After our previews of the Pro Tour Team Series heading into Pro Tour Amonkhet, it’s time to look at the Pro Tour’s aftermath! As expected, last weekend shook the standings up quite a bit. With only one Pro Tour left to finalize the leaderboard and settle which two teams will advance to the Team Series finals at the Magic World Championship, it’s time to see where the teams stand and who is within striking distance of those coveted invitations.
The Teams To Beat
Musashi was already tied for first after Pro Tour Aether Revolt, but Yuuya Watanabe’s runner-up finish and Ken Yukuhiro’s semifinal run keyed a massive seventy-point haul in Nashville. Musashi also showed the same down-roster depth that characterized their performance at the series’s first Pro Tour, with Shota Yasooka notching eleven wins, Yuuki Ichikawa scoring ten, and Kentaro Yamamoto and Teruya Kakumae taking nine apiece (meaning every member of the team finished the pro tour with a winning record). With a twenty-five point lead on the second-place team and a thirty-one point edge on the team in third, Musashi looks to be all but assured a spot in the top two, and knocking them from the top spot at Pro Tour Hour of Devastation will be a tall order.
Martin Muller’s second Pro Tour top eight may be the headline (and his top-four finish brought in a lot of points), but Genesis too showed impressive down-roster depth, with Michael Majors, Seth Manfield, and Brad Nelson all notching eleven wins en route to top-twenty-five finishes, Martin Deng snagging ten wins and a draw, and Lucas Blohon turning in nine wins. With a performance every bit as deep as Musashi’s, Genesis vaulted from eleventh to second. Considering their deep team and their twenty-point edge over the fourth-place team, it will be stunning if Genesis doesn’t at least finish in the top four, and they have a very good chance to hold onto their top-two spot and make the Team Series finals.
Nipping At Their Heels
Team MTG Mint Card slid from first to third, but their thirty-nine points was still a thoroughly respectable outing. They put three players in the top thirty (Lee Shi Tian, Kelvin Chew, Jason Chung), while Hao-Shen Huang chipped in ten wins. They trail Genesis by a mere six points, and I would look for the two teams to duel for a spot in the top two at Pro Tour Hour of Devastation.
Down, But Not Out
Lingering Souls put a player in the top eight for the second straight Pro Tour. Chris Fennel topped the leaderboard after the swiss rounds before falling to Yuuya Watanabe in the quarterfinals. Shaheen Soorani and Travis Woo added nine-win efforts to help Lingering Souls slide up one spot, from fifth to fourth. At worst, they will be right in the thick of the competiiton for a top-four finish (which brings the prize of an invitation for the whole team to Pro Tour Ixalan), but a very strong showing at Pro Tour Hour of Devastation might be enough to propel them into the top two. They might be in trouble, however, if Ashraf Abou Omar, who missed Nashville, does not join them in Kyoto.
Thanks to top-twenty finishes by “Huey” Jensen, Owen Turtenwald, and Reid Duke, Team Puzzle Quest moved up from tenth to fifth. They trail second-place Genesis by twenty-one points heading into the last Pro Tour of the season, but with Paul Rietzl, Andrew Cuneo, and Jon Finkel also on board, Puzzle Quest might be explosive enough to put up the kind of finish that would let them steal a spot in the Team Series finals.
Rich Stein tabbed Mutiny as a team with “the power to rocket back from the bottom of the standings” during his preview; and boy, did they ever, surging from twenty-ninth place into a tie for sixth, largely thanks to Gerry Thompson’s run to the Pro Tour title (backed up by eleven wins from Joshua Cho and ten from Samuel Black). Closing a twenty-three-point gap for second would be no small feat, but they’ve certainly given themselves a shot.
With four players notching ten wins or more (including quarterfinalist Marc Tobiasch), Team EUreka climbed from twentieth into a tie for sixth. With only three points separating teams four through seven, EUreka faces the same essential outlook as Lingering Souls, Puzzle Quest, and Mutiny: they are within range to make a move on a spot in the top two, but it’s going to take a very good outing at Pro Tour Hour of Devastation (most likely combined with a disappointing performance from MTG Mint Card and Genesis).
Falling Back
After putting five players through to day two, only two members of Face to Face notched a record of 9-7 or better, netting them only nineteen points and causing them to slip from third to ninth in the rankings. Now over thirty points behind Genesis, they might need one of their members to take down Pro Tour Hour of Devastation to have a realistic shot at closing the gap for a top-two finish.
DEX Army looked to have some good momentum heading into the Pro Tour, but only two of its six members made day two, and only Thiago Saporito turned in a winning record at the end of the tournament. Their eighteen-point haul saw them slip from sixth to twelfth, with a thirty-seven point chasm opening up between them and second place. (As a point of reference, the difference between first place and last place following Pro Tour Aether Revolt was only thirty-four points.)
No one man can carry his whole team in the Pro Tour Team Series; after winning Pro Tour Aether Revolt, Lucas Esper Berthoud came to Nashville without any of his five teammates and fell short of day two. DEXThird has slipped from fourth to nineteenth in the latest standings.
Beck Holden is a Ph.D. student in theater who lives in the greater Boston area. He enjoys drafting, brewing for standard, and playing 8-Rack in modern. He also writes intermittently about actually playing Magic at beholdplaneswalker.wordpress.com.