Magic life hasn't changed all that much for Jake Beardsley since he won Pro Tour The Lord of the Rings in 2023.
He still enjoys playing the game and can be regularly spotted at Friday Night Magic. There, things are pretty much as they were before he rocketed to the top of the Magic world with a Pro Tour victory over Christian Calcano. He still plays goofy decks when he can, and his partner still gives him grief. Which is fitting, as grief was the same feeling "enjoyed" by many of his Pro Tour opponents during his marvelous run with Rakdos Grief in Barcelona.
"Before I won the Pro Tour, when I went to go play Magic at my local store, I was just Jake, and I'm just Jake now," he explained. "The only time there's really any difference is when someone new comes in and they're like 'Wow, you're playing FNM?' and it's like, yeah, I've been playing FNM for 20 years. I'm not going to stop now."
But life has changed in some ways for the Pro Tour winner, as it has for each of the ten Modern Pro Tour winners in Magic history so far. While Beardsley's motivation for playing Magic hasn't changed—it's always been more about rewarding, in-person games and experiences for him than strict competitive success—life changes have meant that chasing high-level Magic is tougher than it was in his heyday.
Not that he's stopping.
"After I won the Pro Tour, I finished my master's degree at Virginia Tech and went to work as a data analyst, so life since the Pro Tour has been very disparate and busy," he explained. "I wouldn't call myself retired, but I've been off-and-on qualified for the Pro Tour. Honestly that cadence has kind of worked for me. I'm testing for the Regional Championships in Houston and Las Vegas; I'm not queued for the Pro Tour in Atlanta, but I'm really hoping to qualify for Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed."
We've been quiet but as the next Pro Tour season approaches, we are back!
— Team Cosmos Heavy Play (@CosmosMTG) April 21, 2025
We have some exciting additions to the team! First up, we have Jake Beardsley. He won his first Pro Tour (PT The Lord of the Rings in Barcelona) - what will we see next?
@makememesnotwar @HeavyPlayLLC pic.twitter.com/WehkNvHtfT
Atlanta is indeed the next stop. Pro Tour Edge of Eternities is coming up in two weeks at MagicCon: Atlanta on September 26–28, and to commemorate the event shining a spotlight on what has been a quiet year for the Modern format, coverage partner Frank Karsten and I are looking back at each of the previous events. You can find Frank's article with all of the Modern Pro Tour-winning deck lists here Today, I'm taking a look at each of those Modern Pro Tour winners.
There's no better place to start than the beginning: Infinity Faeries.
Pro Tour Philadelphia (2011)
As I wrote three years ago in one of my first articles for this site, it was "Infinity Faeries" that made Modern for me. And now, almost fifteen years later, this moment still brings a smile to my face.
The controller of all those Faeries was Samuele Estratti, one of the most prolific European players of the mid-2000s era. Estratti began his career with a pair of Top 4 finishes at Nationals in 2008 and 2009 and soon found himself at the Pro Tour. That led to the first Modern Pro Tour in 2011, where Estratti was part of one of several teams that sought to break the fledgling format—and they certainly did.
Every single deck in the Top 8 at the Pro Tour Philadelphia event included a card that would eventually be banned in Modern. While it's easy to see why
Estratti never achieved another Top Finish, but he did go on to enjoy a very successful Grand Prix career, with four Grand Prix Top 8 appearances between 2011 and 2013.
Pro Tour Return to Ravnica (2012)
Oh, Eggs and Cifka. A deck and player forever intertwined, but perhaps unfairly. The deck gained notoriety as Pro Tour Return to Ravnica went on ... and on ... and on. With its convoluted combo turns and a master at work behind it, Cifka's Eggs deck became the talk of the event.
Cifka claimed victory at the Pro Tour just fifteen months after he burst onto the scene with a 2nd-place finish at Nationals in 2011. A year later, he made the Top 4 of a Team Limited Grand Prix in San Jose. Just a week later, he was playing Eggs at the Pro Tour, eventually defeating Yuuya Watanabe in the finals.
