Today marks the beginning of the 2017 Magic World Championship and by the time you’re reading this the first rounds of draft will be underway (or even completed depending on when you’re reading this).
To help put the event in perspective we’ve decided to put together the odds of how likely it is each player will take home the title of World Champion. We aren’t taking or offering bets on these odds but we like to think we’ll be about as accurate as throwing darts at the broad side of a barn.
So without further ado (besides whatever banner ad is currently popping up in the middle of our content), here are the odds of victory for all 24 Magic World Championship Competitors!
6-1 Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa
You couldn’t script a better season for the Brazilian Hall of Famer. Two PT top 8 finishes. Two GP top 8 finishes. Locking in the Player of the Year title in the last match of the last Pro Tour of the season. The only thing that could make things better would be to secure the title of World Champion, a title that has only been won once by a Latin American player when Carlos Ramao took it home in 2002.
9-1 Marcio Carvalho, Reid Duke, Brad Nelson
The Portugese pro finished behind Damo da Rosa in the player of the year race and it’s easy to see why. Carvalho lost to last year’s eventual winner, Brian Braun-Duin, so he’s motivated to win it all this time around. One PT Top 8 and three GP Top 8’s is an impressive resume for a single career let alone a single season.
Reid Duke had a good year too, finishing just behind Carvalho in the standings, but 7 points behind in total. Duke had no PT top 8 finishes but did achieve that mark in three GP events including one title. He was also the first player signed to the Las Vegas Golden Knights of the NHL. Duke’s Magic resume is impressive but it’s missing the title of World Champion, coming as close as 2nd place in 2013.
Brad Nelson, according to Rich Hagon, is the best Standard player in the world. It’s hard to argue with that assessment. Eight of the 14 rounds of the World Championship will be played in a new and exciting Standard format, something that could play right into Nelson’s strengths. Despite only finishing in the top 8 of a single GP and no PTs this season, Nelson finished ninth in the POTY race thanks to consistency and being the best Standard player in the world.
12-1 Christian Calcano, Martin Juza, Owen Turtenwald
Calcano is having one of those years where everything goes right. Despite not finishing in the top 8 of any Grand Prix tournaments, Calcano picked up 10 pro points from GP’s this season and made the Top 8 of one Pro Tour. Expect Calcano to finish the year strong.
Juza has also had a great year, moving up in the collective minds of the community from a great player to someone you can imagine finally winning the World Championship. One PT top 8, two GP top 8s, and a top-10 finish in the POTY race help build an impressive resume for Juza who will be inducted into the Hall of Fame at Pro Tour Ixalan.
Turtenwald has played in three World Championships finishing 10th, 13th, and 2nd. That second-place finish was in 2015 where he lost to Seth Manfield. Owen had a good season, finishing tenth in the POTY race, but doing so without a PT top 8. His GP performances were stellar with two top 8 finishes but no titles.
14-1 Samuel Black, Samuel Pardee, Yuuya Watanabe
Black had a solid season finishing in 13th place overall with a PT top 8 to go along with two GP top 8 finishes. Black has been a mainstay of the Pro Tour for many years and is regarded as one of the world’s strongest deck builders, a trait that could benefit him in the relatively unknown new Standard metagame.
I swear I didn’t do this just to group the two “Samuels” together. Pardee had a great season, perhaps the best of his career, with a PT top 8 and an impressive three GP top 8 finishes (a feat only accomplished by sixteen people in the world). That propelled him to fourth in the POTY race, but leaned heavily on Pardee’s GP performances.
Say what you will about Watanabe’s 2012 World Championship/Player’s Championship title, but he followed it up with 6th, 3rd, 10th and 16th-overall finishes in 2013, ’14, ’15, and ’16. What I’m saying is that Watanabe knows how to win at this event and while his performances may have declined the past few years, he cannot be discounted.
16-1 Seth Manfield, Shota Yasooka
It’s easy to forget that Manfield won this title in 2015 after a somewhat disappointing follow-up performance. This season Manfield roared back onto the scene finishing seventh in POTY standings with a PT top 8 and two GP top 8 finishes (a trend among the top players here).
Yasooka finished second to Watanabe in the 2012 Player’s Championship and then returned to the event for the first time last year to finish fourth overall. He’ll be the captain of Team Japan at the World Magic Cup later this year and has been a solid Pro Tour competitor this season.
