In 2006, I told my father that I regretted being born (in 1993).

“I could have been a successful Magic player. But by the time I’m old enough to travel and buy cards, I don’t think the game will be around anymore. I wish I were older.”

“You wish you were older… so you could play… professional Magic: the Gathering?”

It seems unfair that he’d be so incredulous; he is a titled chess master.¹ But he had a point: “professional Magic: the Gathering player” is about as reliable a career plan as “professional ice cream taster”.

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In 2020, I became a professional Magic: the Gathering player.

I hit rank #1 on the online ladder, won a major tournament, and reached the finals of the world championship. Over 100,000 people watched me play on my stream and Magic’s official channels. I made $55,000.

At the height of my power, I was responsible for the banning of multiple cards² Magic’s parent company offered me a job testing new cards to make sure they weren’t too good. I stuck with professional effective altruism, which may be the greatest sacrifice I’ll ever make for the sake of impartial utility.

In 2022, I dropped off the pro circuit. In 2024, I stopped streaming. I may never play another big event; it takes time to qualify, and time is more expensive with each passing year.

But I’m glad I got to live those years, and people often ask about them. This post goes out to everyone curious about pro gaming — and to the version of me who will read this in 2046 to recover those memories.

What it was like

These are the highlights. In “Extra Materials”, I talk about my path to the pros and what it takes to be good.

Money

I played in five professional tournaments from February 2020—March 2022, earning $70,000. This amounts to something like $23 an hour — and I was one of the world’s winningest players over that span. It’s almost impossible to live off Magic earnings. But I also had a job, so most of my winnings (after taxes) went to charity.³

I also streamed ~20 hours a month for five years. Over that span, people watched me for 150,000 hours, and I made around $5,000. That’s not the usual rate: I wasn’t soliciting subscriptions or donations, and I didn’t run ads. But it’s a tough road even if you pull out all the stops — Magic’s fanbase only supports a few dozen full-time creators.

Preparation

In most esports, you can survive by excelling at one or two specific things: Marth in Smash, Zerg in Starcraft, Thresh in League. But Magic is always moving. New cards come out every few months, and people devise new strategies weekly to beat whatever was winning last week (we call this “metagaming”). At the highest level, choosing the right strategy (“deck”) matters almost as much as playing well.

Before most tournaments, I worked with a team of 10-20 people over multiple weeks. The pressure, long hours, and constant competition were great for bonding — and the occasional schism.⁴ We’d practice in secret, trying to puzzle out which deck would beat the decks we expected other teams to bring (knowing they were doing the same).⁵

When I wasn’t prepping for a tournament, I still played several hours a day — devising new strategies, entering small events, and testing decks I might use later. Ahead of the world championship, I learned that I’d played more Arena matches than any other competitor, including many who (through a now-defunct program) received a full-time salary to stream and compete in private tournaments. Looking back, this wasn’t healthy: I cut back on reading, lifting, journaling, and friendship. But I made the finals.

Stress

I sort games by tempo and certainty. Chess demands one decision every few minutes with perfect information. Starcraft, multiple decisions per second in the fog of war.

Magic’s in the middle: one decision every few seconds, just enough guessing to keep things interesting. It’s fun — when you can afford mistakes. Professional opponents punish mistakes.

The bodily experience of Magic:

• After the tenth round of my first serious tournament, I had the worst headache of my life.
• In my first widely-streamed professional match, Twitch chat noticed me hyperventilating.
• Nerves empty my stomach. I used the restroom after most rounds. I knew one player who soiled himself mid-match.
• During matches, my teeth sometimes chatter with tension. I whistle to release it. When you do this at a virtual tournament, and forget your webcam is being streamed, you make a kissy face at 10,000 people for 20 minutes.

