It’s Monday, October 23rd, and only days remain until SJC action returns to the West Coast!
Shonen Jump Championship Seattle This Weekend
Tension is mounting as the dueling world braces itself for the first West Coast SJC in months! Top teams are gearing up for competition, and celebrity duelists like two-time SJC winner Emon Ghaneian and American Champion Austin Kulman are getting ready to go head to head with the best of the west.
With SJC Austin’s Top 8 now firmly etched into the minds of competitive duelists, we’re bound to see a varied metagame. Monarchs, Beatdown, OTK, Warrior Toolbox, and a plethora of rogue decks are sure to make up the metagame in a format where there is still no cookie-cutter archetype. Aggression is expected to continue as the order of the day, but with Hydrogeddon becoming so influential in the format, Apprentice Magician (and its ability to shut out Hydro with Old Vindictive Magician) may very well be the card of the tournament. Speaking of Austin, Matt Stille (of Gearfried Top 8 fame) will be returning in a bid to prove that he’s more than just a one-hit wonder. We’ll be following that story as it progresses through the weekend.
We’ll have all the feature matches, deck profiles, team interviews, photos, and scrubbings you crave as we bring you extended coverage once more. Metagame will be coming to you live from the Seattle Center, so if you can’t make it yourself, you’ll want to be with us bright and early Saturday morning to catch all the action as it happens. If you’re still on the fence about heading out to throw down, you can find all the info you need right here at the official event listing.
This one’s going to be big!
Structure Deck 9, Dinosaur’s Rage In Stores This Week
Missed out on your chance to get one of those super-limited Dinosaur’s Rage Special Sets last week? Never fear, because the hottest new Structure Deck will see a general release all on its own across North America this week, and should start appearing in stores on Wednesday.
Dinosaur’s Rage takes everything you love about Structure Decks and raises the bar. Killer reprints? This deck’s got ’em, including some rare promos that have never been reissued before. New cards? Dinosaur’s Rage has more new material than any other Structure Deck before it, bringing more than half a dozen new cards to the table. Oh, and if that playset of Hydrogeddon has eluded you, this thing comes with two of them!
You should be able to find Dinosaur’s Rage in both mass-market retailers (like Target and Toys ‘R’ Us) and hobby stores this week.
Star City Games Opens 10,000 Square Ft. Game Center
Long-time Upper Deck Entertainment Premier Event Organizer Star City Games announced earlier this week that they’re opening a massive establishment called the Star City Game Center in Roanoke, Virginia. It’s a good sign for fans of the TCG hobby, and represents a huge commercial commitment.
The state-of-the-art Star City Game Center is capable of comfortably accommodating 300 players, and offers many amenities not seen in a typical game store such as a private Parents Lounge and a full-service, in-store restaurant. In fact, it’s so big that it has its own MySpace page, which you can find at http://www.myspace.com/starcitygamecenter. You can hit it up for location information, contact numbers, and the latest details on upcoming events.
Cyberdark Impact Preview Weeks Begin Today On Metagame.com!
Speaking of great things to come, we’re kicking off our countdown to the Cyberdark Impact Sneak Preview events this week with some previews of our own! From now until the Sneaks, we’ll feature a new card from the latest Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG expansion to show you what’s in store!
Today, click on over to see me wax poetic about the set’s namesakes! Cyberdark Horn, Cyberdark Edge, and Cyberdark Keel are the newest additions to Zane Truesdale’s arsenal on Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, and in less than two weeks you’ll be able to make them yours. Blending Dragon and Machine strategies to create 2200 and 2300 ATK monsters that can be normal summoned without a drawback, these are just what the doctor ordered for curing a bad case of Cyber Dragon.
Julia Hedberg follows up tomorrow with a new twist on an old favorite. Black Horn of Heaven twists the original Horn of Heaven in a new direction, giving you a spell speed 3 source of monster removal that doesn’t require a discard. It’s just the beginning of a major theme that runs through Cyberdark Impact, and it’s a boon to Counter Fairy decks and more.
On Wednesday, Mike Rosenberg will introduce you to another of the set’s themes: chain numbers. Cyberdark Impact has several cards that will reward you for managing chains, either creating long ones or creating plenty of small combos. He’ll show you two of the best, Chain Strike and Blast Asmodian, and illustrate how you can use them to pull off stunning victories.
Also, with Wednesday being the first opportunity for most duelists to get their hands on Dinosaur’s Rage, Julia Hedberg will pop back in to take a crack at Restructuring the Structure. Want to turn your Structure Deck purchase into a viable tournament deck for local level competition? Julia’s got the step-by-step process that’ll land you with an aggressive, combo-laden Dino build.
Jae Kim is in the house on Thursday, showing off two prestigious cards from the GX mythos. Cyber Ogre is a field-stomping battle-negating monstrosity that lets you stop opponents in their tracks, even without any set spell or trap cards. Easily increasing its ATK to a whopping 3900, it just gets meaner when two are fused together. Jae’s going to show you how this surprisingly subtle card can pay off in competition
Also, Curtis Schultz is back with part two of his in-depth investigation of Ancient Lamp. The Lamp can create some potentially confusing rulings scenarios, and Curtis is going to lay them all out for inspection and solution. If you’re using this potent Cyber-Stein stopper yourself, you’ll definitely want to check out what Curtis has to say.
On Friday, Matt Peddle is going to preview one of my favorite commons from Cyberdark Impact. It’s called Snipe Hunter, and its effect turns in-hand cards into raw destructive force. Capable of wiping out cards in any zone on the field, it’s a great way to balance your hand while keeping the pressure on the opponent.
The Saturday of Shonen Jump Championship Seattle, Jerome McHale will profile one of the best trap cards in the set. Like Mirror Force? You’d probably enjoy running four copies of it then, and that means you’d like Justi-Break. A boon to decks based around normal monsters, it turns vanilla strategies into top contenders.
Finally, Julia Hedberg continues to work overtime to bring you some of the best new cards out there. On Sunday, she’ll give you the last preview of the week: Vanity’s Fiend. This format is often defined by special summons such as Cyber Dragon, Apprentice Magician, Mystic Tomato, and Hydrogeddon, and Vanity’s Fiend shuts them all down. Cyber-Stein has a new worst enemy.
That’s it for this week, but be sure to hit us up every day! You won’t want to miss all the new cards and insight we’ve got on offer, especially if you’re going to attend a Sneak Preview of Cyberdark Impact. Get a jump on the opposition by studying up on the set’s most powerful cards before heading into competition, and you’ll definitely have an edge.
As always, thanks for reading Metagame.
—Jason Grabher-Meyer
Contributing Editor, Metagame.com