World Championship Player Interview: MIT Round 11 Champion Lee Shi Tian

Note: This article was translated from Chinese by AI and may contain errors. Read the original Chinese version.

Let’s get started!

For this interview, we invited Lee Shi Tian from Hong Kong. Besides winning MIT Round 11, he is better known for being inducted into the Pro Tour Hall of Fame in 2018, and is regarded as the most successful Asian player outside Japan; he remains active at major events today. We are honored to be able to interview him today!

Q1: Before we start, congratulations on qualifying for the 2026 World Championship at MIT! Let’s first go back to the scene of the MIT Round 11 finals. How did you feel in that final showdown?

Lee Shi Tian: I really feel quite lucky. I happened to be in Taiwan on business and ran into MIT Round 11, so I entered while I was here. That time Mono-White Momo popped up, and the Dimir Demon I picked is quite good against Mono-White, so it suited the metagame at the time. Although there were some Mono-Green Landfall decks at the event, I managed to beat them in the end too, so it worked out fine.

Q2: What deck did you play at the time? Why did you choose this deck?

Lee Shi Tian: Actually, I just asked in Worldly Counsel a few days before the tournament. I have a team in the Pro Tour, and some of them were practicing for the RC (Regional Championship), so I asked them whether there was a better deck. At that time they thought Izzet Prowess with the Crab was good, but I didn’t like it very much. In the end I suddenly found another player who played Dimir Demon, and he said Demon was actually pretty good. Because I had played it for a while before and also thought Demon was quite good, I adjusted it a bit and took it to the tournament.

Q3: When you chose Dimir Demon, what were your expectations for the tournament metagame? Did you foresee the Mono-White Momo that surged in the week before the tournament?

Lee Shi Tian: I thought the probability was quite high, and many of the other decks were also creature-based. Besides Mono-White Momo, Mono-Green Landfall, Prowess, and five-color or Simic Rhythm all have many creatures too. So in the end I brought 6 sweepers: 2 five-mana 5/4 Harvester of Misery that can give -2/-2 when they enter, plus 2 each of Day of Black Sun and Deadly Cover-Up, and Harvester can also be reused with Superior Spider-Man. As it turned out, I really did run into many creature-based matchups.

Q4: Next, I’d like to talk about deck building. After the tournament I bought the Guide you wrote, and after reading the whole thing, what I’m curious about is this: at the time Demon wasn’t a hot pick and its results weren’t top-tier, so what made you so sure it could be a championship deck?

Lee Shi Tian: Many people think Demon is a Combo Deck, but in my experience, a lot of the time a 4/4 or 5/5 creature is enough to kill the opponent. The opponent may misjudge, thinking they must remove my Demon, but in playing it I found that I can take Demon out in the sideboard and turn into a midrange deck that’s very good at grinding through resources. My sideboard has Oildeep Gearhulk and Quantum Riddler, and against slow decks I have many different sources of card advantage; against aggro I just take Demon out, and if the opponent hasn’t prepared their sideboard well enough, it’s easy for them to go in the wrong direction. In addition, my 75 cards have many modules that can be swapped in and out to adjust into different types. I can be a Combo Deck, a Midrange Deck, or a Control Deck. The deck has removal, draw, big creatures, and combo, everything, so it’s extremely flexible.

Interviewer: That sounds truly amazing. Through sideboarding, the whole 75 becomes almost an all-in-one deck!

Lee Shi Tian: Yes, and because it was an open decklist, I knew how to mulligan in game 1. In some matchups I have to combo very quickly, and in some matchups I can win just by sweeping the board and throwing out removal, so it feels pretty good.

Interviewer: When you first got the Demon prototype deck, it must have been quite different from the version you took to MIT. Did you choose to bring these creatures after adjusting and specializing the sideboard?

Lee Shi Tian: Yes, I had tried the Gearhulk before, and I knew it was a good card. Against aggro it just wins the game, because the opponent doesn’t have that much removal, and with lifelink a few hits pull your life total ahead. After it comes down on Turn 4, you can win by just keep casting things on Turn 5 and Turn 6. Someone played Gearhulk much earlier and then gradually nobody did, but I had used it and knew it was very good, and it happened to be especially suited to the environment at the time, so I chose to bring it.

Link to the Guide written by Lee Shi Tian: From “Poor Choice” to Regional Champion - Dimir Demon Deck Guide in Standard

Q5: Let’s turn the clock back to much earlier. When you first came into contact with MTG, what made you want to get into this game, and even take the path of a professional player?

Lee Shi Tian: At first I played different board games and different TCGs. But back then many TCGs didn’t last long and were gone quickly. Later I came across Magic, and the best thing about it was Draft. At that time I was in Form 3, in my teens, and didn’t have that much money. You could play a draft for a few dozen Hong Kong dollars, and if you won, you could sell the cards you got and use the money to keep playing, without spending a lot at once on a whole Constructed deck. Otherwise you’d buy a deck, play a bit, find it wasn’t great, and have to buy another. Information wasn’t as developed back then, and there was no site like MTGGoldfish where you could copy a deck at any time. Draft was the most fun for me, and every time a new set came out it was a completely different experience, so it always felt fresh.

