Welcome to this week’s Hipsters Weekly MTG Newsletter. Every Monday, we tell you know what you need to know about the week’s most important Magic news. Subscribe here!
Jose Echeverria Wins GP Sao Paulo with Mardu Pyromancer
Over 1,500 players came to Sao Paulo to play Modern over the weekend, and Jose Echeverria won the tournament with Mardu Pyromancer, defeating Leonardo Giucci’s Abzan Traverse deck in the finals.
Echeverria was joined in the Top 8 by a second copy of Mardu Pyromancer, an Affinity player, an Abzan deck, plus 16 copies of Ancient Stirrings: four copies each in two Tron decks, an Eldrazi deck, and a Krark-Clan Ironworks deck. Aside from the unsurprising success of the green Ponder, Sao Paulo’s metagame looked very diverse and showed the surprising popularity of Young Pyromancer:
The 2018 SDCC Promos Were Painted by Terese Nielsen and Look Amazing
On Tuesday, IGN revealed this year’s exclusive San Diego Comic-Con promos, which were painted by fan-favorite artist Terese Nielsen.
This year’s promos feature the same familiar characters, but this time they are positioned in front of stained glass images of historical figures that came before them. Allison Luhrs, narrative Designer for Wizards of the Coast, explained their relationships on Twitter: Chandra stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Jaya Ballard, Gideon with Serra, Jace turning his back on Urza, Liliana with a looming Nicol Bolas, and Nissa with Freyalise.
Not only do the promos honor characters from Magic’s past, but they also honor a popular member of the Magic community who is unfortunately also part of Magic’s past. Nielsen noted on Twitter that cosplayer Christine Sprankle modeled for the paintings, resulting in a Nissa that looks very similar to Sprankle.
1v1 Brawl Rules Updates
Wizards announced some important rules updates to the brand-new Brawl format this morning. 1v1 starting lifetotals will now be 25 life (down from the 30 that was originally announced, but up from the 20 that Wizards tried two months ago) and 1v1 games now come with a free first mulligan.
Other interesting notes from the announcement include that 20% of players surveyed play Brawl, Wizards is trying to design sets to make sure that each color pair has a playable commander, and Brawl will continue to use the Standard card pool, meaning that rotation will come to the format in October with the Guilds of Ravnica.
Odds and Ends
- M19 prerelease events are live on MTGO!
- The Art of Dominaria book is out and available for purchase.
- New card backs showed up on MTGO last week.
- Sandro broke down the post-ban winners and losers in Legacy.
- Kendra hit 1k followers on Twitch this weekend! Give her a follow!
Thanks for reading!
Your friendly neighborhood robot,
David McCoy (@dmccoy)
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