Over the weekend, Jessica Estephan and her teammates Ryan Lewis-Jonns and Lachlan Saunders won Grand Prix Sydney, making Estephan the first woman to win a Grand Prix in Magic’s 25-year history.
GP Sydney was a team event featuring Team Unified Modern, where each team of three built Modern-legal decks that couldn’t share any cards between them. Like many players, Lewis-Jonns played Humans, while Estephan piloted B/R Hollow One and Saunders Tron’d people out with Mono-Green Tron.
Estephan’s victory makes her the first woman to win a Grand Prix in Magic’s 25-year history. This puts her in the record books with the likes of Melissa deTora, who was the first woman to Top 8 a Pro Tour at PT Gatecrash in 2013 and finished second at GP Orlando in 2014.
There was another Modern GP over the weekend across the Pacific in Hartford, Connecticut, though GP Hartford was an individual event. Matt Nass took the tournament down with his Krark-Clan Ironworks combo deck. He was joined in the Top 8 by seven other (mostly) non-interactive combo decks: B/R Hollow One, Elves, Burn, Amulet Titan, Affinity, and two Bogles decks.
Finally, Wizards of the Coast announced that there would be no changes to the Banned and Restricted list this morning. The announcement disappointed a vocal portion of the Legacy community that has been lobbying for Deathrite Shaman to be banned as it has allowed four-color decks to proliferate in the format. The next B&R announcement will be on Monday, July 2.
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Read Wizards’ B&R announcement here.