From there, Cifka's gaming resume grew, and not just in Magic. He earned two more Top Finishes over the next year, moving on to find success in other games like Chess, where he achieved the rank of Master. He then came back to Magic for a follow-up arc where he rose to online prominence as part of the famed "Czech House" that was responsible for breaking several MTG Arena metagames wide open.
Pro Tour Born of the Gods (2014)
They say it's good to have a brand. In Magic, that's true for a few reasons. Sure, as a player or content creator, a brand is a good way to help people recognize you. But when it comes to playing Magic? A brand can help there, too. After all, familiarity with a deck or archetype is vital to Pro Tour success, and very few had a brand quite like Shaun McLaren.
McLaren always plays Jeskai, if he can, and in his stoic approach was a terror to play against if he was on a controlling list. A connoisseur of
And all of those finely tuned Jeskai lists? They are all the work of McLaren's own mind, as he famously worked alone preparing for big tournaments, tweaking the numbers on his lists as he saw fit. In a ten-year career between 2007 and 2017, McLaren amassed two Top Finishes and five more Grand Prix Top 8s.
Pro Tour Fate Reforged (2015)
Antonio Del Moral León brought Splinter Twin back to the Pro Tour's winner circle—and the final list really didn't look all that different from the one Estratti had used five years earlier to claim victory. It would be the last major victory the deck would claim before meeting a ban, but it was just the start of a brief but competitive stint for the Spanish player.
His first major breakthrough came in 2015 when he won Pro Tour Fate Reforged, where he claimed victory against a stacked Top 8 field. Now, we can say that about pretty much any Pro Tour Top 8, but the combination of multiple Hall of Famers (Eric Froehlich, Seth Manfield, Lee Shi Tian), as well as the breakout Amulet Titan deck making the finals in the hands of Justin Cohen with design help from Sam Black, made it all the more impressive that Del Leon cut through the field to earn his only major trophy.
He followed that up with a semifinals finish at Grand Prix Paris a few months later. Just a week after that, he did the same thing at the Magic Online Championship; he would also add another Grand Prix Top 8 later that year. With his entire career of Top Finishes coming in an eighteen-month span, it was a short-and-sweet run for the Pro Tour Fate Reforged winner.
Pro Tour Oath of the Gatewatch (2016)
This was the famous beginning of what became known as the Eldrazi Winter, but when Jiachen Tao defeated Ivan Floch in an all-Eldrazi finals, it was time for the days of the 'drazi.
For Tao, the victory story belonged to more people than himself. He was a member of Team East-West Bowl, a combination of player groups from opposite coasts who came together at a time when team play at the Pro Tour was really beginning to take off en masse. With the Eldrazi deck at least a decently kept secret in the final days leading up to the tournament, multiple squads discovered at least some of the power the deck had to offer.
That included Team ChannelFireball, which was then at height of its powers. In the Top 8 of Pro Tour Oath of the Gatewatch, Tao had to face three of the team's members in a row: Shuhei Nakamura, Luis Scott-Vargas, and finally Floch. It was one of the most incredible Top 8s in modern (and Modern) memory, and it kickstarted a career for Tao that saw him add two more Grand Prix Top 8s over the next year before retiring from competitive play to become a Magic designer.
Pro Tour Rivals of Ixalan (2018)
The other players on this list have all been great gamers, even feared in their time. But none of them were Player of the Year.
Luis Salvatto claimed the title of Pro Tour champion and Player of the Year on the back of one of the best months of Magic anyone has ever had. He won Pro Tour Rivals of Ixalan with one of my all-time favorite Modern decks, Lantern Control, in February 2018 in Bilbao and just five weeks later won Grand Prix Santiago on the other side of the world.
More Top 8s followed, and when the dust finally settled on the end of a long season, one in which he jetted around the world specifically in search of that Player of the Year title? Well, it ended in a tie, with Salvatto and Seth Manfield left to have one final playoff for all the marbles. The pair played one final set of matches, and it was Salvatto who emerged on top to belatedly claim the very hard-earned 2018 Player of the Year title.
