Ladies and gentlemen, a new record has been set here at Pro Circuit Los Angeles. We now have our very first competitor in Pro Circuit history to go undefeated on Day 1.

Beating out Craig Edwards in round five, Weil went on to face $10K Gen Con UK champ Karl Bown, Dave Spears, Michael Dalton, David Frayer, and Doug Tice…and he beat them all. Wielding an Avengers Reservist build lightly teched for the mirror, Weil glided through the day with a relatively carefree attitude. However, when he finally defeated Doug Tice to clinch his undefeated title in Round 10, his happy-go-lucky shell broke for just a moment.

He held out his hand, palm down, in the air. “Look. I can’t stop shaking,” he grinned.

Never heard of Aaron Weil before? You’re not alone; no one here had any clue who he was. A resident of Santa Barbara, California, he’s a 22-year-old art student. “I teach martial arts—Sambo—it’s like Russian jujitsu,” explained Weil. “I do front-desk security work at a hotel, but that’s not impressive or anything.”

Aaron wasn’t even qualified for the Pro Circuit before this weekend. “For the past year, I’ve had to work weekends,” he said as we sat down to discuss his record-breaking win, “so I could never show up to PCQs or $10Ks. I could never get my rating up high enough.”  No wonder he was nowhere on the radar.

So what changed this time? “I asked for this weekend off since it’s in my home state. I played in the first LCQ yesterday and narrowly lost because of the new time rule. I played in the second LCQ, which was a sealed deck. It was a four-round tournament, best two out of three. I only lost two games.” 

I immediately asked him what he attributed his performance to. He replied, “The fact that I don’t think anybody playtested at all. I swear it’s just like ‘Avengers, what?’  It just feels like nobody playtested.  I have to give credit to Chris Donati. He and I came up with this deck, and we playtested constantly.” Donati, a frequent competitor at major Vs. System events, swung by the interview table and grabbed himself a seat. 

Weil was eager to give Donati credit for his success, identifying the smiling Donati as his only real teammate. “Honestly, it’s him and me,” he said, gesturing to Chris. “We’ll test against other people sometimes, but we’re the only two really competitive players in our area. We imported competition sometimes, just to vary playstyles since we each know how the other plays. We play each other so much, so we’ll just grab people from time to time. It’s really just us two though.”

When asked if their “team” had a name, Weil had to think: “Uhh…Team Skillz That Killz.” He grinned again. He didn’t seem able to stop smiling, and no one blamed him.

I asked him about techy additons he made to the deck. “We added another Savage Beatdown; we’re running four. It’s pretty much the same as Karl Bown’s deck. We’re running four copies of Hercules so we can guarantee the seven.”  All day he’d been wrecking competition with System Failure, so I had to ask him about it. “It adds an extra turn in the mirror.,” he explained. “It saved me in three of the games. Avengers is honestly a deck that a chimpanzee can play; it’s the easiest deck to use. I don’t care what my opponent does because I know what I’m doing.”

I asked how much he felt he owed his victory to Karl Bown, who was hanging around being his cheery self, playfully calling Weil “a deck stealer” with a big grin after congratulating him.  “What we do is we try to think about what the meta is at the moment. Up until yesterday we were going to play Squadron. We knew that—at least in theory—it should beat Avengers. But then we started thinking like, ‘Can Squadron beat anything else? It gets owned by Common Enemy. Sentinels can just destroy it. We might as well just do Avengers.’ So we started looking for tech so that we wouldn’t just be using the same stuff in the mirror.”

Finally, I asked him how he felt about tomorrow.  “I’m pretty sure I just need to win three tomorrow to get in. Maybe four. I haven’t played draft in awhile, but I think I’ll be okay. I mean, it would be horrible if I didn’t make it, but I think it’ll be okay.”

With what seems to be a clear path to Day 3 before him, an unprecedented victory under his belt, and a deck that’s consistent and teched for the metagame, Aaron Weil seems fated to be one of this event’s top players.  Before this weekend nobody knew who he was.  Two days from now, he might just be the next Adam Bernstein, as well as forty thousand dollars richer.