It’s January 16, and we’re seven days into Metagame.com’s new year!

2006 Shonen Jump Championship Season Beginning!

We’re just five weeks away from the year’s first Shonen Jump Championship event. The Durham Civic Center will host hundreds of duelists on February 25 and 26, and the competition is bound to be fierce.

All the major teams and independent duelists have been quiet since Shonen Jump Championship Los Angeles, where many topnotch competitors were knocked out of the spotlight in favor of new, fresh talent from California and Texas. The silence on Internet message boards and online communities has been deafening, and no one has been willing to tip their hat as to new tech or deck strategies. For now, with no teams confirming their intended presence at the moment, only one thing can be guaranteed for Shonen Jump Durham—it’s going to be a weekend filled with surprises.

Are you interested in heading out to North Carolina yourself? Flights are still cheap, and there’s still plenty of time to plan road trips with your friends or team. Check out Premier Tournament Organizer Star City Games’s message board for all the information on registration, event times, and venue info right here.

Our own alumni writer, Simon Sangpukdee, will be head judging the event. If you can’t make it, be sure to reserve that weekend on your calendar. Yours truly will be live on site, bringing you all the interviews, team profiles, feature matches, new tech, and deck developments as they arise, right on the floor of the tournament!

Upper Deck Entertainment Confirms February Releases

A recent schedule was distributed to the commercial purchasers of Upper Deck Entertainment products earlier this month, confirming the February releases of some exciting new products. The next Structure Deck, Spellcaster’s Judgment, has been verified as a February release. Our continuing preview coverage of the Structure Deck winds up this week, so if you want to get a jump on the hot new cards before next month, we’re your ticket for all that delicious new info!

 . . . Yeah, it’s a shameless plug. But it’s one that promises entertainment and information, right? Right.

Also confirmed for February are not only the Chazz Princeton and Jaden Yuki Duelist Packs, but also Special Edition boxes commemorating these hot new mini-expansions! Each Special Edition box will have three Jaden and three Chazz packs, as well as one of three Special Edition promo cards. As of yet, the identity of all three promos are still unknown, and debate and speculation have raged across many player communities as to what UDE might have up its sleeve. After the stellar reprints found in Elemental Energy’s Special Edition, expectations are high in the hearts of many duelists.

Shadow of Infinity Slated for March

With Sneak Preview events already on the schedule for many areas, Shadow of Infinity has been confirmed as a March release. Featuring a plethora of new cards for under-explored monster types like Insects, Shadows of Infinity is the next full expansion set for the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game.

Some special standouts of the set are the three Sacred Beasts, the much-hyped mega-monsters featured in the current Yu-Gi-Oh! GX story arc. As tension mounts at Duel Academy, we in the real world draw closer and closer to the release of three of the most intimidating monster cards ever to hit the game. You can expect the Sneak Preview events for this set to be packed, as collectors will certainly drive the demand for the Sacred Beasts to stellar heights.

This Week on Metagame.com

We’ll start off this week today by continuing our in-depth look at the upcoming Structure Deck, Spellcaster’s Judgment. Then we’ll return you to your normally scheduled columns with a nice blend of whimsy and must-read material. Here’s the breakdown.

As usual, Mike Rosenberg cracks the week open for us. He sets his sights on a new card from Spellcaster’s Judgment, Magical Blast, and shows us what it can do, beyond making Spellcaster Burn a viable strategy. Mike delves into the mechanics of the card and how it works, showing experienced duelists and new players alike how to take advantage of it. Check out the article for some killer combos, cool tricks for major decks, and some ideas that you might not have considered at a first glance.

Tomorrow, Jerome McHale concludes our week-long coverage of the Spellcaster’s Judgment Structure Deck by examining the Spellcaster themes and putting them to work in a deck. He blends new cards with old favorites and brings back several golden oldies from days gone by in order to create a potential tournament powerhouse. Magical Marionette? Rush Recklessly? Jerome flexes his deckbuilding muscle and makes it all work together, blending hot new tech with a little bit of old-school flavor.

On Wednesday we shift gears, and I head back to The Apotheosis to have a little fun. If you like horror movies or just grossing out your opponent, you’ll like what I’ve got in store! Reader Matt C. shows us a deck he calls “Attack of the Slime Tokens,” a unique Lockdown deck that aims to win by creating a ton of Slimes and then throwing them at the opponent. It’s not exactly everyday fare, but the B-movie fan in me won out. Be sure to check it out, and enjoy one of the most interesting decks we’ve ever featured.

We move from the ridiculous to the sublime on Thursday, as Curtis Schultz looks at some of the important rulings surrounding everybody’s favorite underdog, Strike Ninja. How does Strike Ninja’s effect work if it’s activated multiple times in a single chain? Can you throw Blast With Chain on it, and if you can, what exactly is the result? If you Snatch Steal my Ninja and then send it out of play, where on earth does it go? All these questions and more are answered in Curtis’s Duel Academy column this week!

Julia Hedberg follows up on Friday with a must-read Tech Update article in Solid Ground. With an awesome response to her last Tech Update, Julia’s back to show you more of the format’s best-known and most under-appreciated single cards. She’ll look at favorites like Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive and analyzes why exactly they’ve become popular. She also considers interesting cards that are just starting to see popular play, like Elemental Hero Wildheart and Twin-Headed Behemoth. Whether you’re a new player or a veteran, there’s lots of food for thought in this article.

Finally, we finish up the week with some deck reflection from Jae Kim. Jae looks at Spellcasters in the current environment, and like Jerome and I before him, he proposes an interesting Spellcaster build that could fare well in the current Advanced environment. He chooses to focus his efforts in a new direction, though, and uses some older control cards to create an aggressive hand-destruction theme. White Magical Hat and Robbin’ Goblin blend with a toolbox of Spellcasters to create a tough, synergy-heavy Control strategy.

That’s it for this week! Head on back in another seven days for more of your favorite Metagame.com columns, as well as a surprise interview with one of the game’s top players!

As always, thanks for reading!

—Jason Grabher-Meyer

Contributing Editor, Metagame.com