Later, when I was in university, I happened to go to the UK as an exchange student. At that time I discovered that Europe had Grand Prix (GP) events to play in, and flying to European countries on budget airlines like Ryanair was very cheap, maybe twenty-something pounds to fly over and play a tournament. Before I returned to Hong Kong, I played the GP in Birmingham, UK. It was Block Constructed, and I was very lucky to win the championship with Mono-White. After winning a GP I felt it was pretty good, and from that year on I started flying out to play different GPs and Pro Tours.

At that time there was the Pro Players Club system, but at first my results were up and down too. It was not until I made Top 8 of Pro Tour Return to Ravnica for the first time, playing Scapeshift, that I realized I really had a chance to make Top 8, and afterwards I started looking for Asian players to practice with. At that time there were no teams yet, and I practiced alone. Later I found Tzu Ching Kuo, Hao-Shan Huang, and Chapman Sim from Singapore and others, and we all started practicing together, and later we also cooperated with European and American teams to playtest.

When we started to seriously chase every Pro Tour, the team gradually grew, from four people to over a dozen. After the team got bigger, the overall results became much more stable, and every year we managed to reach the highest level of the Pro Players Club. That level provided an appearance fee and travel subsidies, which truly gave playing cards a stable income and let me support myself as a professional player.

Q6: When did a system like the Pro Players Club end? What was its impact on top players?

Lee Shi Tian: It was about 2019, when the Magic Pro League (MPL) was introduced, on the eve of COVID, that it ended. The next year the pandemic broke out, the MPL moved online, and it was gone too by 2022. The old system really did give strong players a fixed budget every year to enter major events, which is quite different from now. Now, if you don’t do well in a few Pro Tours, even the greatest player will fall off. Even Reid Duke has to go back and play PTQs, and Simon Nielsen has also had times when he didn’t qualify for the next one. Nathan Steuer also only just managed to climb back recently.

Q7: After you were inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2018, did your mindset change in any way?

Lee Shi Tian: In the years after entering the Hall of Fame, and with the MPL ending as well, I stopped chasing those Pro Points tournaments, slowly slowed down, and my life became more balanced. Otherwise, every month I had to maintain super high-intensity training and keep an eye on the meta while flying around, which was truly exhausting. These days I ask Wizards to use my once-a-year RC qualification on the one in Japan. As for the quarterly Pro Tour qualification, I’ll consider attending the ones held in Europe, and the US is too far so I may not go. Next year is even better: it will be the first Pro Tour held in Japan since the pandemic, and I will consider attending as well.

Q8: In the past you competed around the world. How did you adjust before, during, and after tournaments to keep your condition at its best? And how did you prepare during team training camps?

Lee Shi Tian: After I finish a tournament and go back to Hong Kong, I usually try not to touch Magic for a while. I keep reading articles and thinking, but I don’t play like crazy all the time. I let myself rest more, and only focus on practicing when a tournament is near. That way I keep a sense of freshness and excitement when I get on the tournament floor. You can’t win all the time; in tournaments there are always wins and losses. If you practice too tensely day to day and pour in a lot of effort but lose, it’s very easy to burn out mentally.

As for training camp preparation, in the past the whole team would fly directly to the city hosting the Pro Tour more than a week before the start to gather and practice in seclusion. But the environment is different now. In the past the decklist was submitted on Friday right before the start, but now it must be submitted by Wednesday afternoon, two days earlier. To cope with such a rule change, we should also go a few days earlier. And now there are Arena and MTGO, and strong decks of a new set are discovered by players around the world within days of release, so it’s hard to secretly build a broken deck that nobody knows about before the tournament like before^{Note 1}.

Q9: Has this also affected your philosophy of choosing decks?

Lee Shi Tian: Definitely. Although I learn new decks much faster than the average person, my practice volume is far less than that of young players. If everyone plays Tier 1 mainstream decks, compared with players who have practiced those matchups hundreds of times, my edge is small. But if, like this time with Dimir Demon, I play a deck the opponents didn’t anticipate, with both sides improvising in an unknown state, my edge is actually more obvious. So I have always put my focus on “choosing which deck,” rather than simply practicing the play of some mainstream deck to the extreme. And the younger generation in the teams can practice a dozen hours a day for several days in a row, and with my current energy I truly can’t compare with them, haha.

Q10: From years of competing abroad to being inducted into the Hall of Fame, did the attitude of your family and friends change along the way?

Lee Shi Tian: At the beginning, of course, they worried “Can you really make a living playing cards… like this?” Later, as I gradually produced results and won prize money, my family gradually accepted it. By the MPL era, I signed as a full-time esports player with an official contract, and my family felt even more at ease. Although there were still some small frictions along the way, basically they were very supportive.

Interviewer: When 郭老闆 was interviewed earlier, he said that he told his family neither the good nor the bad, so they didn’t know what he was doing and had nothing to worry about.