I cared a lot about those matches, and my body knew it. But I felt very calm. My insane amounts of practice let me automate most decisions, and I favored unusual decks that broke my opponents’ patterns, forcing them to think — and make mistakes.⁶

When you play on stage, in front of a big screen, you get white-noise headphones to keep the audience from spoiling your opponent’s hand. I’d never felt such an intense flow state: total focus, use your training, play to your outs. Peace. (Sponsored by Monster Energy.)

Culture

Magic is old enough to have legends: people I’ve followed since childhood, people I’ve come to know through dozens of strategy articles or YouTube videos. It’s also new enough that its legends are (mostly) still active. In the same tournament, you might see both Seth Manfield (prime LeBron) and Kai Budde (an aging but potent Bill Russell).⁷

Professional Magic is roughly the size of the NBA. Several hundred players consistently show up at top events. Every year, a few step away from the game while thousands fight to replace them. Everyone knows everyone — they are your teammates, rivals, fellow gamblers, and roommates in motels across America. They’ve seen your streams and read your posts. They understand your jokes. If you’re ever in Richmond, you can sleep on their couch.

Unlike the NBA, Magic doesn’t pay its players much. Almost everyone has a day job; many pros live with parents or roommates. Cards are so expensive that even the most dedicated players borrow decks from each other.⁸

The vibes are good: sportsmanship, camaraderie, everyone bonding over the same weird hobby. You don’t see many assholes at the top; teams are too important, and antisocial people tend to cheer up at Magic tournaments. (Otherwise, why go?) The occasional cheater is reviled to a degree I’ve never seen in professional sports.⁹

Finale

The most relaxing match I remember was the world championship final. My opponent, Austin Bursavich, was my teammate; we were playing the same deck. (No schism.) Whatever the outcome, we’d already won. I’d beaten him at Dreamhack; if this were his movie, he’d get revenge.

It turned out to be his movie. When he killed three Edgewall Innkeepers with a single Blazing Volley, I made the Home Alone face for all the fans.¹⁰ Then he took the trophy and the biggest check home to his daughters.

Random anecdotes

• I once played in an invite-only event organized by four-time All-Star Hunter Pence.
• A big Magic website is running a March Madness-style tournament featuring 64 of the most famous decks ever built. One of them is mine.
• Even years later, I sometimes get recognized at local game stores — but not often. Most casual players don’t watch tournaments, and my career was brief.
• After I turned pro, my wife taught herself to play and briefly went viral for getting pretty good ridiculously fast. People accused me of playing on her account; they were wrong.
• My wife sold some textbooks; the buyer brought her boyfriend to pick them up. He recognized my wife’s name from Reddit and wanted to meet me.
• Random people from my past turned out to be Magic fans. The CEO of a company I temped for asked me for a match; it never came together.
• At a conference, I spoke with a leading expert on nuclear weapons policy. After a grim discussion of atomic annihilation, he asked, out of the blue: “Do you know Marshall and Luis?” (Alas, not really.)

Extra materials

My path to professional Magic

I played Magic very badly from 2005 through 2008. I couldn’t afford many cards, I didn’t know good players, and I was still learning to use my brain.

I started again in 2015, after graduating and moving to a city of strangers. I could afford the cards and my fluid intelligence had peaked. I could watch good players online. But my skills remained medium at best. I perceived a massive gulf between myself and the pros on YouTube, and saw no reason to begin the deliberate practice that would bridge it.

In 2019, MTG Arena launched. Unlike the previous online game, it used a ladder system: if you reached the top 1200, you’d see your rank.

The ladder turned me into a maniac. I played six hours a day. I built fifty decks in three months, grasping for any edge that would boost my numbers. I now had a goal I could reach. I knew I wasn’t a pro, but it was still thrilling to imagine that I was one of the top 1000 players.

One of the top 100 players. One of the top 10 players. The top player.

I now had evidence that I was good. I didn’t know what to do with that information.

Coincidentally, a Facebook acquaintance turned out to be a Hearthstone streamer who was… forming a Magic team. We all have that friend, right?

