Mythic Championship II kicks off this Friday in London, England. Here’s everything you need to know about the first Modern Mythic Championship.
This is an excerpt from 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! And don’t forget to join our Mythic Championship II fantasy leagues over on Thousand Leagues!
The Event
Mythic Championship II London starts on Friday, April 2 at 9am local time (4am Eastern) and will end on Sunday, April 28. The tournament will take place at ExCel London and will be streamed live on twitch.tv/magic.
The winner of the Mythic Championship will take home $50k, while second place will be awarded $20k, third and fourth $15k, and fifth through eighth $10k. Players that finish in the Top 16 will receive $6k and the tournament will pay $500 to anyone placing lower than 120th.
The Players
546 players are invited to Mythic Championship II London, including the Top 16 of the Mythic Invitational and the 32 members of the Magic Pro League.
However, it is unclear if MPL member Owen Turtenwald will attend the event. Turtenwald was disinvited from the Mythic Invitational the day before it was set to begin and Kotaku later reported that he had been accused of having “exhibited a pattern of predatory behavior toward female Magic players.” However, Kotaku could not confirm if those accusations were the reason why Turtenwald was removed from the Mythic Invitational. It is unknown if Turtenwald has been suspended from Mythic Championship II as well (despite being on the invites list), if he is still a member of the MPL, or if he will continue to play professional Magic.
MPL member Rei Sato, on the other hand, will be attending the Mythic Championship II. Sato was also disinvited from the Mythic Invitational after being disqualified at Grand Prix Prague in January of this year for opportunistically cheating.
The Format
Mythic Championship II will feature two formats: three rounds of War of the Spark Limited and five rounds of Modern Constructed on Days 1 and 2, and Modern Constructed for the Top 8 single-elimination bracket.
The only problem is that the Mythic Championship is being held on War of the Spark’s prerelease weekend. This has created an extremely difficult situation for competitors that want to practice War of the Spark Limited before they sit down to draft the set Friday morning. The set’s full spoiler was only posted last Friday, a week before the event, and War of the Spark will become available on MTG Arena and MTGO on April 25th, the day before the event…but only with support for Sealed tournaments. With no official way to practice, many players have resorted to printing out proxies.
The Mythic Championship being on prerelease weekend will also affect the Modern Constructed format. Despite the fact that players will be playing with War of the Spark cards in the Limited portion of the event, the set will not be legal in the Modern portion since it officially releases a week later.
But those aren’t the only unusual rules that will be used at the Mythic Championship…
A New Mulligan Rule and Public Decklists
In February, Wizards of the Coast announced that it would be testing a new mulligan rule at Mythic Championship II. In London, players will draw seven cards every time they mulligan. When a player is satisfied and decides to keep their hand, they will put one card from their hand back on the bottom of their library for each time they chose to mulligan. Players will no longer scry after mulliganing.
The London Mulligan is intended an experiment for improving the mulligan process in order to reduce the number of non-games due to excessive mulligans. Wizards says that they will analyze the data and community feedback after the Mythic Championship and decide if the London Mulligan will be permanent or if Magic will stay with the current Vancouver Mulligan.
Just two weeks before the Mythic Championship, Wizards also informed playersthat their Modern decklists would be available to their opponents starting in Round 5. Wizards says that community feedback about the use of Twitch plugin CardboardLive, which displays each players’ full decklist, has been overwhelmingly positive, and that in order to level the playing field for players who get their decklists revealed publicly, they will make all decklists public starting in Round 5.
Either one of these changes would have a large impact on the tournament by itself—but the combination of the two, plus a prerelease Draft format, has led to some players grumbling about Mythic Championship II London being a giant experiment at the expense of the players.
The Fantasy Leagues
As usual, we’re running plenty of Mythic Championship fantasy leagues over on Thousand Leagues! You can enter one of our public leagues for the chance to win a Guilds of Ravnica Mythic Edition or some sweet Hipsters gear—or you can start your own league and invite your friends!