Lorwyn League: Week One
Eleven competitors gather to play three rounds of 60-card Magic in the back of a shop in south west England.
Walk into Bath TCG on any given Friday and you’ll find a shop full of Commander players shooting the shit. They form their pods and play out their games, cheering and yelling at each other as battles are won or lost. Every now and then, one of them will leave their seat and make their way to the far end of the shop, walking up a set of stairs and through a narrow doorway to the back room. The back room is lousy with unopened boxes, piles of coats and backpacks, and a non-functional TV hanging off the wall. There’s a door to a small bathroom, with a laminated sign that reads ‘wash your hands after your 0-2 drop’.
In front of the bathroom, sitting at the two short tables that crowd the back room, are the Standard players, competing in a ten-week tournament to test themselves and each other.
In short, here’s how it works: competitors in the league get three points for each match they win. If you go undefeated, that’s nine points for the week. At the end of the league, your seven best weeks make up your final score, and the winner gets a trophy in the form of a knitted pig.
The debut league finished on January 2nd. The next league is about to begin.
At just after 6PM, most people are already in the room. Eleven players show up for the inaugural session of the league; four of them are rookies, not new to Magic but new to the league, making their debut tonight. Every competitor has brought a different deck.
In the centre, an authoritative voice holds court on the versatility of sideboard options in Modern and how that shapes the format’s metagame. He then pivots to elaborate on the viability of his proxy Death and Taxes deck in an upcoming Legacy tournament. This is Sami, the Mono-White player.
Sami’s here to defend his title. He’s the current League Champion.
It’s hard to overstate Sami’s debut run. He kicked off the inaugural league with a 6-0 start, earning two undefeated weeks in a row. That put him in first place from the beginning and he never lost it. Whenever Sami turned up, he won at least two matches out of three, racking up 43 points by the end of the league to secure the knitted pig, a Flusterstorm promo, and a stack of booster packs the size of his head. He remains the only player to go undefeated in consecutive weeks. Sami is who everyone else’s performance is measured against.
If Sami is Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Alex is Monstrous Rage. Alex locked second place in the debut league with a plethora of aggro decks powered by basic Mountains. For Alex, the mission is simple: you each have twenty life and you want your opponent to hit zero before you do. If Sami wins by patiently disarming each threat you present, Alex wins by throwing a stick of dynamite into the air and seeing who’s still standing when the smoke clears. These two players defined the inaugural season: to beat Sami, you outperform him; to beat Alex, you outlast him.
For these two, and the other nine contenders, the start of a league night is a moment of equilibrium. In those moments - before the pairings are announced and the course of the night is set - everyone is undefeated.
Three hours later, there will be only one.
“Magic players!” says Kyan, honouring the tradition of the many people who’ve bellowed the phrase in the decades prior. “Round 1 pairings are up. We’re gonna do three rounds, best of three, 50 minutes. Any problems, shout. I’ll start the timer when I see you’ve all started. Good luck!”
Alex unlocks his phone. Martin stands next to him. Martin and Alex run the league; Martin’s mum knits the pig.
“Who you playing?” Martin asks as people around them take their seats, unroll their playmats and shuffle their decks.
Alex looks at the app. “Oh, shit.”
Martin looks over. “You’re cooked”, he says, and saunters off to face Roman, a rookie equipped with Izzet Lessons.
Alex walks to his seat and takes his place opposite Sami.
“Pregame actions?” Sami asks. Alex nods, placing a red Leyline of Resonance on to his Winnie The Pooh playmat. Sami smiles and matches it with his own free card - a white Leyline of Hope.
Leyline of Resonance copies the spells Alex casts on his own creatures; typically pump spells, letting him deal massive damage quickly. Sami’s Leyline gains him extra life and buffs all his creatures once he reaches 27 life or higher. But he needs time to play out his plan.
