It’s Monday, January 26, 2009, and less than two weeks remain until thousands of duelists get their shot at a copy of Gold Sarcophagus!
Upper Deck Day Locations Continue To Be Confirmed
We’re less than twelve days out from the Upper Deck Day weekend, and as duelists across North America get ready for a whopping sixty-three events, all but one of those events now have confirmed venues. Sixty-three Shonen Jump Championship copies of Des Volstgalph, Shrink, and of course Gold Sarcophagus are officially on the line, as well as over 1500 booster boxes and countless extra prizes. It all adds up to one unprecedented gaming extravaganza.
While the Duelist Challenge is the central feature of each Upper Deck Day event, make no mistake: there’s plenty of other stuff to do! The world gets its first taste of the new Huntik Trading Card Game
in free Sneak Preview tournaments, and you can be one of the first to try out this tremendous new game. Curious about the World of Warcraft TCG? There are beginner tournaments for that too, and both events will see you walk away with a free Starter Deck. I don’t know about you, but I routinely try new games without scoring free stuff, so it should be pretty awesome. There’ll even be demos for the World of Warcraft minis game — no shortage of new stuff to check out!
It all goes down on February 7 and 8, so hit up the official event listing page and find an Upper Deck Day near you!
This Week On Metagame
I got our week started today with a look at what’s fast becoming my favorite tech card at the moment: Karma Cut. I don’t think this card has ever been tournament-worthy in the past, but a perfect storm of matchups and metagame trends has changed all that. Click on over to see what I mean!
Tomorrow, Jerome McHale unveils a deck I’ve been waiting for him to reveal for weeks now: his latest build of Black Garden. A lot has changed since Shonen Jump Championship Detroit: Cyber Valley is out, Tomatoes are in, and "removal" is the word of the day! If you’ve been experimenting with Black Garden yourself, then this article is a must-read.
On Wednesday, Curtis Schultz brings us some much-needed rulings for two topnotch new cards: Dandylion and Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon. When do you choose the Dragon you want to special summon with Red-Eyes’ effect? How can you trigger Dandylion’s ability, and how can you miss out on it? Curtis answers all those questions and more this week.
Thursday, Matt Peddle discusses one of the most important parts of dueling in Battlefields: practice. How do the top players get to be as good as they are? The answer is simple, but the explanation is intriguing. Matt shares some interesting personal experiences and reflects on his team’s performance at Shonen Jump Baltimore — the debut of TeleDAD.
Julia Hedberg kicks off our weekend with a pair of articles: one on players’ rights and another on judges’ rights. Where the two intersect, and how they interact isn’t a topic that’s been explored much in the past, so this is going to be a very interesting pair of columns discussing one of the more important balances in the game. If you play, or judge, at sanctioned tournaments, you’ll definitely want to check these out.
Matt Peddle’s back on Saturday with a look at another big tournament deck. This time it’s Ryan Spicer’s TeleDAD variant, a daring build that ran zero copies of Emergency Teleport. Why did Spicer eschew the tournament-winning spell? And why does Matt think it was the best deck at the tournament? You won’t want to miss this one.
Finally, Ryan Murphy closes out our week with a look at another Black Garden deck, this one built from the perspective of the Budget Builder. While Black Garden isn’t as easy to build as some of Ryan’s other decks (hey, some of those ran nothing but commons!), it’s a great competitive strategy that undercuts Lightsworn and TeleDAD by hundreds of dollars. This one’s pretty different from Jerome’s build on Tuesday too, so it makes for an interesting comparison.
That’s it for this week! Join us in another seven days though, as we count down the remaining hours to the Upper Deck Day weekend!
-Jason Grabher-Meyer