Esports | Magic: The Gathering | Michael Loconto — The 2-1 First Pro Tour Final at the Puck Building

On Sunday, February 18, 1996, Michael Loconto and Bertrand Lestrée sat across a table inside Manhattan’s Puck Building to decide the first Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour, with a snowstorm-delayed field reduced to its last two players.

Wizards of the Coast organized the publisher-run event as Pro Tour–New York, the opening tournament of a new professional circuit, and its records identify Loconto as the winner over Lestrée (https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/oral-history-first-pro-tour-2016-12-22; https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/tour-part-1-2004-07-26).

This was physical tabletop Magic rather than a digital client: each player brought a constructed deck, drew cards from a personal library, generated mana from lands, and normally won a game by reducing the opponent from twenty life to zero or by leaving that opponent unable to draw.

The tournament used a one-off modified Type II format now described as “Standard, New York Style,” requiring every deck or sideboard to contain at least five cards from each legal set—Fourth Edition, Chronicles, Ice Age, Fallen Empires, and Homelands.

Loconto’s blue-white control deck used Millstone to remove cards from an opponent’s library, while Lestrée’s green-white deck combined large creatures with Armageddon, a spell that destroyed all lands; their slow plans made the scheduled final unusually long.

Organizers had announced a best-of-seven-game final, but after the first two games consumed hours they changed it to best-of-three, so the next game would determine the title (https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/oral-history-first-pro-tour-2016-12-22).

Loconto won that third game and the match 2–1, making him the inaugural Pro Tour champion and earning the $12,000 senior-division first prize; the event record and the later collector-set biography both preserve the same final result (https://mtg.wiki/page/1996_Pro_Tour_New_York; https://rooksgamesandmore.com/collections/all/products/mtg-1996-michael-loconto-biography-cardworld-championship-decks).

The Puck Building is not a city-level substitute for an unknown hall: Wizards personnel recalled preparing its roof for the event, and independent tournament histories likewise locate the first Pro Tour in the building (https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/oral-history-first-pro-tour-2016-12-22; https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/the-origins-of-zvi-volume-2-the-first-pro-tour/).

At 295–309 Lafayette Street, the red-brick landmark still occupies the block where Houston, Lafayette, Mulberry, and Jersey streets meet; its round arches and gilded Puck figure remain visible from the public sidewalk (https://thepuckbuilding.cbre-properties.com/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puck_Building).

The cover is a 2024 exterior photograph of the exact building and does not depict the tournament, competitors, or cards.

Photo: Kidfly182, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puck_Building_August_2024_002.jpg).