It’s Monday, February 12th, and the dueling world is still reeling from the latest Sneak Preview promo!
Strike of Neos Sneak Preview Promo Finally Revealed!
For weeks now, we’ve known that the Strike of Neos Sneak Preview events would offer duelists a brand new, never-before-seen promo card. The thought of a totally secret promo—debuting in the Western world instead of Japan—was a tantalizing prospect. Speculation as to its playability ran wild and everyone was asking the same questions. Would it see tournament play? Would it influence local metagames? Would it change the way we duel?
Just this past Friday we got our answer. The new promo card, Grandmaster of the Six Samurai, was revealed on yugioh.com in this article, and duelists went wild! Grandmaster is just the kind of thing players have been asking for. It supports a specific theme that helps a new deck become competitive, it has an effect that deals with all the removal in this format, and it’s a unique card that’s balanced, but incredibly good. In Japan, the Six Samurai just didn’t see that much play since it was so hard to keep two on the field (and you need to have two in order to use their unique effects). Grandmaster of the Six Samurai takes care of that problem, and it’ll definitely see some serious table time once Strike of Neos launches. You can read more about it in Jerome’s article from this weekend.
Speaking of which, Strike of Neos Sneak Previews are in less than two weeks! If you’d like to find a Preview event near you, just check out the official TCG website for complete listings. You’ll get five boosters of Strike of Neos and a copy of Grandmaster of the Six Samurai just for registering, and then you’ll have a chance to earn more boosters, exclusive t-shirts, and who knows what else!? Stay tuned to Metagame.com this week too, because we’ve got two weeks of single card analysis lined up to lead into the set’s Sneak Preview launch!
Shonen Jump Championship St. Louis Approaching Fast
If you’re in Illinois on the 24th, the Strike of Neos Sneak Preview is just the beginning of your dueling fun that weekend. SJC action will be the order of the day, as hundreds of duelists show up to throw down at the Gateway Center Convention Complex in Collinsville. It’s the last big tournament of the current Advanced format, and Metagame.com will be live on-site as this era goes out with a bang.
Team Rampage shocked onlookers at Shonen Jump Championship Orlando just weeks ago, as they took a trio of Chimeratech Overdragon decks to Day 2 finishes. The Top 8 featured Monarchs, Creature Swap, and Gadgets, but when the dust cleared, it was Team Nexus’s Paul Lyn who took home the gold! Armed with yet another Chimeratech Overdragon deck (this one packed with Ancient Gear cards) Lyn destroyed all opposition to capture a fourth title for Team Nexus and the new prize promo, Crush Card Virus. The big question on everyone’s mind now is obvious: was Chimeratech a fluke, or will it Top 8 again in Collinsville?
Gadgets managed to capture an impressive pair of Top 8 slots in Orlando, but duelists running the clockwork wonders will be even more experienced with them by the time St. Louis rolls around. Gadgets will no doubt have a strong presence, but they’ll be up against a varied pool of strategies—this tournament’s almost as unpredictable as Orlando. Which deck will reign supreme, and who will be piloting it? You’ll find out when we do, so long as you’re reading our live tournament coverage on the 24th!
New Champion Packs Available At Tournament Stores
Following hot on the heels of the uber-popular Champion Pack: Game 1 comes the second set in the tournament-exclusive series. Champion Pack: Game 2 started popping up in tournament stores last week, and features a whole spread of highly playable favorites (like Morphing Jar and Ring of Destruction) as well as some great new holographic reprints. Magical Stone Excavation is the set’s ultra rare, and Nimble Momonga, Magician of Faith, Pyramid Turtle, and Smashing Ground appear as super rares, getting the foil treatment for the very first time! Predictably, Smashing Ground is proving to be the clear fan favorite, already commanding more than $60 on online auction sites.
If you want to get in on the action and win some of the new Champion Packs yourself, the only way to do so is to take part in sanctioned tournaments in your area. To find tournament times at your local game store, just give them a call. You can search for stores in your city using UDE’s handy store locator.
This Week on Metagame.com
After spending the weekend exploring Grandmaster of the Six Samurai, we’re ready to continue on with two weeks’ worth of Strike of Neos card previews. It all starts today, as Jae Kim looks at Card Trader, one of the most anticipated cards in the set and perhaps the best continuous spell card ever made. It’s splashable, it rewards good decision-making skills, and it makes lots of cool decks easier to play. Thunder Dragon gives it two thumbs up . . . or at least it would if it had thumbs. Click on over to see what Jae has to say about it.
Tomorrow, a returning contributor who you might be familiar with holds a special lecture on not one, but two new cards. Gene-Warped Warwolf is the biggest level 4 normal monster ever printed, and the only thing better than an enormous beatstick is an enormous beatstick that just . . . won’t . . . die. The new trap card Birthright makes that happen, upping the ante for Normal Monster decks by providing a superior alternative to Call of the Haunted. Check it out on Tuesday.
Wednesday, Julia Hedberg breaks down one of the newest additions to Jaden’s deck: Neo-Spacian Grand Mole. Another pleasing sight for the seriously competitive duelist, Grand Mole is probably the best Neo-Spacian yet, terrorizing flip effect monsters and big attackers alike with a single slash of his mighty paw!
One of the big card groups from Strike of Neos is the returning Dark World monsters, and Dark World Dealings is a powerful spell that adds to their arsenal of deployment effects. Mike Rosenberg will take a look at that—plus the new monster Kahkki, Guerilla of Dark World—on Thursday, revealing a new chapter in the future of Dark World.
On Friday, Matt Peddle will showcase one of the most interesting—and potent—tech cards from Strike of Neos. D. D. Crow swoops into the opponent’s graveyard and steals cards by removing them from play, and it does so at a chainable spell speed. Shutting down popular mainstream picks like Pot of Avarice, Magician of Faith, and Premature Burial, it’s a surprisingly versatile piece of tech. Be sure to check out all the uses that Matt has come up with for it.
Jae Kim is back again on Saturday, and this time he’s taking a look at one of the set’s best trap cards! Pulling the Rug is an awesome counter trap that beats up on Monarchs, Gadgets, and anything else with a point-of-summoning trigger effect. So what decks can use it, and what else is it good for? Jae’s going to answer those questions and show you what might make it a candidate for your deck.
Finally, Jerome McHale is back on Sunday with a follow-up to his piece on Grandmaster of the Six Samurai. Grandmaster is just the first of two big guns in the double-barreled arsenal the Samurais wield, and the second is our last preview card for the week: Great Shogun Shien. The Shogun can be special summoned under the right conditions, and has a crazy effect that locks down the opponent and devastates OTKs.
That’s it for this week, but head on back in another seven days for even more preview cards, as we get ready for the arrival of Strike of Neos!