Team Comic Odyssey has a lot of well-recognized, outspoken individuals, but Juan Cardenas isn’t one of them. Not that his name hasn’t been extremely well-respected as of late—high placements in a number of premier events and a showcase spot on the number one team in the game tends to get a little respect—but because out of a wide range of team members, he is definitely “the quiet one.”

We started with the usual questions. “I’m playing Warrior Chaos today. I believe it’s stll the best deck over all, due to its consistency. Except the Light monster issue. I think the new format is definitely a little bit tougher when it comes to balancing out the Light monsters in one’s graveyard, and a little removal can really be bad [for a Chaos player]. I don’t think the new advanced format makes that much of a difference overall, although you know… some decks don’t work entirely . . . Jaelove’s Strike Ninja deck doesn’t work.” A small jab to Team Savage’s Jae Kim.

I asked him if he was surprised by the field. “I’ve seen a lot of deck-out decks. That was the one thing that really surprised me. As a whole, the field was a lot more varied than I thought it would be, but the big thing is definitely the increased number of deck-out decks [Mill]. I was surprised with that. Yeah, it’s more varied than I thought it would be.”

“Vampire Lord is everywhere today! It’s going to be the new cookie cutter.” His observation was in line with others, as it seemed like everyone was playing Vampire Lord wherever they could fit it.

I was eager to know a bit about what he thought of Team Savage. “I think they’re all talk. I think like two of their guys got invitations due to invitations being bumped down to ninth place in Regionals. I really don’t want to play them, but I’ll play them tomorrow because I’m part of the team. We don’t even want to play, most of us are like, ‘yeah, let’s just go party at Dwayne’s house after the Top 8.’” Like a lot of Comic Odyssey, he didn’t seem too eager to be in the latest chapter of a conflict that has involved a lot of flaming and bandwagon-riding hatred against his team.

“I’m feeling a little more on the negative side about my personal performance today.” He’d just come off of a loss in the second round, standing at a one and one record. “You never know, though. Long Beach Regionals I lost my first match, then won all the rest, so that could happen again.”

I’m always curious about side deck choices, as the side decks of good players often indicate the expectations that those in the know would have about the field. “I just went with Magic Cylinder and Sakuretsu Armor for guys who like to go aggro and stuff. I guess I teched Burn a bit, with two Mobius.”

I asked him what it was like to be a part of the number one team in Yu-Gi-Oh! “We were all friends before the team started, and before Nationals we decided to make CO shirts, and that’s how the team was started. It feels pretty good! It feels very good. There’s a couple people who hate us, a couple people who like us . . . ”

“‘A couple people’ hate us? More like everybody hates us!” laughed Kevin Hor, bursting into the interview. Cardenas just laughed a little bit and smiled in his quiet way.

My last question was whether or not he felt the influx of teams in Yu-Gi-Oh! was going to explode after this event. I personally feel like soon, every good player is going to want to be part of a team, so I wanted Cardenas’s opinion. “I think they’re trying to do that now. I don’t know how the Team Savage thing started . . . they just came up and kind of wanted to play. We were up for it!”

Juan “The Job is Done” Cardenas isn’t the kind of player you need to watch in the future: he’s not a “rising star.” He’s already a star, and despite his modesty and doubt of his own performance today, he’s a major threat in the race for the main event Cyber-Stein.