It’s January 30, and Shadow of Infinity and the Sacred Beasts loom on the horizon!
Shadow of Infinity Sneak Previews Less Than Three Weeks Away!
Sneak Preview Weekend events for the next expansion set, Shadow of Infinity, begin on February 18 and run for the entire weekend.
Want some cool statistics? In the US, there are more than 80 venues hosting Previews, spread across more than 35 states. Internationally, almost 250 more events are scheduled beyond those in the US, taking place everywhere from Australia to Hungary.
If you haven’t been keeping up with the hype, Shadow of Infinity will bring the Sacred Beasts of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX to TCG players worldwide. If you can only attend one Sneak Preview weekend this year, make sure it’s this one, because no cards have ever been so anticipated by fans and collectors!
Metagame.com Shadow of Infinity Previews Start Next Week
Speaking of, you can get a jump on the competition at those events by boning up on some of the set’s best cards in advance! Starting next Monday, we here at Metagame.com will be starting up the Preview Machine™ to give you some insight into the set’s biggest, baddest, and most playable new entries.
As much as we’ve been hyping the Sacred Beasts, there’s a lot more to the set than just those three monsters. Soul Control gets at least one card that will give it a nice push, a new spell-search card hits the scene, and Insects will get more support than ever before! Our preview schedule is set up to highlight some of the set’s top offerings for both collectors and hardcore duelists, so you won’t want to miss a single article once we kick things off on February 6!
Even More Shadow of Infinity News!
I just can’t seem to get to the bottom of the Shadow of Infinity news barrel today. For those who are interested in getting a complete grasp of the set, a spoiler-free checklist of the entire thing has been published in this month’s Shonen Jump Magazine.
Crowd reactions to some of the new card names have been incredibly positive all around. New favorites like D.3.S. Frog are bound to become ingrained mementos of duelist culture. For the full list, grab a copy of Shonen Jump at your local newsstand or book store!
This Week on Metagame.com
We’ve got one week of regularly scheduled content before we break open Shadow of Infinity!
Mike Rosenberg opens up shop for us today with an in-depth review of . A powerful card that has drifted in and out of favor since its release many years ago, Judgment remains the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG’s best piece of “hard” negation. It stops anything and everything, and today Mike looks at what makes it strong and where it fits into the current environment. Could your deck benefit from this classic trap? It could be, and you might not even know it until you check out Mike’s article!
Jerome McHale hits us with another cool deck on Tuesday, when he debuts Swap Meet. Focusing on the synergy between Ameba and the Spellcaster’s Judgment card, Mystic Box, the deck aims to befuddle opponents by stealing their monsters and passing them dead weight. You know, I was once finished off by an Ameba deck. It wasn’t pretty for me, but the other guy seemed to have a great time! And could that be an allusion to his preview card next week at the bottom of the article?
On Wednesday, I take a timely look at an Insect-themed deck that my submitter titled Jirai Gumo Control. An aggressive Insect deck, this one hits at just the perfect time, right before the release of Shadow of Infinity. Insect Imitation fuels a number of beneficial tricks and creates the backbone of a deck that shunts out raw ATK power and numbers advantage like nobody’s business, and the deck will only get stronger with the Insect support of Shadow of Infinity!
After seeing so much success on Europe’s recent Pharaoh Tours, Blast with Chain has received some attention over here in North America. There are some tricky rulings involving the card though, and this Thursday, Curtis Schultz will set the record straight. Does Blast with Chain become a spell card when attached to a monster? How does it interact with monsters like Armed Samurai – Ben Kei and Maha Vailo? And what precisely makes this thing blow up, anyway? Curtis answers those questions and more this week.
Julia Hedberg follows up her article last week on the academics of card presence with a dissertation on tempo. Another topic that most duelists have an inherent understanding of, but have trouble actually discussing, tempo is one of the most important core theories to the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG. Julia not only defines and discusses tempo on a technical level, but she analyzes five of the format's top decks to show you their comparative speeds.
Also on Friday, Julia churns out another must-read for judges when she investigates the concept of table judging. I’m a Level 3 judge who’s head judged two National Championships, and there were ideas here that I’d never thought of. If you regularly judge Regional-level events, or think you might ever judge one, you definitely don't want to miss this thorough, step-by-step guide.
Finally, Jae Kim kicks off a new series he calls New Grounds. Every week, Jae will look at an original deck idea and then evaluate its ability to generate advantage and counter the metagame, while also looking at the deck's theoretical performance in the cookie cutter matchup. Nice! This week he builds a Dark Scorpion deck that blends Tomato Control’s resiliency with the precision capabilities of Warriors, and the end result looks to be a pretty darn playable hybrid of Control and Beatdown power. It could be a real winner, so be sure to check it out!
Also coming up soon, I sit down with Shonen Jump Champion Anthony Alvarado for the longest interview that Metagame.com has ever seen. In Part 1 of this two-part behemoth, we look at Anthony’s amazing track record and his gamer history, and we discuss some of the finer points of the current format. The next day, we’ll follow up with the conclusion, talking about Team Overdose’s relationship with Team Scoop and Alvarado’s amazing showing at December’s East Coast vs. West Coast battle. The quietest Shonen Jump Champ is finally speaking out, and you won’t want to miss a word of what he has to say!
That’s it for this week! Don’t forget to head on back next Monday, when we look at the first of many unreleased cards from Shadow of Infinity!