It’s been eight months since the Shonen Jump Championship Series began, and with nine events behind us, the tenth looms on the horizon. The Shonen Jump Championships have given duelists a great reason to reach higher and duel harder, and with a slew of great prizes and full media coverage, both loot and glory are being fought for like never before.
This incredible series of massive competitions has inspired tech, ingenuity, and originality like nothing previously witnessed, but the greatest development has inarguably been the rise of teams. Without Shonen Jump Championships, there was little reason for duelists to unite towards a common goal. Players who were once bitter rivals now team up to travel across the country and compete for the ultimate prize—the title of Shonen Jump Champion.
Shonen Jump Championship Indianapolis will take place at Gen Con Indy, which is arguably the greatest gaming convention that the year has to offer. The sought-after Cyber-Stein promo card has been retired and will be replaced by an earthshaking new prize card. Play will again be taken to unknown heights, competition will be fierce, and new stars will be born as old ones fall! But for the moment, let’s take a look back at the past eight months and examine the journey that thousands of duelists have undertaken.
Shonen Jump Championship #1: Gen Con So Cal
Gen Con So Cal hosted 309 duelists on December 3, 2004, and the Shonen Jump Championship series was born. North America’s first pair of Cyber-Steins were hotly contested by a field of independent players. Though the seeds of the deadliest team in Yu-Gi-Oh! would be planted when Juan Cardenas broke into the Top 8, it was John Umali who would claim the world’s first Shonen Jump Championship title. Umali would be the first to generate hype around the name of Comic Odyssey, but he would never officially join the team.
The Top 8 competitors wielded a variety of decks, from the winning Hybrid Chaos build piloted by John Umali, to more varied decks, like Henry Ke’s One-Turn-KO Magical Scientist deck and Miguel Flores’s Earth Beatdown deck. Flores was only narrowly defeated in the finals, and while Umali would be known as the most cerebral player in the game for months to come, Flores’s success gave hope to Beastdown and Earth players worldwide.
The first Shonen Jump Championship was one of the most grueling, featuring a highly varied metagame and nine rounds of Swiss competition in a one-day format. The Top 8 had to play their elimination rounds long into the night, and it wasn’t until 1 am that Umali would claim his title, prizes, fame, and the first Cyber-Stein ever awarded.
Shonen Jump Championship #2: Las Vegas
More than two months of silence on the premier tournament scene gave duelists time to develop new strategies, and February 8 marked the first major success of Comic Odyssey as a whole. Representing the store where they played, star duelists like U.S. Champion Theeresak Poonsombat, Juan Cardenas, and Wilson Luc were joined by a wide field of allies that succeeded in taking both the main-event and side-event Cyber-Steins. It was a sweep that would rock the North American Yu-Gi-Oh! community, and it echoed through future events like nothing else.
Wilson Luc captured the second Shonen Jump Championship, and was accompanied in the Top 8 by multiple teammates—namely, Theeresak Poonsombat and Freddie Garcia. Luc faced off against Past Times owner Ian Wingrove in a match that mimicked the finale of the previous Shonen Jump Championship. Chaos took on an Earth-based Beatdown deck and cleaned house in the finals. 220 duelists attended the tournament, and in the end, they all fell before Comic Odyssey. The message was clear—Comic Odyssey was here to win, and they intended to continue dominating the Shonen Jump Championship scene and harvesting Cyber-Steins.
Though a large number of Lockdown Burn decks were seen in the competition, none made the Top 8. The same could be said about Strike Ninja decks, which also saw some play but didn’t break into the Top 8. Shonen Jump Championship Las Vegas also featured the debut of the Makyura Combo deck, focusing on the repeated reuse of Desert Sunlight and Morphing Jar #2 to quickly deck an opponent into submission. Though Makyura the Destructor was removed from the environment months later, the concept itself has continued to flourish to this day.
Shonen Jump Championship #3: Columbus
One week later, 723 duelists descended upon the Veteran’s MemorialCenter in Columbus, Ohio. The largest Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament in North American history erupted as the horde of competitors required more room to be rented at the venue on the spot. At one point, the registration line ceased to act like a line normally would—it actually grew longer for more than an hour instead of reducing in size. A chain of duelists snaked around the massive building, and after an intense, draining, and unprecedented thirteen rounds of play, Team Comic Odyssey had once again placed in the Top 8.
Chicago duelist Gustavo Reyes battled his way to the finals with a teched-out Chaos variant that featured The Creator. It was an innovation that no one saw coming, but at the end of the day, it just wasn’t enough to overcome local talent Patrick Smith. His use of three copies of Scapegoat would quickly be emulated by duelists all over the continent. Though Comic Odyssey would again win a Cyber-Stein through their utter domination of the side events, they would not go home with a Shonen Jump Championship title under their belts this time.
Shonen Jump Championship #4: Orlando
A scant two weeks passed between Shonen Jump Championships, and again, Comic Odyssey sent players to compete. Shonen Jump Championship Orlando was the final tournament of its kind before the April 1 format shift, and duelists threw down like never before to send off fan favorites like Mirage of Nightmare and Magical Scientist.
The locals defended their turf like never before, beating back Comic Odyssey in the main event and then taking down Comic Odyssey’s lone Top 8 finisher, the venerable Theeresak Poonsombat. Matt Zaabadick, John Jensen (now a top player for Team Nexus), and Andrew Ferdeloa were just some of the Florida duelists who reached Day 2, with the latter winning the title of Shonen Jump Champion.
However, Comic Odyssey rocked the side events and took home another Cyber-Stein. The final match of the side competition saw Kevin Hor beat out teammate Wilson Luc. It would be the first of two Cyber-Steins that Kevin Hor would win for the team before his retirement.
The Shonen Jump Championship series has brought Yu-Gi-Oh! a long way over the past two-thirds of a year. For some, dueling is still a strictly-for-fun activity, but for others, there is now a great deal more at stake. Dignity, pride, and fabulous prizes have brought the proverbial cream to the top of the competitive field, and while the first four Shonen Jump Championships were intense, they were nothing compared to the battles that began at Shonen Jump Championship Los Angeles. A new format, new teams, new decks, and a fresh new metagame sparked creativity, originality, and brutal levels of competition that haven’t slowed down since.
Join me tomorrow when we look back at these five groundbreaking tournaments and relive the birth of some of the greatest stars of Yu-Gi-Oh!, while also taking a look at some of the year’s most dramatic moments.