Evan Pierce Leads 2026 cEDH Championship Series With 2,580 Points

Evan Pierce, the New Mexico-based cEDH player known online as FreedomWaffle and a member of Team Zenith, sits atop the TopDeck Championship Series 2026 leaderboard with 2,580 points, a 330-point lead over second-place "ban rhystic study" (2,250) and a comfortable 535 ahead of third-place Zachary Adler (2,045). With 7,766 total players and 2,687 events tracked across the season, those points represent one of the most competitive cEDH ladders the circuit has ever fielded.

Pierce's lead isn't a fluke built on one hot weekend. He won the Land, Go Forest Fight 8k cEDH event on January 17 against a 105-player field, then backed it up on February 7 with a first-place finish at the Dallas $10k c/tEDH, one of the year's most high-profile cash events, going 5-2-2 through a 199-player bracket. Both runs came on Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, specifically his NBC (No Blue Creatures) variant that he maintains publicly on Moxfield at moxfield.com/users/FreedomWaffle. The deck leans into explosive ramp, infinite mana lines through Kinnan's activated ability, and a tightly curated disruption package that lets Pierce play at fast combo speed while keeping interaction dense enough to survive the pod before his turn to win.

That Kinnan keeps showing up at the top of large events is a signal worth reading. The commander rewards proactive, high-velocity play, punishes slower midrange strategies that rely on board presence, and generates enough mana redundancy to power through single-target removal. In a field where interaction density is at a premium and the first player to stick a fast combo often wins, Kinnan NBC's ability to accelerate past the critical turn threshold consistently puts it ahead.

The handle of the second-place player, "ban rhystic study," is its own editorial on the current meta: Rhystic Study remains one of the most contested cards at any cEDH table, and the fact that a player brandishing that grievance is sitting at 2,250 points suggests the blue value engine is as omnipresent as ever in the 2026 circuit.

Who to watch and what to sleeve up: Pierce is the clearest surging narrative in the standings right now. Two major wins, back-to-back, on the same commander in under a month, and he's posting decklists and commentary publicly under his FreedomWaffle handle on both Moxfield and X (@FreedomWaffle_MTG). The Kinnan NBC list has been updated through the 2026 season and represents a direct line into how the leaderboard's top player is actually building the deck.

The stakes for the back half of the season are real. TopDeck's Championship Series sends the top 60 leaderboard finishers to its Invitational alongside Diamond event auto-qualifiers. At 2,580 points, Pierce is well inside that threshold, but with 7,766 players actively accumulating points across weekly locals and regional qualifiers, the gap between a safe seat and the bubble can close faster than most expect. The leaderboard updates daily at topdeck.gg/championship-series-2026/leaderboard.