Reporting at a Shonen Jump Championship is always a busy job, and there are always a couple of articles that wind up on the cutting room floor due to time constraints. Interviews are particularly hard, because they take place in between rounds and often have to be cut short when the tournament starts up again. In addition, while the interviewed duelist always wants to do the interview, his or her mind is often occupied with a teammate’s performance, his or her own win-loss record, or play decisions that he or she could have made in previous rounds.

In short, they’re usually tricky, and my interview with Ryan Hayakawa at Shonen Jump Championship Durham was no exception. Ryan’s a very focused competitor, and even though we’d talked about doing an interview in the weeks leading up to Durham, it was still difficult to arrange and execute. While the interview itself did take place, there wasn’t time for me to turn it into a readable, complete article until later in the weekend. At that point, I decided to save it for later. This let me write more time-sensitive pieces while ensuring that Ryan would get his fair share of the spotlight.

And boy, does he deserve it. Over the past many months, our lack of coverage on Ryan has actually been one of my few regrets. Besides a handful of feature matches, we’ve never done much coverage on Ryan, which is sort of criminal when you consider that he’s arguably the most successful duelist in North America.

Ryan distinguished himself last year while Comic Odyssey was at the apex of its Cyber-Stein winning streak. All in all, the team took home more than half of the Cyber-Stein championship promos that were offered in North America, and they were a decidedly dominant force on the tournament scene. The first group of top-level players to unite and create a true team, Comic Odyssey overwhelmed the opposition with raw talent and raw numbers, and it wasn’t until Shonen Jump Championship New Jersey that serious resistance started to crop up.

While duelists had been attempting to mimic Comic Odyssey’s successful team formula for several months, most of them struggled until New Jersey. Packed with teams (including the then up-and-coming Team Overdose), the focus for the day was on newcomers instead of Comic Odyssey’s vets. It was a turning point in the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG’s North American history . . . and then, well, Comic Odyssey won anyway. Sweeping both the side and main events, they took home two Cyber-Steins, and Ryan Hayakawa cemented himself as a legend by repeating his championship performance six weeks before in Houston.

Shortly after his earth-shaking wins and a respectable showing at the American National Championships, Ryan disappeared off the radar for a bit, re-emerging every now and then, but generally laying low. The public was left to wonder where he went, and what had happened to Yu-Gi-Oh!’s only official* two-time Shonen Jump Champion. Here are the stats for this incredible duelist!

Name: Ryan Hayakawa

Age: 15

Residing in: Los Angeles

Student of: Village Christian High School

Sponsor: Comic Odyssey

Accomplishments:

Winner of Shonen Jump Houston 2005

Winner of Shonen Jump New Jersey 2005

Two-time Shonen Jump Champion

Ninth Place, 2005 American National Championship

After a long absence, Ryan Hayakawa has again plunged into the fray of Shonen Jump competition! Making an appearance at last summer’s Shonen Jump Indianapolis at Gen Con, he re-materialized at Shonen Jump Los Angeles last November, and was also in competition at San Francisco the following month. Making the trip out to Shonen Jump Durham just a couple weeks ago sent a strong message—Ryan Hayakawa is back, and will be a major presence in top-tier competition for 2006!

I was really happy to get a chance to talk to him. Like most of his teammates, he’s laid-back, polite, and friendly—three factors that have always distinguished Comic Odyssey. Ryan was quieter than most duelists I talk with. I’ve interviewed many of Comic Odyssey’s members, and while I wouldn’t call Ryan shy, his mind was clearly on the field of competition at Durham. The first question I asked him was the obvious one. After blowing away two back-to-back Shonen Jump Championships, where had he disappeared to?

“School,” he answered. “I was studying.” I asked if there were any other reasons that contributed to his disappearance. Perhaps a feeling that he had accomplished everything there was to accomplish in the format? “Nope.” Discouragement at how the National Championships worked out? “Nope. Just school.”

I fumbled for some more possibilities, but Ryan just stuck to his answer, smiling a bit. Seeing as it was my number-one question for the interview, I was a bit disappointed that the answer was so simple. I was hoping for something like a confession that yes, the message board rumors were true, and Ryan had in fact done something to Jerry Wang to prevent him from appearing at Worlds. But no such luck.

I asked him what he’d been doing lately, and again the answer was pretty definite. “Practicing for this.” He grinned and elaborated a bit, saying that when he’s not dueling, he plays videogames and hangs out with friends like any normal teenager. “I spend a lot of time at Comic Odyssey,” he added, which is a familiar comment from many members of the team. Operating almost like a loose-knit family, Comic Odyssey’s members come from different walks of life with a wide variety of backgrounds. Their time spent at the store is the one thing they all have in common (aside from being really good Yu-Gi-Oh! players).

I was kind of feeling my way through the interview, trying to figure out what would open Ryan up to a bit more conversation. I asked him what he felt the field was like at Durham. “A lot of good players, but a lot of bad ones too,” he replied nonchalantly. “It’s all right, I guess.” With virtually every major team in North America present, and with every single one of the format’s previous Shonen Jump Champions in contention, it was a surprisingly blase evaluation. Ryan wasn’t being cocky: he just wasn’t shocked and awed by the spread of top-notch players. I guess winning back-to-back Shonen Jump Championships changes your perspective a little.

