motivation to practice."
That reason goes back to a basic truth of Magic that even the most calculator-simulating humans can't refute: everyone plays better playing something they like to play. While certainly that's not the final deciding factor for most of the world's top players at something like, say, the upcoming Magic World Championship 31, for the non-Reid Dukes among us, familiarity and playstyle are major factors in finding success, and performing well at the high level of stress at competitive Magic events also is stimulated by playing from a comfort zone.
For Paulot, the Arena Championship 2 runner-up in 2023 and 9th-place finisher at the 2023 World Championship, playing the most complicated deck with everyone gunning for it at the Spotlight Series actually was his comfort zone.
"I almost always play highly synergistic, intricate combo decks and like to put my own twist on them," he explained after winning the Spotlight Series in Liverpool with Izzet Cauldron. "I play a lot of Standard on MTG Arena, and I played a lot of
Agatha's Soul Cauldron
Faithless Looting
Arclight Phoenix [1OZOU76FNStfjndL5sgIL4]
While it helped that Izzet was the best deck in the Standard format, it's also just true that Paulot could storm his way out of a basement—his Arena Championship finals appearance came on the back of playing a synergistic blue-red deck that also had to fight through varied graveyard hate in post-sideboard games: the classic Izzet Phoenix. It turns out that the prospect of a dozen mirror matches is a lot less daunting when you know you're having more fun than your opponent in them.
For another Spotlight Series winner, the existence of an acknowledged top deck does impact his decision—he looks to beat it.
"I usually don't pick the number-one deck for a metagame in most cases," explained Magic Spotlight: Planetary Rotation winner Brennan Roy, who conquered Cauldron—posting an 11-2 record against it—on his way to victory in Orlando last month. "Not only do you have to be prepared for mirrors, but you have to prepare for every other deck teched to beat you.
"For the Spotlight Series, I chose Mono-Red because I felt as though it wasn't respected, despite having good or fine matchups across the board. I was fortunate that during this Spotlight Series, the meta was slightly more open than in the months to come. I was working on Mono-Red for a while, ever since the release of Edge of Eternities. I tried many different variations and landed on my configuration, even deciding against the blue splash that Quinn Tonole popularized in the final week to be more versatile."
For Roy, the win was a long time in the making. After years of grinding his local scene, he played in almost every single Regional Championship since his first one in Dallas in 2023, and he played in every Spotlight Series event that he could for a shot to qualify for the Pro Tour. It came because he created and executed a perfect plan for the perfect tournament.
We have a winner at #SpotlightPlanetary! After an incredible run that saw him post an 11-2 record against Izzet Cauldron with his dialed-in Red Aggro list, Brennan Roy is your champion of Magic Spotlight: Planetary Rotation! pic.twitter.com/FxSIl1EP4L
— PlayMTG (@PlayMTG) August 31, 2025
"The win at the Spotlight Series was definitely the biggest accomplishment of my Magic journey. It blew my mind. I went from doing nothing to winning it all, almost feeling like an impostor in the following weeks; I'm glad I have many friends who helped validate me after my newfound success," Roy recalled as he reflected on the process and product of his choice to not play the "broken" deck.
"I hadn't had much success when it comes to playing in big events before this, but I kept striving to eventually break through the barrier, and it finally happened. My next two goals are to repeat my success at Magic Spotlight: The Avatar and requalify through my first Pro Tour at Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed. I definitely want to continue proving myself and keep making my community, followers, and friends proud."
Going off-meta—rogue deck building as it's known in Magic Boomer parlance—has a storied (and ongoing) history in Magic, and famed creators like Shota Yasooka, Sam Black, and Rei Zhang have a habit of showing up to Pro Tours and informing the rest of the field that the metagame wasn't quite as solved as they thought it was, one
At least for a weekend.
That's what Kyle Gonzales did at the Nerd Rage Gaming Series earlier this month (a circuit that can lead to a Pro Tour invitation) when Izzet Cauldron was at the height of its powers. Participating alongside teammates Chris Smith and Andrew Wolthuis—all NRG veterans with almost two dozen Top 8 finishes between them—Gonzales decided that in what was widely expected to be the final week of Cauldron's legality, he would rather take aim at the top deck than play it.
"Mainly, playing the best deck to me seems boring. I play off-meta decks because it feels more special to win that way. It feels like your wins are because of you and your ability to pilot your deck, as opposed to maybe the power of the deck carrying you along," the 2024 Dallas Regional Championship Top 16 finisher explained. "It also feels more like a complex puzzle playing off-meta. You get to examine the metagame and pick and choose what you want to be good against and see what you become worse against as a result. Then you get to see if these matchup spreads are going to be favorable for you in the overall spread of the tournament."
It's an approach that has kept Gonzales locked into the game, winning, and having fun while doing so.
"Over the last couple of years, I've been testing every format to prepare for the NRG circuit, Regional Championships, and I even played in my first Pro Tour, testing with Team Swish Gaming and contributing to numerous late-night Discord calls," the Michigan native and Standard specialist said. "In Regional Championships, I have multiple Day Two appearances, one near-miss, and one Top 16 appearance where I missed a win-and-in for Top 8.
"I tend to never play the best deck in the format and like to play to beat it instead; each time I played, I played an off-meta deck that was positioned very well into the best decks of the format."
That's what he did at the NRG event earlier this month as well, cooking up a Dimir Control list that didn't just help take his team to the Top 8—it went undefeated for him on the weekend.
Been a while since I’ve posted but had an amazing time this past weekend top 8ing the NRG team event with @The_GingerBrute and @CrisSmithMTG! Decided to play UB control since other top decks seemed not fun. Went undefeated on the day and was very happy with the result! pic.twitter.com/XksmZTAQca
— Kyle Gonzales (@MTGplayer22) November 3, 2025
The more Magic changes, the more it stays the same. And with the Magic World Championship just around the corner, we'll soon see how the best players in the world approach the refreshed Standard format—and until then, if you'd like to get a preview of what we might see at Worlds, you can check out Frank Karsten's Metagame Mentor!