The MKM Series 2015 SuperFinals are in the books!

The 32 most successful competitors of last year's competition all qualified for our annual SuperFinals. They were battling it out at the second stop of the MKM Series in 2016 in Frankfurt, Germany. The winners of the knock out style tournaments were all rewarded with a lucrative MKM Sponsoring contract.

More than just a prestigious prize, the contract would allow many of the victors to attend even more exciting Magic events in the future. All sponsored players will receive MKM branded gear, gaming materials as well as prize money for popping up in the coverage and doing well. On top of all that, there are even more MKM vouchers on the line to make up for the disappointment of not coming in first.

The field was stacked with elite competitors, many of which had amassed several Top 8 results in the events leading up to our finals. Below, you can find all winners of the 2015 SuperFinals.

To learn more about their past performances, simply check out our coverage archive.

Standard SuperFinals

Julien Berteaux never expected to find himself an MKM Series champion, much less the MKM Series Superfinals champion, when he attended last year's MKM Series Toulouse. “I basically just went because a friend of mine had booked a hotel but then couldn't go and asked me to take his place,” said Berteaux. Then he won the Standard main event with Red-Green Dragons, qualified for this year's Standard Superfinals, and the rest was history …

Usually, the 32-year-old Frenchman, who began playing with Ice Age, attends all of the European Grand Prix events and a lot of PPTQs. “I play as much as possible to get back onto the Pro Tour,” said Berteaux. “I played a couple of Pro Tours before, in Dublin and Portland.”

Between this and the MKM Series, his was quite a busy schedule. In fact, he mentioned that a scheduling conflict with a WMCQ might lead him to miss MKM Series Madrid later this year. “But if I win the first WMCQ, I'll definitely be there!” he promised. “The MKM Series is cool.”

Berteaux said he didn't play a lot of older formats, mainly focusing on Sealed Deck and Standard. For the MKM Series Superfinals he chose the Standard mainstay of Green-White Tokens. In the quarterfinals, he faced a Mardu Control player who commanded an abundance of removal spells but too little discard. “The best card in the match was Dromoka's Command,” said Berteaux. “At least two times, I was able to stop Radiant Flames with it. Of course it does nothing against Languish.”

In the semifinals, he needed to defeat White-Black Control, and did so. “Though he made quite a mistake,” Berteaux chuckled at the memory. “On turn two, he cast Duress, wrote down the cards in my hand, took a while to decide what to discard … and eventually passed the turn. He only realized that he forgot to play a land on his next turn! So now he cast every spell one turn later and that cost him the game.”

Obviously, on the fourth day of the event, some fatigue was to be expected. But Berteaux had to be alert for the finals of the Superfinals. Because, here, he met a veritable end boss in fellow Frenchman Eliott Boussaud. Berteaux, in ironic understatement, called the GP and multiple MKM Series champion “quite a solid player.”

Berteaux had also been impressed with Boussaud's deck, especially his sideboarded Eldrazi Obligators, but said, “Dromoka's Command was absurd against him. The combination of Avacyn plus Command was too much for him.”

“I enjoyed our match,” said Boussaud. “The win was well-deserved.”

The Winner's Decklist:

Bonus: The Finalist's Decklist:

Vintage SuperFinals

When a very young looking man was send my way to do a winners interview, I naturally figured he would be the winner of our Standard SuperFinals. I could not have been more wrong, as he was the winner of the Vintage SuperFinals instead! The young man was Tomáš Már, who had won the event with a tempo deck homebrew.

Being well-known for developing the 4-color Delver deck in Legacy, Tomáš Már is obviously more of a Legacy specialist than a Vintage veteran. Last year he made the cut to Top 8 at our Vintage event in Rome with a similar tempo deck though.

He is not even 20 years old, which means that some of the cards he was playing with had been printed before he was born! He is a friend of aspiring professional player Petr Sochůrek, and claims to be the deck designer behind some of the decks we saw Sochůrek pilot to great success. Yesterday Sochůrek barely missed the Top 8 cut in the Legacy main event when he finished in 9th place while using the exact same list as Tomas.

