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Christopher Flores, who normally goes by his middle name “Ivan,” has battled his way through two matches in which he was decidedly not the crowd favorite. Now he’s dueling for the ultimate prize, a Shonen Jump Championship title! |
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Richard and Jason sat and shuffled, chatting idly about their previous matches. While both seemed relaxed, they were here to win and each was focused intently on the coming matchup. |
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“I’m gonna hang this on my wall” said Flores, as he took his seat and flopped down his score pad from his last game. Fresh off a win over Robert Ackermon, Flores was feeling pretty good. |
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Richard Treadwell is a seventeen-year-old from Wilson, North Carolina, and he’s pleased to be representing the local players. Omar Gaspar traveled to Durham from New York. He’s sixteen, came here on his own rather than part of a group, and he made a strong showing yesterday. |
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Zachary Austin was the only undefeated player in yesterday’s Swiss rounds. Armed with a burn deck that was perfectly tuned for the metagame, he’d put large numbers of cards into his main deck in order to convert his strategy from Burn to a brutal Cyber-Stein One-Turn Kill deck. “Nobody saw it coming,” he remarked. But of course, the other seven players of the Top 8 are now well versed in his technique. |
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Check out the Top 8 decklists here! |
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Photos from Shonen Jump Durham! What is Winged Kuriboh up to now? |
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Jashawn Brooks is a familiar face, frequently judging at major Yu-Gi-Oh! events. Robert Ackermon has never tasted Shonen Jump success, but that hasn’t stopped him from being a favorite of several in-the-know duelists. |
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This is normally where I do my spiel, reminding every one what tech is and lauding the fact that there’s always some innovative tech at a major event if you look hard enough. |
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According to Internet rumors, Jerry Wang didn’t appear at Worlds last summer because he was in a car accident, stabbed, mugged, shot, arrested, or stabbed and shot. By Bryan Coronel. That’s why Bryan didn’t compete either—he was too busy running from the law. |
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Two relatively unknown duelists have fought their way to Table 1! |
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Brian Long of Team Hunger Force won Shonen Jump Boston, claiming the team’s first and only Shonen Jump Championship. Jason Holloway made Day 2 at Shonen Jump Atlanta, and is a teammate of Shonen Jump San Francisco’s champ Fili Luna. |
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Dale is back by popular demand. With a 4-0 record, it was actually his opponent, Jordan Savage, who made this an easy pick for a feature match. A familiar face, Savage fell just short of a breakthrough performance at Shonen Jump Chicago, where he went 7-2 but missed the Top 8 on tiebreakers. |
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Feroze Ramcharan’s Top 8 performance at Shonen Jump Championship Los Angeles didn’t go unnoticed. Ramcharan’s Top 8 showing was a dose of hope for many duelists, and with a 3-0 record thus far today, he’s well on his way to another Day Two qualification. |
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Last week, Paul Levitin sent me an email to say that his team had another “metagame-breaking deck” for Durham. Now, I get that kind of email on a regular basis, but when it comes from the team that created Bazoo Return, I tend to listen. |
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Another irresistible feature match! Ameen Bahar, former spokesman for Hunger Force, has now taken up with Team Revolution and made affiliations with “CREW!!” |
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How could I resist? |
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