Hearthstone Champion Stansilav Cifka Returns to Magic: The Gathering

The Magic: The Gathering Mythic Championship V tournament is happening this weekend (October 18-20). During the three-day tournament, 68 MTG players will compete for a $750,000 prize pool in Long Beach, California at Thunder Studios, and among those 68 players is the 31-year-old former Czech Hearthstone champion Stansilav "StanCifka" Cifka.

Credit: Wizards of the Coast

Back in August, Cifka and his teammate Ondrej Strasky made Top 16 at the Mythic Championship Qualifier to earn their spots for this weekend's MCV, and they surprised the Standard competition with a combo-focused homebrew deck called "Four-Colored Legeds" AKA "Kethis Combo", a deck that plays "Kethis, the Hidden Hand" with a bunch of legendary spells to win the game. Just in case you haven't seen the strategy, you can watch me play Cifka's deck in the video below:

Cifka's qualification for the Mythic Championship V marks his return to the MTG pro scene. While Hearthstone fans would recognize Cifka as the player who earned the Czech national team a first-place championship win at the Hearthstone Global Games in 2017, in MTG, he is best known for winning Magic's Pro Tour Return to Ravnica in 2012. Cifka and his team of roomates Strasky and Ivan Floch also had their share of challenges in Magic Arena. During an interview with DoT Esports, he said:

"When I started on MTG Arena it was essentially from ground zero, […] Recently I'm living in the same house as Stráský and Floch. They're playing a lot of Magic and doing it professionally, so I decided we could play the game together as a way to share ideas."

You can watch how this deck runs in the video below:

Cifka and his team tried to qualify for Mythic Championship III with the four-colored "Command the Dreadhorde" Standard deck but sadly, they did not qualify, but I'm glad they were able to dominate the MCQ back in August with a spicy brew to qualify for MCV. Of course, they can't use the same "Four-Colored Legends" deck in MCV since some of the cards from that deck have already rotated out of Standard format and the meta has significantly changed since the release of Throne of Eldraine, but I'm looking forward to see what they will brew for the major MTG event.

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