| Jean-Emmanuel Depraz | |
|---|---|
 Depraz at MagicCon Chicago in 2024 | |
| Nicknames | JiRock |
| Born | 22 June 1994 |
| Residence | Paris |
| Pro Tour debut | 2014 |
| Winnings | $445,900 [1] |
Jean-Emmanuel Depraz, nicknamed JiRock [2] (born 22 June 1994), [3] [4] is a French Magic: The Gathering player, and the current World Champion, since 2023.
Depraz says that he was introduced to Magic: The Gathering in 2005, when a friend shared his cards, and they played for fun. [5] He began to attend competitive events from 2011 through 2013, and first qualified for the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour in 2014. [5] However he failed to repeat the qualification the following year, and it took another three years until he qualified for the Pro Tour by winning the Warsaw Grand Prix in 2017. [5]
After that, starting in 2018, Depraz had a series of successes, including a Top 8 appearance in Bilbao, and a victory in Barcelona [2] as the captain of the French team which won the final World Magic Cup, with Arnaud Hocquemiller, and Timothée Jammot. [6] [7] At the end of 2018, Depraz was one of the first 32 players, and the only one from France, invited to the Magic Pro League, the esports Player's Tour equivalent. [8] That year, Depraz says, he abandoned literature, the field he was studying before becoming a professional Magic player. [9]
In 2019, Depraz made two more Top 8 finishes, including one where he came in second to Javier Dominguez of Spain, the 2018 World Champion, [10] and the finals of the overall 2019 Magic: The Gathering World Championship, finishing in 7th place. [2] In 2020, Depraz took second place at the online Players Tour, though the Championship was not held due to the COVID-19 pandemic. [11] [2] In 2021, Depraz came in second place to Yuta Takahashi of Japan in the 27th World Championship, which was held online in the MTG Arena program. [12] Depraz says he does not regret his near misses at the title from those years, and learned a lot from them; though he would have loved to win, as the World Championship prize included appearing on his own Magic card. [11] [13]
In September 2023, Depraz won the 29th Magic: The Gathering World Championship in Las Vegas. [14] The three day event included the 110 best players of the season, five of whom were French, including Depraz and Gabriel Nassif. After two days, only Depraz remained of the Frenchmen among the top eight bracket, which was made of players from seven countries. He defeated American Greg Orange, in a close match where he lost the first two games and needed to win all of the last three to continue. [11] He followed with easier matches against Australian Anthony Lee, and Japanese Kazune Kosaka to win the title and prize of US$100,000, and eventual Magic card appearance. [12] Depraz's winning deck included three copies of "Faerie Mastermind", the card made depicting Yuta Takahashi, who defeated him for the World Championship in 2021. [12]
Jean-Emmanuel Depraz is the son of philosopher Natalie Depraz. [15] He lives in Paris. [16]
Magic: The Gathering is a tabletop and digital collectible card game created by Richard Garfield. Released in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast, Magic was the first trading card game and had approximately fifty million players as of February 2023. Over twenty billion Magic cards were produced in the period from 2008 to 2016, during which time it grew in popularity. As of the 2022 fiscal year, Magic generates over $1 billion in revenue annually.
The Magic: The Gathering World Championships(Worlds) have been held annually since 1994. It is the most important tournament in the game of Magic: The Gathering, offering cash prizes of up to $100,000 to the winners. With the exception of the first edition, Worlds is an invitation-only event, and from 1996 to 2011 World was the last event of each Pro Tour season. The invitees were mostly top finishers from the National championships, the top-ranked players of the DCI and high-level pro players. Since 2012 the World Championships are held after the season and the most successful 16 or 24 players have been invited to the tournament.
The Players Tour (PT) is a competitive international league for the Magic: The Gathering collectible card game, culminating in the World Championship. It consists of a series of tournaments held throughout the world, each requiring an invitation to participate. The Players Tour permanently replaced the Pro Tour in the 2020 season. Every PT awards a total of $250,000 in cash prizes, with $50,000 going to the winner. The Players Tour is split into three regions: Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Each region hosts three events, resulting in nine Players Tour events per season.
Magic: The Gathering formats are various ways in which the Magic: The Gathering collectible card game can be played. Each format provides rules for deck construction and gameplay, with many confining the pool of permitted cards to those released in a specified group of Magic card sets. The Wizards Play Network, the governing body that oversees official Magic competitive play, categorizes its tournament formats into Constructed and Limited. Additionally, there are many casual formats with the Commander format being one of the most popular formats of the game.
