Category: tournament bracket

CardMarket’s “Quest for the Best Deck Ever”

In 2023, CardMarket launched a series on their YouTube channel where they played only the winning World Championship decks against each other. This is a little different than the tournaments we do here, but it’s close enough that we included the results in our data. The main difference is that several of the World Championships were held at the beginning of a block cycle, when the card pool was not at its largest. Often, although not always, the decks from the summertime, when the card pool is largest, are a little stronger than the decks from the fall. But it was still an interesting exercise. Results shown below. The way they did it is they did a swiss portion, then cut to top 8. They didn’t share their swiss portion results, so all we have is the top 8.

Winner: 2018 Hazored (Worlds)

2nd place: 2017 Temur Energy (Worlds)

2015 Jambarama Tournament

A guy on reddit named Jambarama told me about this single elimination tournament they did, only using the old gold bordered World Championship collectible decks. Here are the results!
Winner: 2002 Psychatog
2nd place: 2008 Faeries

2014 Eternal Weekend

Academy and Memory Jar both retired / not invited.
Double elimination except for the final: this time we did a loser’s bracket, but the winner of the loser’s bracket took 2nd place without challenging the undefeated winner of the winner’s bracket. So Swans had a good run but lost to Delver and Shrine Red.
Winner: 2012 UW Delver
2nd place: 2011 Shrine Red

2013 Eternal Weekend

Double Elimination. Academy retired.
Since the Tolarian Academy deck had won Chingsung’s tournament and the Pax Prime tournament, I decided to retire it “to the hall of fame” and see if Memory Jar could win a 2nd time without Academy in the way. I put up a sign that read “What’s the 2nd best standard deck of all time?!!!” and players who bombed out of the main event would come over and play a match or two.
Winner: 1999 Memory Jar
Runner-Up: 2010 CawBlade

The first tournament: “World Cup 1” (2006)

This tournament only included my gold-bordered World Championship decks, the 1996 Pro Tour commemorative decks, and “Deckmasters: Garfield vs Finkel” decks. I do recall that in the semis, Psychatog resolved Upheaval only to have Ghazi-Glare drop a land and play Pithing Needle naming Psychatog.