fk03-05-98
Pro Tour Los Angeles 1998 Sneak Preview
by Francis Keys
The Thursday before a Pro Tour starts early. Long before the tournament
area and hotel rooms are ready for players, testing and trading begin in
earnest. On board the historic Queen Mary in Long Beach Harbor, the
international pros took advantage of their disrupted schedules. In the
cool morning air, Tempest-only deck tech finally came out from under wraps.
Aggressive mono-red and blue/white control immediately revealed themselves
as the decks to beat. Defending PTLA champion Tommi Hovi joined the crowd
of pros as the metagame began to unfold. As expected, Cursed Scroll
defined the environment with aggressive speed and quickly sold at $20 and
above.
Joining the two major deck archetypes, numerous variations of white and
black weenie showed, but neither appear capable of handling red�s reckless
speed. Blue/white/black and white/black control variations showed up in
several groups, but not with consistent success against the field.
The most popular approach for slowing down the aggressive onslaught focuses
on gaining life, typically Bottle Gnomes, Staunch Defenders, or occasionally
Essence Bottle. Some interesting strategies involve recycling the
life-gainers with Corpse Dance and Living Death, but their mana-intensive
natures frequently result in an early win for aggressive red. Despite
repeated appearance of Verdant Force, green is suspiciously absent from the
short list of top decks.
The players meeting commenced at 8:30PM, with Jeff Donais presiding as head
judge. For the first time, players will be seeded for the first round of
play. Seeding based on DCI Standard ratings will separate the players into
two groups, with top-ranked players paired against the middle, similar to
the method used in chess tournaments. For example, with 300 players, the
top player faces the 151st player, the second seed faces 152nd, and so on.
Recent rulings involving Propaganda with Hand to Hand take effect on April
1st and will not affect PTLA. Repeated questions from Pro Tour participants
involving Humility reflect almost universal confusion.
Almost 400 players face seven rounds of Swiss on Friday, with a cut to the
top 96 for another seven rounds on Saturday. Given the prevalance of
extremely fast, aggressive decks, chance is expected to play a huge roll in
the next two days. Look for plenty of mono-red, particularly from
California players, with New Englanders favoring control. Team CMU,
featuring expert deckbuilders Erik Lauer and Brian Schneider and Pro Tour
Chicago champion Randy Buehler, was notably absent from testing and deck
discussion, which may hint at a powerful rogue deck. Regardless of the
strategy used by the winningest deck, one think is clear: PTLA is about
reckless speed.
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