2017-18 Pro Tour Team Series Update
Following Pro Tour Dominaria, the Top 16 teams in the 2017-18 Pro Tour Team Series has been set, with all members of those teams receiving invitations to compete at Pro Tour 25th Anniversary August 3-5 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
However, with the conclusion of last weekend’s Pro Tour, we also saw a three-way tie for 16th place between three teams: MTG Mint Card, Massdrop East, and Final Last Samurai.
Because of the current tiebreaker rules to determine prizes for this program, MTG Mint Card will finish in 16th place based on the following clause in the 2017-18 rules:
“The tied team with the best Pro Tour finish during the 2017-18 Professional Points season across all current team members. In the event both teams have a player who had a Pro Tour finish that is the same place, the tie will be broken by the next best Pro Tour finish across all current team members until one team has a better finish from the 2017-18 Professional Points season than the other.”
In looking at the aftermath of Pro Tour Dominaria, this tiebreaker is problematic in that is calls upon breaking a team tie through a scoring metric that is determined by an individual’s tiebreakers at a Pro Tour. Tiebreaker decided by tiebreaker, in retrospect, goes against the spirit of the Pro Tour Team Series, which measures a team’s overall aggregate success over the course of six players in their preparation for a Pro Tour.
We have decided that—because of the importance of the team invitations for this season and because teams had made decisions about who would be on their roster with these rules in mind—that having a tiebreaker based on individual-performance tiebreakers for the invitations awarded at the conclusion of Pro Tour Dominaria needs an exception. Therefore, we are granting special invitations for Pro Tour 25th Anniversary to players on the 17th place and 18th place teams of the 2017-18 Pro Tour Team Series. We will also be re-evaluating the tiebreaker system currently in the Pro Tour Team Series rules for future seasons.