Wow there’s a lot of tech here today! Let’s start with the obvious choices and work our way down to the more interesting picks.

Legendary Jujitsu Master:         

No surprises on this one! Eleven duelists in the Top 16 played this card in either their main or side decks at Shonen Jump Championship Nashville, influenced by Paul Levitin’s huge Gladiator Beast win at Minneapolis. Five more Top 16 competitors sided Jujitsu Master at Saint Louis. Today, a massive number of duelists are siding it while a significant number are main decking it, in everything from Samurai and Monarchs to dedicated anti-metagame decks, some of which don’t even play the usual core of Gadgets.

Jujitsu Master is being played to fill one major role: it stops Gladiator Beasts. If a Gladiator monster can’t stay on the field until the end of the battle phase, it can’t tag out — obvious, but deadly to the point of deserving mention. But Jujitsu Masters also do well against Lightsworn and Gadgets, each of which have only a handful of outs to big defenders. Wulf, Lightsworn Beast can attack and destroy Jujitsu, but you still have to draw it again on the following turn. That’s a rough beat. Jain, Lightsworn Paladin could destroy Jujitsu Master while remaining a live topdeck, but nobody’s running her as far as I can see. Ehren, Lightsworn Monk can trump Jujitsu, but she too seems to be taking a backseat to the same low-utility stuff we saw in Saint Louis. The Gadget builds here today aren’t playing Shield Crush or Nobleman of Crossout all that often, meaning that they’re ill-equipped to take on Jujitsu too.

What started as a great metagame call for a single matchup has turned into a spectacular call for three matchups, two of which have proven to have far greater representation than most expected. Players maining Legendary Jujitsu Master today should have a big advantage

Bottomless Trap Hole:    

Again, this is another obvious pick that’s blossomed here today. While many players ran a pair of Bottomless Trap Hole at Saint Louis, this trend is in full swing here today, with plenty of competitors running not two, but three copies. Bottomless stops virtually everything outside of the constraints of a Gadget deck. It shuts down the bulk of the Gladiator Beast strategy, removing Gladiator Beast Laquari, Gladiator Beast Darius, and Gladiator Beast Bestiari from play. It even counters Gyzarus when the contact Fusion is summoned. It also stops Dark Armed Dragon, Judgment Dragon, and an array of Lightsworn and Samurai monsters.

There’s not much to say — it’s obvious how good this card is, and with so many duelists relying on monster effects for spell and trap removal, eschewing Mystical Space Typhoon to do so, Bottomless Trap Hole is an incredibly safe card to play. High in utility and devastating in all but one major matchup, it’s a no-brainer pick in threes. This trend is going to be a major influence on how decks are built over the coming weeks, so keep it in mind when you go to create your next build of whatever you decided to play.

Vanity’s Fiend:     

A lot of duelists running Monarch variants are main-decking one of two different tribute monsters: Prime Material Dragon and Vanity’s Fiend. Vanity’s Fiend gets the nod here in the tech update, because it’s also being sided in other strategies, including Dark Armed Dragon and Gadgets.

The ability to turn off special summoning in its entirety is nuts when three, arguably four of the biggest decks in the format rely on special summons. Gladiator Beasts and Dark Armed Dragon straight-up can’t win if they can’t use their special summon tricks. No Gyzarus, no Heraklinos, and no tag-outs (well, no tag-ins at least) is just a death sentence for the Gladiators, while Dark Armed Dragon builds generally require Dark Armed Dragon to win. Lightsworn gets hit hard, especially the more combo-oriented builds that continue to see play. Even Monarchs run into issues if they can’t use Treeborn Frog.

Monarchs and Dark Armed Dragon both run infrastructure that make siding the Fiend easy — it’s actually been going on for several Shonen Jump Championships now, but it’s been under the radar of the average player despite that fact. This weekend it’s simply too big to continue ignoring, and it’ll probably continue to pop up until the Advanced format changes over in September. As long as Gladiators continue to dominate, it’s going to be a viable side option for any deck that can support tribute monsters.

Deck Lockdown:   

One card that’s been seeing a ton of play today is Deck Lockdown. This one was miles away from my thought processes coming into this event, and I was shocked to see it in so many side decks as a counter measure to Gladiator Beasts. Results have been mixed at best — so far we’ve seen Deck Lockdown played in two feature matches, and in each, the duelist playing it lost anyway. But its presence in the metagame here today has created ripples that have affected the entire event.

I do think Deck Lockdown can be effective tech, but it’s just not as splashable as some players seem to think it is. The problem with Deck Lockdown is that it only gives you two turns of freedom from special summoning. That means you’d better be able to get some serious action going in those two turns, and if your opponent throws down Hoplomus you’d better be able to deal with it. You’ve got two turns to cause some havoc — after that point your efforts amount to nothing more than a wasted card. I honestly wouldn’t even run this card in a deck that isn’t prepared to deal with big, high-DEF monsters brickwalling. You’d better have Ehren, Lightsworn Monk, The Six Samurai – Irou, or Shield Crush in multiples to take advantage of the situation you’re creating, and you’d better have those cards at the ready when you activate Lockdown. If you don’t, then all you’re doing is delaying the inevitable. I don’t even like Exiled Force in this context, because it consumes the normal summon that you need to thump your opponent.

The proper Lightsworn, Samurai, or Gadget builds could definitely side this card effectively — I’m surprised to find myself saying that, because I frankly wrote the card off as “funplayable” weeks ago (yes, I did just roll “fun” and “unplayable” into one word). But at the same time, I don’t think anybody here siding Deck Lockdown is actually running those particular builds. It’s the right card at the right time, but it’s being played in the wrong places. It’s got potential though, so keep it in the back of your head in the future.

That’s it for me — we’ll have another tech update some time later in the weekend, because there’s tons of successful, and not-so-successful tech being played en masse. There’s a lot of creativity, and we’re going to show you all the highlights influencing the shape of Day 2.