Operatives: 1998 World Champion 1.0

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• 1.0

1st place - 1998 World Championship dark side deck.

Player: Matt Potter, USA

The following summary of the 1998 World Finals was taken from 'History of the World Finals', originally posted on Trandosite.

The latest expansion, "Special Edition", was timed to co-incide with the World Finals 1998. It would, they hoped, prove a good arena for players around the world to see what kind of new strategies were coming out of the game. What they failed to take into consideration, of course, was the over-powered nature of the expansion compared to pervious releases and in particular the foolish idea of "Operatives". 1998 was the "Operative Worlds", held at the Cavalier Hotel in Norfolk, Virginia.

On day one, it was those with operatives who proved to be successful and those who had not decided to go with them that were punished. Tomoya Suzuki was the leader after the first day, with Lucas Hernadez just behind. Last years finalists were also fairing quite well, with Michael Riboulet finishing inside the Top Twelve and Philipp Jacobs just falling short. The top twelve was far more American dominated than it had been in previous years; with nine of the twelve being from the USA. Credit must go to Evan Fergusson as well, who was the highest up finalist who did not use an operative deck - he finished 14th out of the 55 contenders.

The second day was dominated by Lucas Hernandez, who seemed sure to make the final, but was beaten by an unexpectedly high margin by Michael Riboulet in the last game and thus lost his place. The final two was Michael Riboulet, who became the first player to make two Grand Finals, and Matt Potter, appearing in his first World Championships. Riboulet won the first game by 19, using his dark side operative deck, but then lost by 28 in the second game to Potter, also using operatives. Thus, Potter came through to win by 2 (+9) and became America's first (and to date only) World Champion. Surprisingly, we have not heard much of Potter since that victory.

Not much we can really say about this deck. Yes it hurt, yes it worked. Operatives were horrible. The main claim to fame of the World Finals 1998 was that it managed to create more errata to SWCCG than Decipher had ever had to give out before. Firstly, Spaceport Speeders was changed (Jon Van Der Meer had used a negative, time-out light side deck designed to get him into the final by not losing to dark side operatives), then Operatives were changed, then Floating Refineries and then Hidden Base. sigh. This was not the most successful of championships, however often seen claims that Matt Potter's victory was not as significant or "proper" as any other World Championship is entirely ludicrous. These were still the top players in the world, and the game was still the same even if the operatives were defective in principle.