Austin Bursavich Wins the 2020 Season Grand Finals

Austin Bursavich won the 2020 Season Grand Finals Sunday night, defeating Aaron Gertler in the finals two matches to zero in one of the weekend’s many Omnath Adventures mirrors.

The Grand Finals was a split-format event that featured both Standard and Historic, three rounds of each on both Days 1 and 2, with the Top 8 being Standard. Bursavich, along with the majority of the 32-player field, brought Omnath Adventures in Standard. He also chose to play an Omnath, Locus of Creation deck in Historic in the form of Omnath Ramp, as did ten other players.

Bursavich finished the Swiss rounds in first place at 11-1. He was joined in the Top 8 by Autumn Burchett (Gruul Adventures in Standard/Omnath Ramp in Historic), Patrick Fernandes (Omnath Adventures/Omnath Ramp), Aaron Gertler (Omnath Adventures/Omnath Ramp), Emma Handy (Gruul Adventures/Omnath Ramp), Raphaël Lévy (Omnath Adventures/Four-Color Midrange), Seth Manfield (Dimir Rogues/Jund Sacrifice), and Gabriel Nassif (Omnath Adventures/Four-Color Midrange).

The Top 8 bracket at the 2020 Season Grand Finals.

Bursavich was paired against the eighth seed, Lévy, for a Omnath Adventures mirror in the upper bracket quarterfinals. Lévy beat him in two games, dropping Bursavich to the lower bracket and a loss away from being eliminated. He proceeded to eliminate half of the bracket himself, including winning his rematch with Lévy, on his way to face Gertler in the best-of-three match finals.

Gertler, who was also on Omnath Adventures, had a much easier path to the finals by going undefeated in the upper bracket. But he lost a competitive first match to Bursavich 2-0 and then couldn’t find a third land to open the second match, quickly putting Bursavich a game away from victory. Gertler finally got on the board by winning the second game of Match 2, but Bursavich won the third game, match, and Grand Finals in the way he’d be winning all day—by Flinging a giant creature at his opponent for lethal.

Omnath Dominates Both Formats

The release of Zendikar Rising, Magic’s newest set, two weeks ago was accompanied by the annual rotation of Standard where four sets—Guilds of Ravnica, Ravnica Allegiance, War of the Spark, and Core Set 2020—left the format.

The weeks following rotation is traditionally an exciting time in which the format is wide open for new decks. But it only took three days for Wizards to recognize that the Standard format had already coalesced around a dominant deck: Four-Color Omnath, featuring Omnath, Locus of Creation from Zendikar Rising. They decided to ban Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath in order to weaken the archetype, while leaving its namesake card—a brand new mythic—untouched.

It’s unclear how much Wizards thought banning Uro would weaken Omnath decks heading into the Grand Finals. Despite the ban, over 70% of players registered either Omnath Adventures (59.4%) or Omnath Ramp (12.5%) for the Standard rounds of the 2020 Grand Finals.

The Standard metagame at the 2020 Season Grand Finals.

Even more impressive was the fact that 30 out of the 32 players registered Bonecrusher Giant in their deck.

Omnath wasn’t satisfied with merely taking over Standard, though. It also made its way to Historic, where the core of the Standard Omnath Ramp deck was augmented by banned-in-Standard Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath and banned-in-pre-rotation-Standard Growth Spiral.

The Historic metagame at the 2020 Season Grand Finals.

Historic Omnath ramp replaced Muxus Goblins in the Historic metagame, which was the most popular deck at the previous Historic event, last month’s Mythic Invitational. Both Jund Sacrifice and Four-Color Midrange (Sultai Midrange splashing White for Yasharn, Implacable Earth) remained the second and third most popular archetypes.

After the Grand Finals ended, Wizards tweeted Sunday night that they would be making another Banned and Restricted list update on Monday morning. Last week, “we indicated that we would continue monitoring the evolution of the Standard and Historic metagames, making further changes if necessary,” they said. “Following this weekend’s tournament results and analysis of play data over the last few weeks, there will be an update tomorrow impacting Standard, Historic, and Brawl.”

UPDATE: Wizards banned Omnath, Locus of Creation, Lucky Clover, and Escape to the Wilds in Standard and suspended Omnath, Locus of Creation in Historic.

The Conclusion of an Upended Season

The Grand Finals marks the end of the 2020 partial season, a season that ended up looking significantly different than the one Wizards of the Coast had originally envisioned.

Originally, the season was intended to serve as an eight-month bridge to the September-August 2020-21 season. That full season would embrace the new organized play structure of three Players Tours and three Mythic Invitationals per year. That system was to make its debut during the partial season with two Players Tours, two Players Tour Finals, and two Mythic Invitationals.

Players Tour Series 1 was held in-person at the end of January and beginning of February, after which the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic forced Wizards to cancel the rest of the 2020 season and restructure the remaining events into a single Players Tour and Mythic Invitational that culminated in this weekend’s Grand Finals. The impacts of COVID-19 will also extend the 2020-21 season, which will scrap the new Players Tour system for shorter, set-based championships, the first of which will be this Fall’s Zendikar Rising Championship.