He threw me into a Discord channel where I could, for the first time, practice with strong players. They tried my weird decks and made productive suggestions. They exposed weaknesses that ladder players mostly missed. I built another top deck, then another. My Reddit posts began to get attention; I saw pros use decks I’d built in matches with actual money on the line.

All of this together finally pushed me to enter a serious tournament, alongside my teammates. I won.

How to reach rank #1 on the MTG Arena ladder

Be unusually good at:

• Solving a small puzzle every few seconds.
• Being creative without descending into madness.
• Getting addicted to brief risk-reward cycles with minimal, but positive, expected value.

And then add:

• Ample free time: My natural predators were burning the midnight oil at Jane Street.
• Soft competition: Most pros practice with teammates instead of clobbering random scrubs on the ladder.
• Genetics: Thanks, Dad!

That should buy you at least a month, if you keep playing and don’t let anyone pass you.

Does rank #1 make you the best player in the world?

No.

• There are many ways to play Magic (“formats”), and Arena doesn’t cover all of them.
• The ranks can be gamed. The most consistent rank #1 player boosts his winrate by choosing obscure formats with few serious opponents.¹¹
• There’s no incentive, aside from pride (and YouTube views), to actually reach #1. You don’t win anything extra.¹²

But for all that, being #1 still means winning ~80% of your matches. That’s very hard in a game with Magic’s variance.

And rankings do have predictive power. When I won my first tournament (a field of 100 players), I was rank #1 on Arena, and my last three opponents were rank #2 on Arena and ranks #1 and #2 in live tournaments.

Storybook Brawl

After I left the pro circuit, I took a break from Magic to focus on Storybook Brawl — an indie autobattler designed by Magic players. It was a very different game, but I could still apply what I’d learned about deliberate practice and creative strategy. After nine months, I was one of the game’s best players.

Normally, “best player in a tiny indie game” wouldn’t mean much. But Storybook Brawl had an edge: it was loved by a wealthy celebrity, one of the richest men in the world. He loved the game so much he played it during Zoom meetings. He loved it so much he bought the company! He began to invest his nigh-unlimited resources in new features, better art, and a world championship with serious prizes — to be hosted at his company’s headquarters, in the Bahamas.

Unfortunately, that celebrity was Sam Bankman-Fried, and one day in November 2022, Storybook Brawl met the same fate as the rest of FTX. I’ve still never been to the Bahamas.

1. His career is full of obscure fun facts that would make sense to chess people. For everyone else, the most salient is that he and Tyler Cowen once played on the same team.
2. There are only so many cards, and the good ones eventually break through. If it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else. But it was me.
3. I was public about my giving; one of my fans anonymously matched a $15,000 donation to GiveWell.
4. Two half-teams, both alike in dignity // one playing Blue and Black, the other White // “Aaron’s brain is smooth, Blue-Black is trash.” // “We’ll know who made the right call soon enough.” // Alas, ’twas Jonny Guttman proved correct.
5. Decks often have lopsided matchups; you show up with paper and hope no one brought scissors. But if you’re lucky, you discover a secret fourth thing that has a 70% matchup against both paper and scissors.
6. I won the hyperventilation match. My opponent’s post-match Tweet translated from Japanese: “It was impossible after all.”
7. In this metaphor, I’m Jeremy Lin — burned bright and fast, made the fans cheer, Ivy League degree.
8. Though some have been around long enough to have collections they could trade for a house.
9. I could write a full essay on this, but in short: the hatred combines frontier justice (most matches aren’t watched by judges; we self-police), deterrence theory (most cheaters aren’t caught; those who are become symbols), and the way Magic cheating negates skill (steroids wouldn’t turn me into Barry Bonds, but a weak Magic player can dominate pros with the right shuffling tricks).
10. They were struggling: mirror matches are bland, and our decks were boring and broken, bound for a ban.
11. That said, I like his channel: he’s a sharp deckbuilder, and it’s fun to see someone break weird cards.
12. There was a brief period where a top-10 finish would qualify you for a major tournament; the competition was much stronger.