20-1 William Jensen, Martin Muller, Gerry Thompson
Jensen has had a very impressive career but it’s almost certainly on its downswing. Like Reid Duke, Jensen finished the season with three GP top 8 finishes and no PT top 8 finishes. However, he also finished 20 points behind Duke in the POTY standings. Jensen certainly has enough gas left in the tank to compete, and I expect the team of Peach Garden Oath to do well this year on the Pro Tour Circuit, but I don’t see Jensen competing for the title in Boston this weekend.
Jensen might be the oldest player at the event this weekend, and Martin Muller is the youngest. Will his inexperience be a hinderance or will his youthful energy help him endure one of Magic’s most grueling tournaments? Muller has been a mainstay of high-level competition but has yet to secure an individual title.
If Jensen isn’t the oldest player on the tour it could be Gerry Thompson, who’s seemingly been around the Pro Tour since the days when Mark Rosewater was still a judge. Gerry had a good season that was wildly inconsistent including finishing first and dead last at different Pro Tour events. Very few people know deck building as well as Thompson, and he certainly deserves the good karma after donating proceeds from his Pro Tour victory (including auctioning off his deck and trophy) to Planned Parenthood.
25-1 Kelvin Chew, Javier Dominguez, Ken Yukuhiro
Chew had a great year on the Grand Prix circuit. Two top 8 finishes including one title. He picked up 26 total points towards his POTY total, the third most in the world behind only Marcio Carvalho and Reid Duke. But, and this is a big but, Chew does not perform well at the Pro Tour level. He picked up 35 points from Pro Tours, but his win percentage was only 54%.
Dominguez has a similar story to Chew having secured 20 points from Grand Prix events with two top 8 finishes to his name. He similarly struggled at the Pro Tour level which is usually a stronger indicator of success against other pro players. Dominguez’s best Pro Tour finish was 8-8. Expect a similar performance in Boston.
Yukuhiro finished the season with a PT top 8 and a GP top 8 to propel him to 13th in the POTY race. He’ll be making his first appearance at the World Championship and had a great, but not excellent season. He’ll be well-overshadowed by his fellow Japanese pros but he certainly can’t be counted out.
30-1 Sebastian Pozzo
Pozzo is the Standard Master but that’s only half the battle coming into the World Championship. Pozzo has no PT top 8 finishes and only one GP top 8 finish. Despite being one of the world’s preeminent Standard players, Pozzo only finished 30th in the POTY race.
40-1 Donald Smith, Josh Utter-Leyton
Here are some fun facts about Donald Smith, who finished 13th in the POTY race. He was the best of four players named Donald (Donald Liu 2,463rd, Donald Mason 4,114th, and Donald Fry 4,114th). He was the best of 24 players with the surname Smith (I’m not naming them all). Smith has no GP top 8’s which is both a strike against and a mark for him, as it highlights his strong performance on the Pro Tour itself.
No Pro Tour top 8 finishes. One Grand Prix top 8 finish and it was a title. 55th in the POTY race. Hall of Fame Induction pending at Pro Tour Ixalan. It’s been quite the up-and-down season for “Wrapter” but it’s hard to imagine it ending with a World Championship title for Josh, who finished as high as 4th place at the 2013 event.
50-1 Lee Shi Tian
Despite another great season with a PT top 8 and a GP top 8, Lee Shi Tian has been consistently very, very good but never really great. If he has been consistent at anything, it’s putting up poor performances at the World Championship, finishing 20th in 2015, 24th in 2014, and 15th (out of 16) in 2013. It’s hard to argue against Lee Shi Tian’s consistency, for better or for worse.
60-1 Lucas Esper Berthoud
Berthoud may be really good at Magic but he made it to the World Championship on the strength of a single Pro Tour Top 8 finish. In fact, his best GP finish this season was five wins. Berthoud finished the season as the 62nd ranked player in the world (the lowest among competitors at the World Championship) and isn’t strongly favored in Boston this weekend.
100-1Â Eric Froehlich
I’m not going to lie, I put Eric here to see if he’d tweet about it. Actually he had a great season and has pretty good odds to finish strong at the World Championship. If we’re being honest I should have given him 20-1 odds, but this is Hipsters of the Coast and Eric can take a joke.
Rich Stein isn’t a betting man but if he was he would bet on the star of Championship weekend to be whichever Wizards of the Coast employee says something revealing about Magic the Gathering Arena that they shouldn’t have said, causing the communications’ team’s collective heads to explode.