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With a directional antenna (which have high intrinsic gain), you will probably get too much power from the strongest channels on your list for a pre-amp. Signal levels this high will put most pre-amps into overload. This creates distortion across all of your channels, which is a bad thing.
You should be fine with no pre-amp.
The "directionality" of an antenna is closely related to its gain. If you go with a modest gain antenna like an HBU-33 or HD7694P, they have a "beam width" of roughly 60 degrees. That means that can do a reasonably good job of picking up signals if they are within 60 degrees of each other.
If you have a higher gain antenna like the HBU-55, HD7698P, HD8200U, 91XG, 4228HD, DB8, SBGH, etc., then they will have an even tighter beam width. For these high gain antennas, you can expect the beam width to be something more like 30 degrees.
Since your local stations are pretty strong, you don't need a super high gain antenna. One of the smaller antennas will be good enough, and they are a bit more generous on the beam width. As long as the transmitter clusters are close enough together, you might be able to get multiple channel groups when the antenna is pointed between them.
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