A seven-year run between 2013 and 2020 saw the Argentinean accumulate a pair of Top Finishes to go along with seven Grand Prix Top 8s. He's recently begun exploring competitive Magic play again, so Salvatto may be making his way back to a Pro Tour table before long.
Mythic Championship II (2019)
Eli Loveman isn't your typical Pro Tour winner.
Even after winning Mythic Championship II in early 2019, Loveman said then that a long-term career as a professional Magic player was not something he was overly interested in; Loveman is deeply involved in his community and spent much of his time with the family business developing affordable housing. But his victory over Matt Sperling in a memorable finals match in London put Loveman's name forever into the history books, and he has stuck around since.
His Pro Tour win was followed by a Top 8 at the 2020 World Championship, and despite playing off and on since—including in the online Rivals League in 2020–22—Loveman's career remains defined by his incredible run to victory with Humans at a time in Modern that's fondly remembered.
Mythic Championship IV (2019)
This was a busy year for Modern, with the format once again on display in July as the Pro Tour headed to Barcelona. While much of the attention was on
But it was just the start for the "Arena Boy," who went on to a popular content creation career and shared with the Magic world what those who knew him best already knew: underneath the ultra-smart Pro Tour player, there was a funny guy who liked to laugh with his friends while trying out silly decks. The Pro Tour win gave Severin the platform, and he made the most of it.
Pro Tour The Lord of the Rings (2023)
Modern returned to the Pro Tour after a four-year hiatus with another trip to Barcelona, and with it came big changes. The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™ was direct-to-Modern and made a strong impact at the tournament. That created a new challenge for deck builders who were looking at a severely shaken-up format, and in short order,
Not that Modern mattered all that much in the moment to Beardsley when he sat down for his first PT draft at Pro Tour The Lord of the Rings and found he was sitting next to Marcio Carvalho, a many times-minted Magic competitor and famed Limited gamer. It was a welcome-to-the-Pro Tour moment for Beardsley, but one that was telling: Beardsley would go on to win the entire tournament and prove he was good enough to draft next to anyone.
Winning the first Pro Tour you ever competed in is quite the feat. Not since Jan Merkel in 2006 had that been done, and Beardsley pulled it off in Barcelona.
"I'm happy to just play Magic at whatever level I'm competing at, Pro Tour or FNM," he explained. "I would ideally love to play a few Pro Tours a year moving forward, but I would also be happy just to qualify for the Regional Championships and play a ton of Magic."
Pro Tour Modern Horizons 3 (2024)
The winner of our most Modern Pro Tour? That would be the one and only Simon Nielsen, the enigmatic Pro Tour winner who is just as likely to take a detour on a bike ride as he is to grind a few extra Standard matches the morning before a tournament.
Of course, the 2023 Player of the Year has come a long way from the "sleep-in Simon" persona he once jokingly embraced, and his resume ranks among the best ever accumulated in a ten-year period, and certainly the most impressive we've ever seen in a row—from May 2023 through June 2024, Nielsen made the Top 8 of every Pro Tour-level event he played, and finally won it all at Pro Tour Modern Horizons 3 with Bant Nadu.
I once thought Nathan Steuer's momentous run to the World Championship would be the most impressive I would see; Nielsen blew that away. As of today, he has an incredible six Top Finishes with a bunch of Grand Prix Top 8s tacked onto that, and that's not mentioning the Daneblast heard 'round the World Magic Cup. Every legendary player deserves a legendary moment. Nielsen's came early in his career, and it was a sign of things to come.
Now, we look ahead to Pro Tour Edge of Eternities, and the eleventh Modern Pro Tour in Magic history. Who will join this group of memorable winners, and in the seemingly wide-open Modern format, what will they do it with?
We'll find out at MagicCon: Atlanta on September 26.