Már began collecting Magic cards when he was just 5 years old, and started playing about 3 years later when he could read and understand all the cards. Given this early start as a player, his great success today is much less of a surprise than his young age might suggest at first. We expect to cover many more success stories of Tomáš in the near future!

The Winner's Decklist:

Legacy SuperFinals

Artur Panfilow, who advanced to the semifinals at MKM Series Prague last year, had to go up against Julian Knab and his trusted Elves deck in the all-deciding match of our Legacy SuperFinals! Both players agreed that it were some of the best Legacy matches they've played in a very long time with Artur coming out on top!

In the quarterfinals, Panfilow had to overcome furious opposition in the form of Grixis Delver and he was forced to provide his opponent with a window of opportunity to win the game several times. Still, thanks to his opponent lacking the right cards, he came out on top, advancing to the semifinals. There, he beat an Eldrazi player, which is one of the more favorable match-ups for his Lands deck. It was an excellent event and all participants had a great time duking it out for the greatest prize of them all.

While Panfilow hasn't played as much Magic as he wanted to in recent months, his brand new MKM sponsoring contract might help him free up some time in his schedule to add a few more impressive finishes in his preferred format of Legacy.

His additional preparation where he tried to guess the archetypes his opponent's would rely on prior to the tournament (Knab did the same) paid huge dividends; congratulations again to Poland's own Artur Panfilow, the winner of the 2015 MKM Series Standard SuperFinals!

The Winner's Decklist:

Modern SuperFinals

In the last match of the Modern SuperFinals, two MKM Series regulars were duking it out among themselves. It was Andreas Dippon, a two-time Top 8 competitor at the MKM Series (in 2 different formats!) against Tim van der Lans.
It was their third and last chance of the day to walk away with the prestigious title of SuperFinals Champion; Dippon had earlier already participated in the Standard and Legacy SuperFinals while van der Lans had qualified for Vintage, Legacy and Modern.

Tim van der Lans took the first game with his Ad Nauseam deck and when he had successfully drawn into most of his deck in the second game, he already started celebrating. With several counters in hand, he thought there was nothing that Dippon's aggressive Red-White Deck could throw at him, but that was before the German revealed Angel's Grace.
Van der Lans got defeated by one of his own cards; one that he totally did not expect in this match-up. It took him a little while to find his focus again after that surprising defeat, but in the end, he persevered in the final game of the day and walked away victorious!

So far, van der Lans had successfully flown under the radar of our coverage team. While he did attend many of the past MKM Series events, he always missed the Top 8 by a notch. That didn't prevent him from collecting a lot of points for the SuperFinals, though, showcasing that it always pays out to attend the MKM Series, even if you're not among the final 8!

Today, he collected more than 350 € in prizes (most competitors in the MKM SuperFinals decided to split all the prize money) and he didn't even have to pay any entry fees. Add a Top 16 finish in Saturday's Modern event and you can quickly call the weekend a stunning success for the Dutch player!

Van der Lans told me that he's a big fan of the MKM and the BoM tournament series. While there are a number of bigger events in Italy and Spain, it's hard to find similar opportunities in the Netherlands. That's why he started making trips to the events that MKM sponsored and often, he had to go all by himself as his friends didn't feel like joining him.

I made a lot of friends on the (MKM) Series; I was often hanging out with the Danish and German players in the evenings, grabbing dinner together. It's been a great experience and I always come back to these events as I can expect to see a couple of friends.

Now more motivated than ever, we expect to see Tim van der Lans again at one of the future events of the MKM Series. Since a group of friends joined him this weekend and they have seen him do well, I wouldn't be surprised to see a little spike in the number of Dutch attendees.

The Winner's Decklist:

MKM Series 2015 Leaderboard: