It’s another bright and shining Monday, and there are less than two weeks between today and the final Shonen Jump Championship of the year!
Shonen Jump Championship San Jose
After the earthshaking action in Anaheim, the Shonen Jump Championship circuit is making a quick encore in California! Hundreds of duelists from one of the world’s most competitive metagames will pack into the San Jose Convention Center to throw down for the glory, the gold, and of course, a spread of fabulous prizes.
With Theeresak Poonsombat and Tim Perry’s performances at SJC Anaheim drawing Dark World into the spotlight, it seems like Monarchs and Fiends are on a collision course leading to San Jose. But the field is more open than ever before, and a wide variety of decks might see competition. Dimensional Fissure, Creature Swap Control, and Cyber-Stein OTK all made the Top 8 of the last SJC, but Warrior Toolbox, Strike Ninja, and many more strategies came within inches of Day 2 qualification. With Monarchs still the deck to beat, duelists are pulling out all the stops and there are sure to be some surprises.
It’s a complicated metagame that becomes even more beguiling with the addition of Cyberdark Impact. San Jose will be the first Shonen Jump Championship that allows cards from the latest set, and I’m sure some players will throw their hat into the ring with Normal monster or Cyberdark decks. The latter might be especially good in what will be a relatively conservative event: when the stakes go up, many duelists don’t take the risks they normally would in local tournaments or regionals, and that creates an environment that’s friendly towards Cyberdark Horn. Over the past couple weeks, Jae and Jerome have each shown you successful ways to run the Cyberdarks—it’ll be interesting to see if anybody has the guts to take them to San Jose.
As always, we’ll be bringing you all the action live, Saturday and Sunday from the tournament floor! I’ll have all the decks, tech, and feature match action you crave while Julia Hedberg hits players up for interviews, photos, commentary, and all the day’s best stories. If you’re interested in heading out to compete, then check out all the info at Cascade Games, the Premier Tournament Organizer for the event. If not, be here on December 16th and 17th for the next best thing!
Champion Packs Fuel Interest In . . . Darn Near Everything?
I don’t know about you, but my local hobby store has been offering Champion Packs as tournament prizes for two weeks. Since then, tournament attendance has doubled. If you haven’t been to a local tourney in awhile, you might want to hit one up! Rares like Solemn Judgment, Pot of Avarice, and the uber-popular Enemy Controller have created a bottom line for prizes that’s pretty hard to ignore. Though Tournament Packs didn’t guarantee a rare in every booster, Champion Packs do, and that means that even if you just get a pack for participating, you’ll walk away with something tournament-worthy.
While the secondary market value of stuff like Controller and Avarice hasn’t taken much of a dive, the new super rare versions of cards previously only available as commons and rares have been a hit! Metamorphosis, Night Assailant, Book of Moon, and Sakuretsu Armor are all commanding anywhere between $12 and $25 or more, with Sakuretsu and Book the most sought-after. The set’s ultra rare, Satellite Cannon, is taking down about $75 on online auction sites. All this is good news for the average tournament competitor, who’s now getting far better standardized prizes for his or her entry fee!
If you want to throw down for some Champion Packs and haven’t gotten the chance yet, call your local authorized hobby store and ask if they’re offering them for tournaments! You can find a list of authorized stores in your area right here, and there are hundreds of tournament venues across the continent.
This Week at Metagame.com
Kirk Leonhardt’s success with a deck built around Dimensional Fissure sparked a lot of interest in Anaheim, and Mike Rosenberg is opening up our week today with a look at what makes the card so good. A combination of clever play options and a “perfect storm” metagame in North America has made it a great time to play Fissure, and Mike is going to show you why it’s the basis of a dominating deck choice.
Speaking of dominating decks, Vincent Tundo is back today to show you the latest of his creations! The focus of Through the Common Pile this week is a creative twist on the recognized Counter Fairy strategy, a potent variant of the deck that runs only four spell cards. This deck has a secret ingredient that ties everything together, solving one of the big problems that normally faces the Counter Fairy archetype. Click on over and check it out.
On Tuesday, our own resident Counter specialist Jerome McHale presents what I consider to be one of the most interesting (and promising) decks we’ve ever run. Max Suffridge created an incredibly unique strategy when he took the much-hyped Clockwork Control to Shonen Jump Championship Atlanta earlier this year, and now Jerome’s made some radical changes to update it for the current format! Control players are going to love it, and I’m not ashamed to say that I’m the first person to netdeck it. You won’t want to miss this one!
A day later, I’ll take on the task of fixing up one of my favorite new decks from Cyberdark Impact. Guardian Sphinx has always been a sleeper favorite of mine, and the release of Degenerate Circuit has made it the star of a brutal remove-from-game strategy. I’ll tweak a very solid build this week, and the result is a deck that could have a place in any competitive player’s testing gauntlet.
Thursday, Curtis Schultz teaches us why it’s good to be the Queen in his Duelist Academy! The Allure Queen monsters from Cyberdark Impact can be surprisingly powerful, but you’ll need to know the ins and outs of their effects before you put them to work. Curtis has got you covered with all the rulings and play tips you’ll need to support the latest member of the Yu-Gi-Oh! royal family.
Julia Hedberg is back on Friday with a follow-up to last week’s Solid Ground and Agents of Judgment articles, showing you the remaining five things you can avoid doing to keep your tournaments running quickly. Lag time between rounds can be a drag, but players are often responsible for part of the problem and don’t even realize it. Check this one out—you might be surprised to find some of your own habits on the list.
Finally, Matt Peddle rounds out the week with a look at the deck that carried Fili Luna to the finals of Shonen Jump Championship Anaheim. What made it such a dark horse success, and why did it perform so well in the Anaheim metagame? Matt’s going to answer those questions and more as he delves into this intriguing blend of old and new.
That’s it for now! We’re in the final weeks of the 2006 season, but neither Metagame.com, nor competitive dueling are cooling off. Things are only heating up as we head into San Jose, so get ready for some of the best action we’ve seen all year!
—Jason Grabher-Meyer
Contributing Editor, Metagame.com