A minute later, when Alex plays his second land and casts his second creature, and Sami misses his second land drop, and then misses it again, the shape of the game becomes clear. Sami scoops up his cards. The first game is over in two turns.
Sami reaches for his sideboard.
While Alex and Sami battle for an early lead in the league, Martin loses to Roman and sits cross-legged on the floor ransacking bulk boxes for Pauper playables. In the distance, Commander damage is tracked; the one is paid; someone buys a collector booster and finds nothing of value.
It’s game three. Sami’s recovered from his two-turn loss and is threatening to take the entire match. Alex keeps hurling damage and Sami keeps gaining the life right back. He’s on 22 - two more than his starting total - with two huge angels in play. Alex has two Leylines on the board but no way of getting any damage through. He has to win this turn to survive.
As he begins his final turn, Alex’s deck offers him Twisted Fealty, a red ‘threaten’ spell that lets you temporarily steal an opponent’s creature.
In a last-ditch effort to close out the game, Alex casts the steal spell on his own creature.
Sami pauses, before reaching over to read the text of Leyline of Resonance.
Sami’s instinct is right. Alex’s play triggers the Leylines, giving him two more steal effects, which he uses to take both of Sami’s angels and send his entire board back at him. He sits back and leaves it to Sami to do the maths.
When the dust settles, Sami falls from 22 damage down to 3. They both agree that Alex did over 40 damage to Sami that game. But Sami lives, kills Alex on the crack-back, and secures his first three points for the board. Alex shakes his hand.
Round two pairings flash up. Alex is paired against Georgia, a Reanimator player; Sami is paired against Vasudef and his green Landfall deck; and Martin is paired against Stephen. It’s not the first time they’ve crossed paths.
While Sami and Alex occupied the top spots of the inaugural leaderboard, Stephen and Martin finished just below them, taking very different paths to get there. By the halfway point of the debut league, Stephen had turned up every week, consistently piloting his Temur Battlecrier combo deck to lock in his points and maintain third place in the standings. Martin, on the other hand, languished in last with just three points - a single match win - to his name.
In the latter half of the season, while Stephen continued to cruise in third, Martin retooled his Dimir Midrange deck and tore through the field in a monumental comeback. By the end of the penultimate week, with Sami locked for first and Alex locked for second, Martin and Stephen entered the final rounds of the season in an exact tie for third place. There were just three matches left to decide the bronze medal.
Martin and Stephen both won their first match, and then both lost their second match. In the final match of the league, they were paired against each other to break their tie. Stephen dispatched Martin 2-0 and took third place by three points.
Now they were facing each other again.
Next to Stephen, Georgia is fending off Alex’s aggro volley and resolving The Infamous Cruelclaw’s exile trigger. Martin and Stephen watch her rip through six lands off the top of her deck before hitting a nonland spell, revealing the game she could have had if Cruelclaw hadn’t connected. Next to them, Josh is borrowing Sami’s Azorius Flash deck to take on Roland, who’s brought something entirely new that nobody can quite make sense of. Alex sees black and white land sources on Roland’s board but all his cards are colorless; there’s a Sliver, an Eldrazi, a legendary equipment from Eldraine, and the spirit dragon Ugin from Tarkir. Alex asks Roland what he’s doing.
“I changed my deck,” he says.
Stephen, who lost to Roland in the first round, chuckles. “Don’t spoil the surprise.”
Stephen is pacing himself against Martin, assembling the pieces for his explosive one-turn combo. Martin’s hand is armed with Tishana’s Tidebinder, a flash creature with a ‘stifle’ effect - used to stop an ability from resolving. Stephen is stuck on land, playing a tapped Fabled Passage while Martin develops his board. The following turn, when Stephen tries to crack the fetchland to search his deck for a basic, Martin seizes the opportunity to spring the Tidebinder and fizzle the effect. The land goes to the graveyard, and Stephen is denied his land drop. Next turn, Stephen topdecks another tapped Fabled Passage, slowing him down further while Martin batters Stephen’s life total.
