It’s over, and long-time tournament veteran Jason Holloway has finally become a Shonen Jump Champion! His path to title gold was anything but easy.

His first opponent in the Top 16 was Cesar Gonzalez, the Shonen Jump Champion of Montreal and one of three players carrying Jerry Wang’s Dark Armed Dragon build this weekend. Cesar was the definite favorite for the win in the eyes of the players here in Nashville, and Jason’s 2-0 victory in that match surprised spectators here today. Next he took on Hugo Adame: another fan favorite. Adame was playing an innovative Dark Armed Dragon build high on defense and big on control, but Holloway scored yet another 2-0 win.

Confronted by one-time teammate and three-time Champion Fili Luna, the road was even harder: Holloway narrowly squeaked out a win in game 3 to get to the finals. There, he went to war against Shonen Jump Champion Jerry Wang. In a knock-down drag-out three-game battle defined chiefly by terrible hands for both players, Holloway emerged from a game 1 defeat to capture the last two duels, and with them, a Shonen Jump Championship.

The weekend was an interesting one: predictably, many players just tweaked their Dark Armed Dragon builds to accommodate the new mid-format changes, citing the lack of time to test as their reason to do so. Zombies, Samurai, and several other decks were represented in Day 1, but at the end of the Swiss rounds fourteen of the Top 16 decks were variants of Dark Armed Dragon. The builds were extremely varied: defensive control, Light and Darkness Dragon, and Caius the Shadow Monarch decks were just three of the variants that made it to Day 2. Two Monarch decks made the cut too, succeeding where faster strategies failed. The metagame was much slower than previous ones from recent Shonen Jump Championships, so the gates are wide open for the debut of Lightsworn and the new Gladiator Beasts two weeks from now in St. Louis!

In the mean time, congratulations to everyone who showed up to compete here in Nashville, and special congrats to Jason Holloway, your newest Shonen Jump Champion!