One of the interesting things about team play in Yu-Gi-Oh! is that each group has its own defined style for both dueling and building decks. While Teams Scoop and Savage (and several others) usually aim to innovate, other teams just play the most consistent deck in the format and try to play it better than the competition. Team Overdose is a perfect example of the latter, and Comic Odyssey is usually similar. I asked Ryan about his team’s strategies, and he confirmed my observations. Then he thought for a second and added, “Except for Wilson [Luc]. He’ll pull out the weirdest stuff!” Sure enough, I checked out one of Luc’s matches in the early rounds of the day, and he was running a deck that showed either considerable creativity or some serious Japanese influences. In the past I’d seen him run Strike Ninja, and his work with the card last year helped earn it the regard it currently has, building its reputation as a late-game powerhouse in topdecking situations.

At that point, I asked Ryan how the team was doing so far that day. “It’s doing all right. We’ve got one-losses. Dwayne Nunez is undefeated.” Ryan himself had taken an early-round loss to a duelist who was main-decking three copies of Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer, a card that’s seriously underplayed in the current environment. Ryan whipped out his deck to show it to me. “The only way to beat this deck is Kycoo, and the guy had three of them, main-decked.” I asked what was so damaging about it, and got the expected answer. “It gets my Pot of Avarices, destroys my Chaos Sorcerers . . . that’s basically it.”

Sensing that discussing game mechanics would draw Ryan out a bit, I ran with it, letting him tell me about his deck. I asked him about his use of Tsukuyomi, which was popular that weekend, even in decks that weren’t running many flip effect monsters. “It’s good with the trains,” he said, tapping a copy of Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive. “That’s basically the only reason I play it.” He considered another moment, and then added “It gets rid of the Monarchs, it’s good overall . . . Snatch Steal is good with it!”

“I like Mystic Swordsman LV2 right now. It’s so good with all the Dekoichis and Merchants running around.” A lot of players at Durham were main-decking a pair of Mystic Swordsman LV2, so I asked Ryan if he thought Merchant and Dekoichi were becoming the new cookie-cutter cards. “Yeah, Merchant’s practically always a +1. That’s why these guys are main decks,” he said, again flashing Mystic Swordsman.

His favorite card? Enemy Controller. “It’s my favorite card, overall. I can often get rid of Spirit Reaper with it. I can sack Sangan for it. It takes out low-DEF monsters like Cyber Dragon, Mobius, and Breaker, and it’s chainable, too.” He paused. “Especially Spirit Reaper!”

Ryan’s good-natured dislike of Spirit Reaper made me want to ask him about the current format and play environment. “It’s all right. It’s not like, ‘Wow, it’s really good.’ I don’t like Graceful Charity being forbidden. Pot of Greed and Delinquent Duo I can understand. The new set’s gonna be awesome, though! Treeborn Frogs? I’m looking forward to it.”

I asked him if there was anything else he liked in the set, and Disciple of the Forbidden Spell came up. “I’ve actually only picked up a couple packs so far. Disciple’s good with Merchant [to get copies of it into the graveyard]. It kills Reapers. Cyber Dragon and D. D. monsters, too.”

As for the next Advanced format? “I’d like to see Graceful come back! Spirit Reaper is a pain . . . ”

Getting back to the day at hand, I asked Ryan how he thought he might do. “I don’t know! I don’t like to jinx anything. That’s what I did at Nationals. I thought I’d Top 8 there easily, and then I lost and took ninth. I’m really superstitious.”

He was quick to emphasize how important the team was to his success, especially around the time of his back-to-back wins. “I was practicing a lot at Odyssey. Theeresak Poonsombat helped me build my deck before Texas. Today I got my own deck, but yeah.”

Despite losses in numbers, the polite and friendly war-machine that is Team Comic Odyssey has marched onward, finding new blood in recent months. “I think we’ve got a lot of potential in Matt Laurents. He’s running the same deck I am. He’s been [at the store] for a long time. He plays other games, though, that’s why [he hadn’t appeared before San Francisco].” Laurents made a splash at San Francisco with his impeccable build of Soul Control getting him to Day 2, and is a top prospect for the team. Coming out of nowhere, many attendees at San Francisco didn’t even know Laurents was on the team until Day 2, since his TCG background is rooted in a different game. Though he stumbled at Durham, he was a smart-money choice for that event in the eyes of many, and he’ll continue to be one to watch well into the next Advanced format.

Having settled into the interview, Ryan answered that he’s “mellow, just mellow,” when I asked how he sees himself. “I’m pretty calm. I’m not like Dwayne, who’s always all ‘YEAH!’ He’ll just yell out.” He grinned.

I asked him if he had anything he wanted to say to the world, since it was his interview after all! His reply didn’t take a moment of thought. “People think I’m banned! I’m not banned.” While we conducted the interview, a few random Shonen Jump attendees stopped by to hang out. “That guy who was here a minute ago, he was looking through my deck and was all, ‘Dude, I thought you were banned.’ I’m not banned!” He laughed, still wanting to get the word out.

“Write that in quotes: ‘I am not banned.’”

Now that Ryan’s back on the scene, and is definitely not banned, what does he have planned for 2006? “I’m going to one of the next Shonen Jumps, actually. The one during spring break.” With the upcoming Shonen Jump Los Angeles right in his backyard, it’s a definite no-brainer, and it should be a big event for Comic Odyssey.

After reaching unprecedented levels of success, Ryan Hayakawa suffered disappointment at the National Championships and faded from the forefront of competition. But now he’s back, a bit older, maybe a bit wiser, and ready to make a mark on 2006 just like he did in 2005. With a new format on the horizon, and new and old players joining the team’s active ranks, Comic Odyssey is ready to make a comeback. Ryan Hayakawa will undoubtedly play an important role in their performance this year, and lightning may very well strike thrice.

—Jason Grabher-Meyer

* There’s a reason I specify that Ryan’s the only “official” two-time champ. Head back next week to see why!