It’s December 22, 2008, and here in the midst of the holiday season we are just two-and-a-half weeks removed from the next Shonen Jump Championship!
Shonen Jump Championship San Francisco Fast Approaching
In less than three weeks the 2009 dueling season will officially start, as hundreds of duelists flock to the South San Francisco Conference Center. The first Shonen Jump of the year is upon us, and this one’s bound to be big!
The Shonen Jump metagame appears to be slowing down, with the finals of Detroit pitting two very different decks against each other—both packing different tech to bring duels to a screeching halt. Threatening Roar, Necro Gardna, Waboku, and of course Gorz the Emissary of Darkness are taking their toll on overly aggressive duelists, a trend that we can expect to see more of in San Francisco. Plants and Zombies have continued to see testing, while the Day 2 showings from Gadgets and Gladiator Beasts may mean more representation for those two once-great archetypes in San Fran.
Interested in going? There’s still plenty of time to book a flight or a hotel, so hit up the official TCG site for the San Francisco event listing. From there, make sure you check out the San Francisco event page over on Premier Tournament Organizer Cascade Games’ site for more information. They’ve got important details on start times, side events, prizes, and more.
As the winter grows colder, dueling is heating up! Get ready to kick off the year with one enormous tournament.
This Week on Metagame.com
This is our last week of new content for the year—we’ll return on January 12 with more new articles, but today I start our home stretch sprint with a look at Dark Eruption. Exploding into the competitive scene just weeks ago in Detroit this underrated spell card made it all the way to the finals in the hands of Calvin Tsang. Since then, it’s been a popular card for plenty of duelists to experiment with, but results have varied. I’m going to discuss what makes the card so good, and how you can get the most out of it.
Tomorrow Jerome McHale joins us for one more deck, as he builds a dedicated Psychic build. Packed with negation and capable of slowing duels down to a crawl, it’s a cool deck packed with good ideas. Psychics get a boost from the upcoming Crimson Crisis booster set, so the concepts presented in Tuesday’s article are going to give you a leg up on future competition.
Then we’ll see the first of two articles this week from Curtis Schultz, as he tackles all your questions on Gorz the Emissary of Darkness. Can you negate his summon with Solemn Judgment? How does Gorz work when the damage you’re taking is dealt by Don Zaloog? Curtis will answer those questions and many more.
On Thursday Matt Peddle discusses a big topic for competitive duelists in Battlefields: when and when not to activate Solemn Judgment. Conservative play in an aggressive format is the sub-theme, and Matt gives some great examples of situations where jumping the gun would cost you victory. This one’s a definite must-read.
Curtis is back on Friday with one more dose of rulings goodness, looking at another hot promo card for tournament players: Thunder King Rai-Oh. Thunder King is seeing play darn near everywhere right now, and even if you don’t play him yourself, you’re bound to come up against him. Be ready by knowing all the important rulings when he hits the table.
Matt Peddle is back on Saturday too, ringing out the year with one more installment of The Champions. This time he’s covering one of the most promising new decks from Shonen Jump Detroit — our own Jerome McHale’s Blackest Garden. A number of Canada’s top players have worked with this deck since its debut, taking it in new directions. Matt’s going to talk about what made Jerome’s progenitor build so promising in the eyes of Championship-level players.
Finally, Ryan Murphy closes out the year with another easy-to-construct deck in The Budget Builder. This time he’s revisiting one of the most controversial decks of all time: PACMAN. What new innovations and insights have led Ryan to back this oft-maligned archetype? What can a budget player expect to get out of it, on and off the table? Find out by joining us Sunday.
But the year doesn’t end there! For the next two weeks, our writers will reflect on their favorite articles as we bring back some of 2008’s best columns, complete with new intros from the authors. Which articles have stood the test of time? Stick with us this holiday season to find out.
Happy Holidays from all of us here at Metagame!
—Jason Grabher-Meyer
Contributing Editor, Metagame.com