It’s Monday, May 19, 2008, and this week is a big one for Championship tournaments across the globe!
Shonen Jump Championship St. Louis Is This Saturday
It’s finally going to happen—Light of Destruction is now legal for premier events, and we’re going to see how it all plays out this weekend in St. Louis!
Players have had more than two weeks to experiment with cards from the latest booster set, and it seems that Gladiator Beasts and the Lightsworn have started to deliver. Debate still rages on about the viability of both decks, but a first-place and third-place showing from Gladiators and Lightsworn, respectively, at the Irish National Championship this past weekend gave the first dose of real conclusive evidence. This Saturday, hundreds of duelists will take part in one of the game’s biggest experiments of all time, and a Day 2 filled with Lightsworn, Gladiator Beasts, and Dark Armed Dragon seems like the most likely result.
But surprises abound at these types of tournaments! Batterymen, Destiny End Dragoon, and even some unique strategies like Skill Drain Beatdown may have strong potential in the post–Light of Destruction environment. The mid-format changes to the current Advanced Format swung the doors wide open for creative duelists, and Light of Destruction has brought countless new opportunities to the game. How will it all turn out? We won’t know until we see the field on Saturday. If you live in or near the St. Louis area, it’s not too late to be part of the action!
You can find date, venue, and contact information at the official event listing on UDE’s website. Then, find more info about the prize spread, start times, side events, and the accompanying Regional qualifier over at Pastimes’s website: the Premier Tournament Organizer for this event. If you can’t make it, then be sure to join us here on Metagame bright and early Saturday morning—we’ll have live coverage coming straight to you from the tournament floor at the St. Charles Convention Center!
Lightsworn, Gladiator Beasts, and Dark Armed Dragon are finally set to clash! Get ready for a knock-down, drag-out fight that will set the pace for this summer’s premier tournaments.
United Kingdom and Mexican National Championships Are This Weekend
Hot on the heels of the German and Irish National Championships (and probably others—Argentina, I think?—man these things are hard to keep track of!), we’ll see at least two more Championships this weekend, as the best of the U.K. and Mexico go head to head.
Metagame.com will feature linked coverage to U.K. Nationals info post-event, so while you’re here to check out the Shonen Jump Championship this Saturday and Sunday don’t miss all the info from across the pond. While American duelists get a lot of hype, European and South American duelists always distinguish themselves when the World Championship roll around, and there’s a lot to be learned from events in other countries. Join us, and witness even more fallout from Light of Destruction this weekend!
This Week on Metagame.com
I’m pretty excited about our articles this week. Everybody at Metagame is always trying to help you be a better duelist, but I think we’ve got some particularly awesome offerings this week to help you step up your game.
I get things started today with an article on a card I’ve looked at once before: Phoenix Wing Wind Blast. This old-school trap card worked wonders in the Perfect Circle format before falling to the speed of Dark Armed Drag Return, but it made a tremendous showing at Shonen Jump Championship Nashville. It was a great fit for that metagame, but it’s going to get even better now that Light of Destruction cards are legal for competitive play, and today I’ll show you why.
Tomorrow, Jerome McHale’s must-read article brings you a deck that I think anyone going to Shonen Jump Championship St. Louis should know about—Gladiator Beasts. Jerome’s tweaked my Elemental Hero Prisma build and made it his own. The result is a truly awesome deck for Regional or Shonen Jump–level competition. With Gladiator Beasts winning this past weekend’s Irish National Championship, this is a matchup you’ll need to know about if you plan on succeeding over the next several months. Jerome’s article is an awesome starting point.
On Wednesday, Curtis Schultz swings open the doors to his Duelist Academy for one of the final articles in his series on summoning. This time around, his focus is on special summon monsters, and if you’ve ever wondered why some monsters can be special summoned by Monster Reborn and others can’t, then this is the article for you! Not sure about the intricacies of card text like "can only be Special Summoned by," and "can’t be Special Summoned except . . ."? Curtis will lay everything out in plain English and teach you the differences. When new monsters come around, you’ll know how to handle them!
Probability plays a huge role in the dueling instincts of top players, but a lot of competitors just haven’t been introduced to the basic math behind it. Well, Bryan Camareno will fix that this Friday in another must-read installment of The Practical Duelist. Ryan will show you some really easy numbers work that’s guaranteed to up your win percentage. Want to be able to predict what card is coming off the top of your deck? Want to shape your plays around the cards you’re likely to draw, and feel that sa-weet feeling when everything comes together? Don’t miss Bryan’s article on Friday!
A Jerry Wang deck back in The Champions again?! It’s true—after yet another format-shaping finish at Shonen Jump Championship Nashville, another of Jerry’s decks comes under Matt Peddle’s microscope. What about Jerry’s deck is so good that three top duelists abandoned their own builds just minutes before the tournament kicked off? And how did it get so many people to Day 2? Matt will reveal all as he explains why this innovative Dark Armed Dragon build may just be the deck to beat.
Finally, we wrap up our week with a hugely important article from Ryan Murphy. This Sunday, Ryan’s going to propose a new piece of theory for the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG, and the result is something totally new: a mathematic system for building side decks. Ever wonder how many cards you should devote to each matchup you may come across? Want to beat your bad matchups while still optimizing your good ones? If you’re a regular tournament player you need to check this one out.
That’s it for this week, but don’t forget to join us this weekend for live coverage from Shonen Jump Championship St. Louis! Light of Destruction is legal for play, and with Lightsworn and Gladiator Beasts beginning to take local and national tournaments across the globe we’re in for a brand new metagame.
See you there!
—Jason Grabher-Meyer
Contributing Editor, Metagame.com