Raphaël Lévy is a professional Magic: The Gathering player. He was inducted to the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour Hall of Fame in November 2006. He is the first player to have been inducted while active on the Pro Tour. He is one of only six players to have won a Grand Prix on three different continents. He's holding the second most lifetime Pro Points behind Shuhei Nakamura.
Mark Justice is a former Magic: The Gathering pro player. He was considered by some to be the best player of the game in its earliest era of professional play. Justice was the second Magic: The Gathering US National Champion in 1995. He also led the first Magic US National Team to the first world team victory of the first team portion of the World Championships.
Commander is a series of supplemental Magic: the Gathering card game products. Its mechanics are derived from a fan-created format known as "Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH)". The official Commander format is "the only sanctioned format maintained by an outside entity" other than Wizards of the Coast.
André Coimbra is a Portuguese former professional Magic: The Gathering player and former professional poker player, member of PokerStars Team Online, he retired in 2017 after choosing not to renew his contract. He is from Coimbra, Portugal, and is perhaps best known in the Magic: The Gathering community for winning the Magic: The Gathering 2009 World Championship.
Owen Turtenwald is a former American professional Magic: The Gathering player. He won a number of awards during his career, notably the 2010 Vintage World Championship and 2011 and 2015-16 Player of the Year. In 2016, he was inducted into the Magic: The Gathering Hall of Fame. He was briefly a member of the Magic Pro League in 2019 before being removed following sexual harassment accusations from women in the Magic community. He has not participated in any Wizards of the Coast sanctioned Magic: The Gathering tournaments since the incident.
Gavin Verhey is a Principal Magic: The Gathering Designer at Wizards of the Coast. He has been a member of numerous Magic set Design and Development teams since joining in 2011, including Aether Revolt, Conspiracy, Conspiracy: Take the Crown, Fate Reforged Gatecrash, From the Vault: Angels, From the Vault: Annihilation, From the Vault: Twenty, Ixalan, Kaladesh, Modern Masters 2017, Oath of the Gatewatch, and Shadows Over Innistrad, in addition to being the lead designer of Archenemy: Nicol Bolas, Commander 2017, and Battlebond. He also currently writes the weekly column Beyond the Basics on the official Magic website. Mark Rosewater considers him part of the fifth generation of Magic designers.
Seth Manfield is an American Magic: The Gathering player, perhaps best known for winning the 2015 World Championship. His other accomplishments include sixth-place finish at Pro Tour Fate Reforged earlier that same year, and five Grand Prix wins. In 2018, he was inducted into the Magic: The Gathering Hall of Fame. In 2020, he was signed on by Team Envy.
Magic: The Gathering Arena or MTG Arena is a free-to-play digital collectible card game developed and published by Wizards of the Coast (WotC). The game is a digital adaption based on the Magic: The Gathering (MTG) card game, allowing players to gain cards through booster packs, in-game achievements or microtransaction purchases, and build their own decks to challenge other players. The game was released in a beta state in November 2017, and was fully released for Microsoft Windows users in September 2019, and a macOS version on June 25, 2020. Mobile device versions were released in March 2021.
The Magic: The Gathering Judge Program is an independent organization that trains, certifies, and manages Judges, the tournament officials who run tournaments of the trading card game Magic: The Gathering. The Judge Program was founded early in the game's history as part of the DCI, the game's original sanctioning body, but has since become an independent, peer-driven organization, selecting its own leadership. In 2019, a new corporation, Judge Academy LLC, took up responsibility for the program.
Throne of Eldraine is a Magic: The Gathering expansion set. It is not part of a block. It was released on October 4, 2019. The sets development codename is "Archery", and its expansion code is ELD. MTG Arena also officially launched with this set.
Strixhaven: School of Mages is a Magic: The Gathering expansion set. It is not part of a block. The set was released in April 2021.
War of the Spark is the 81st Magic: The Gathering expansion; while it is not part of a block, this set is functionally the third part of a Ravnica-focused storyline set on the plane of Ravnica. It was released on May 3, 2019. It also became available in MTG Arena on April 25, 2019.
Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms is an expansion set for Magic: The Gathering (Magic) released in July 2021. The world of the Forgotten Realms was created by game designer Ed Greenwood around 1967 as a paracosm for his childhood stories and premiered as a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (1987). This expansion set is the third collaboration between Magic and D&D; both teams are part of Wizards of the Coast.
Natalie Depraz is a French philosopher. She is a specialist in German philosophy, phenomenology, and, more specifically, Edmund Husserl. She is a professor at the University of Rouen Normandy and an academic member of the Husserl Archives at the École normale supérieure (ENS/CNRS). She is the founder of the l’École rouennaise de phénoménologie.
Mon fils Jean-Emmanuel, troisième joueur mondial de Magic the Gathering...