In his Star City column this week, crack podcast coverage reporter Rich Hagon tells us that brand-new World Champion Uri Peleg will not be playing in the first Pro Tour of 2008 in Kuala Lumpur.
Not by choice, but because he’s Israeli, and Malaysia doesn’t recognize Israel.
They’ve mentioned Russian players having visa issues in the past, but this is likely the first time it’s simply been impossible, for political reasons, for a “star player” to make it to a Pro Tour.

A little while ago during Lorwyn previews, Frank Karsten ended up previewing Cloudthresher in this online tech article. A lot of the online response to this was disappointment that Frank was given such an obviously “Timmy” card to discuss. Even though he mentioned the value of flashing it out, evoking it out, and hurricaning, people weren’t so keen on the Thresher.
This may have changed with Worlds. There, Thresher destroyed whole boardfulls of Faeries, and singlehandedly took care of a Hellkite in the final match to garner Uri Peleg a win. As it happens, even with quadruple green in its casting cost, a 7/7 Flash critter with a pet Skyroclasm is not bad at all.

Roar.

I watched the live broadcast from the final day of Worlds 2007 yesterday, although I didn’t bother to write anything this time around. I was a little surprised to see that the live broadcast began with the team finals, and that the individual quarterfinals were already done. I’d been looking forward to seeing Mori in action again, so that was a bit of a disappointment.
You can see short recaps and post-match interviews from the quarterfinals on WotC’s Magic YouTube channel. For example, here’s the Mori-Peleg recap:

The semifinals were interesting, and the standout match was definitely the Dragonstorm mirror of Nassif versus Chapin. Much as he did last year, Nassif made a misplay that helped cost him the match — although, as Randy Buehler correctly says, this year’s mistake just made it far more likely that he’d lose the match, whereas last year he actually threw away a game he’d otherwise have won.
Despite the fact that I went in rooting for Chapin, I ended up wanting Uri Peleg to win just because a Dragonstorm win is so non-interactive. Chapin also wasted a little time asking the judge if he could pretend to accidentally reveal his sideboard plan to try and throw Peleg off. I can’t imagine that much would have kept Peleg off of his own sideboard plan, however, as siding in disruption made more sense than any other option. At the end of the day, Peleg had stability of his own and disruption for Chapin that kept Chapin’s deck off its plan.
You can read all the final reporting here. In addition to the decks used for the top eight itself, they’ve nicely gone ahead and listed the top Legacy decklists and the top Standard decklists. This is useful, since people may look at the top eight and think that B/G is just the way to go. As Aaron Forsythe reminds us in an interview with Rich Hagon, the decks in the top eight get there because their players made it through a format that was about two-thirds “not Standard,” so they’re not strictly representative of the best choices there. The top Standard decks (4-1 or better), in order from most to least frequent:
16 B/G Rock-style builds (all Elves versions wrapped into this total)
15 R/G Big Mana
8 U/B Mannequin
6 U/G Faeries
5 Dragonstorm
2 B/G Rack
2 Mono-Blue (Sonic Boom)
1 Red Deck Wins
1 B/R Goblins
1 U/B Faeries (go Zvi!)
1 B/R something
1 U/B Teachings (Wafo-Tapa)
1 Mono-Blue Pickles
…and, of course, you’d really want the full breakdown of decks that went into the initial Standard round to really know how good these are. After all, about six Dragonstorm decks went in, and five came out at 4-1 or better. A boatload of R/G Big Mana decks went in, so their entry-to-wins ratio is nowhere near as good. Mind you, if you try and play the new Dragonstorm deck now, you’re likely to insta-lose to someone who also watched Worlds and has sideboarded Story Circle against you. So it goes.

As Rich Hagon has said more than once, even though the Worlds top eight is Standard, the top eight participants may not have had Standard be their best rounds of the event. Is there any predictive value in a player’s Standard record, going into tomorrow? Here’s how each player in the top eight did in the first five (Standard) rounds at Worlds this year:

• 1. Christoph Huber – 5 wins
• 2. Gabriel Nassif – 4 wins, 1 loss
• 3. Yoshitaka Nakano – 5 wins
• 4. Katsuhiro Mori – 5 wins
• 5. Uri Peleg – 4 wins, 1 loss
• 6. Pat Chapin – 4 wins, 1 loss
• 7. Roel van Heeswijk – 4 wins, 1 loss
• 8. Koutarou Ootsuka – 4 wins, 1 loss

There’s not a lot of variance there to work with (not really surprisingly). I guess we’ll just wait and see what happens tomorrow.