Lee Shi Tian: Haha, that is also one way to do it, saving the family from constantly worrying.

Q11: Can you name a few players who have influenced you, and tell us what you learned from them?

Lee Shi Tian: Players like PV (Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa), Reid Duke, and also Javier Dominguez and Simon Nielsen. Watching them play is a pleasure; their attention to detail in using individual cards, how they induce opponents to make mistakes, and their play style and concepts are all extremely masterful. Once you reach that level, watching top players play is itself a form of learning.

Q12: I’d like to understand more: from when you first came into contact with MTG to now, has your feeling about this game changed? As a veteran player, do you think the changes in recent years are different from before in terms of gameplay and competitive events?

Lee Shi Tian: It’s very different from before. It used to be four or five sets a year, and now it’s six or seven a year. And the overall design focus is clearly tilted toward Commander rather than Competitive. Many cards are fun in Commander but too strong in competitive formats, so competitive play has to ban cards frequently. Now when you go to a game store or a big event, the Pro Tour competitive area takes up only a corner, and all around it are players playing Commander and side events.

Interviewer: Some people say that competitive players may now make up less than 20% of the total.

Lee Shi Tian: It should be even less. But actually we have to thank Commander players, because they bring the huge funds and enthusiasm that let Magic keep operating, and old cards keep their value too. Without Commander, this game might not have made it long ago.

Interviewer: But to save Standard, Wizards extended the rotation to three years while stuffing in a large amount of Universes Beyond to increase the number of released sets. What impact do you think this has on the environment?

Lee Shi Tian: The policy is actually quite contradictory. Rotation extended to three years, plus six or seven sets a year, makes the card pool expand extremely fast, and cards now have more and more words and very complex abilities. Wizards thought that the bigger the card pool, the higher the deck diversity, but it’s actually the exact opposite. Competitive players only use the strongest few cards, and like Prowess, no matter how many strong cards get banned, it stays in the field. Since rotation happens only once every three years, it will keep dominating the environment, and in the end only official intervention can fix it. With the number of sets and the rotation length unable to change, more and more frequent bans are bound to happen. But then the community atmosphere also becomes more restless. Just two weeks after a new set is released, right after a tournament ends, after some deck using new cards wins a championship, everyone starts shouting on social media for bans, and social media also veers in that direction for traffic, which is not good for the atmosphere of the game.

Lee Shi Tian: My feeling is that the proportion of Taiwanese players heading toward professional competition is not high. This has a lot to do with the community structure too. In Japan, for example, there are many strong players who organize exchanges, so naturally they get stronger and stronger. Without the support of a team or organization, and where practice time may not be enough, my suggestion is to watch more streams, videos, or articles from top European and American Pros and learn their thinking logic and responses, which brings faster improvement than practicing hard behind closed doors by yourself. Of course, it would be great to have a very strong team come out to lead, but reaching a level like Japan’s is not easy.

Also, I heard that the Draft culture among Taiwanese players is relatively weak, which is a pity. Actually Draft is the best format for practicing Magic fundamentals. You must learn how to look at a card pool and build a deck with a reasonable curve, learn creature combat, and learn to switch between offensive and defensive tempo. In Constructed, in aggro versus control matchups the script is often fixed, so there is little to learn. But in Limited, both sides are judging at all times whether it’s time to attack or defend. Even without going to a game store, playing on MTGA or MTGO is also a great way to hone your fundamentals.

Q14: Finally, please describe what Magic: The Gathering is to you.

Lee Shi Tian: In the past it was a “dream” to me, and now it’s a “dream successfully chased.”

For Asians more than ten years ago, making playing cards a career was a very difficult thing. And I happened to meet, and seize, this opportunity, and my work and living situation back then also happened to allow me to keep traveling abroad to compete. Walking step by step, in the end I even made it into the Hall of Fame, and it is a dream truly realized in my life.

Post-Interview Chat: Outlook on Reality Fracture (FRA)^{Note 2}

Lee Shi Tian: I think the FRA set is very strong, and many cards even reach a broken level. The new mechanic Empower Jace, and all kinds of quality draw, removal, and creatures are of very high overall power. Of course, Draft must be a lot of fun too.

Historically, sets in autumn (around September) are usually especially strong, because at that point in time the environment is facing rotation, and the company needs to print powerful single cards to define the brand-new Standard environment as the baseline of the new meta. In addition, there is also a need to push sales at year-end, so cards have to be printed a bit more powerful to stimulate buying. These sets usually have a huge impact on the tournament scene after release. Like the earlier DSK, it was all like this. Although now, because of some other considerations, rotation has been pushed to the first set next year, at least from the design perspective, FRA clearly has the ambition to reshape the environment.

^{Note 1: A broken deck usually refers to a deck that breaks the balance. But in the interview, what Lee Shi Tian means is probably closer to: a unique deck that is hard to target because it is little known, forcing opponents to push their learning curve back to the time of the tournament itself. This is also consistent with his philosophy of building and choosing decks.}
^{Note 2: The interview took place on September 16, 2026.}