Martin wins that game, but loses the match. In the other games, Stephen’s combo is too fast, and doesn’t play enough threats for Martin to disrupt it. Stephen wins 2-1, and Martin’s league starts the same way the last one finished.
On Stephen’s left, Alex is in game two, out-aggro’d when Georgia casts Coiling Rebirth, a spell that reanimates a creature from the graveyard and then copies it. She targets Overlord of the Boilerbilges and deals lethal damage to Alex’s life total. But Alex shuffles up for game three and sends back an onslaught of Pawpatch Recruits and Stadium Headliners to win his first match of the night 2-1.
In the corner, Roland beats Josh with his colorless nonsense. And Sami beats Vasudef, putting him on track to lead two leagues in a row, until the final round pairings are revealed, and Sami finds out he’s paired against Dom.
In the inaugural league, Alex and Stephen showed up for all ten weeks of competition. Martin attended eight weeks. Sami made seven. Georgia made six. Dom only turned up for two, back-to-back in the early half of the season. Nonetheless, he won five of those six matches, put an undefeated score on the board, and achieved an overall winrate of 83%, the best of anyone - including Sami. In fact, Dom was only one win away from matching Sami’s consecutive undefeated performance and finishing the league with a perfect record. Consistent results over a ten-week season is all well and good until Dom walks in from nowhere like John Wick, killing everyone in his path and then disappearing back into the shadows wearing your points around his neck as a trophy.
Dom’s path to Sami tonight was assured when he beat Dan, another rookie making his mark by becoming the second person in the room to sleeve up The Infamous Cruelclaw for tournament Magic. Dom dispatched his demon deck 2-0, showing the room that The Unstoppable Slasher is, in fact, stoppable.
While Dom and Sami roll to see who’s going first, Roman is fighting Roland and his mystery colorless package. Roman is on Izzet Lessons, a proven meta-deck with a well-tested strategy, whereas Roland is doing whatever it is he’s doing. That might sound like trouble for the unknown deck, but it means Roland - knowing the popular strategies - can play around his opponent’s gameplan. For Roman to win, he has to do the same.
In the end, Roman sees that Roland is running a controlling ramp list designed to cast Ugin and use him to cheat out colorless powerhouses - Bahamut from Final Fantasy, Sire of Seven Deaths from Foundations, and others. While the cards are powerful, Roman manages to assemble a loop on his side of the table, repeatedly bouncing Roiling Dragonstorm to draw around sixteen cards and overwhelm his opponent with pure resource advantage. He beats Roland 2-1, becoming Roland’s only loss that night.
Sami and Dom are still facing off. Alex sits next to them, taking a kicking from Vasudef’s army of Treefolk, who block Slickshot Show-Off in the air. Alex loses his second match of the night.
Then Dom resolves a Badgermole Cub.
At the time of writing, 306 Magic players are in the midst of Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed, combining Lorwyn’s draft format with constructed Standard over three days of competition. Over 44% of those attending are playing a deck with a Badgermole Cub in it; no other card is seeing more play. The unassuming 2/2 mole lets you tap your creatures for extra mana, turns your lands into creatures to benefit from the boost, and thereby scales your resources up exponentially in just one or two turns. The pros have determined this to currently be the card most worth playing in Standard, with 548 copies of the mole taking to the tables in Virginia this weekend.
There’s only one Badgermole Cub in Dom’s deck, but he manages to draw it. As Sami tries to stabilise with his angels, Dom uses the power-multiplier Ouroboroid to increase the strength of his threats, smashing through the winged army with a trampling force on the ground.
“I can beat this deck,” says Sami, “but it’s not easy.”
Dom beats Sami 2-0, and becomes the Lorwyn League’s first undefeated player. He finishes with not just a 3-0 win, but a 100% game win record.
For the first time since the league was founded, Sami doesn’t have the lead.
There are nine weeks left.
