First of all, congratulations to Fili Luna! Luna won
his fourth Shonen Jump Championship, defeating
Hungerforce’s Chris Evans and Overdose’s Adam Corn
and Dale Bellido en route to a gripping final match.
It had been two years since my last Gencon Indy
visit, and I must say the place was amazing.
Take a look at the pictures here on Pojo for an idea
of the scale.
The response was so tremendous to Yu-Gi-Oh! that
I
want to e-mail Konami employees and urge them to
create a Konami-con (on a smaller scale) to exhibit
Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments and vendors. It would seem that
the Yu-Gi-Oh! convention space (along with Wizards
of the Coast) completely dominated the
heavily-trafficked TCG Hall at Gencon. Upper Deck’s
card properties are clearly in decline and the other
TCG’s did not register a blip on the radar. Go Yu-Gi-Oh!
The PTO (I believe Florida’s NeXus was handling the
event for Konami) did an amazing job of producing
side events. Win-a-mat tournaments and Regionals
were being run nonstop all day. 12 dollars for a
flight bought three packs and the chance at winning
an extremely valuable item.
The Go for the Gold and Attack of the Giant Card
were big hits as well. Go for the Gold involves a
draft format that has players open five packs of the
Yugi reprint set (5 cards a pack) and one pack of
Gold Series 2009. Players then construct a 20 card
(or bigger) deck and play for uncut sheets of Gold
Series cards. Attack of the Giant Card features a
constructed tournament where the winner gets a pick
of a Giant Card. One day, I would like to plaster my
wall with these as decorations.
The Shonen Jump Championship at Indianapolis
The Shonen Jump turned up with nearly five hundred
players in attendance, and badge purchasers were
given an extra set of Crimson Crisis booster packs
to make up for the additional cost of the Gen Con
Indy badge.
The event featured a cool
bounty system (for the first time). Ten players were
given bounty tags and gave out free packs (like
piñatas) to the opponents that defeated them. At
1-0, I was given a bounty on my head and won my next
match before going 4-3 drop
L.
The bounties were given to winners of side events
along with one pick each from Jason Grabher-Meyer,
Julia Hedberg, and Frank Debrito (I believe). A few
wild card slots were also thrown in.
I took a list of all the top players in attendance
to find what they were running (I missed a few
names). You can find it at my live coverage of SJC
Indy at Go-YGO.com along with a picture of the top
sixteen finalists.
I believe every player polled on my list had either
a Nationals Championship win or multiple SJC day
two’s. The breakdown for the thirty best players was
as follows:
-8 Light Sworn variants (including Twilight)
-7 Cat Synchro variants
-7 Blackwing variants
-5 Dark Valley variants (the Cyber Valley deck
that Adam Corn modified from Mario Matheu and Comic
Odyssey’s original build)
-3 Gladiator Beasts
Based on the pro’s picks, I think it’s safe to say
that the metagame was incredibly diverse. While I
would go more into the details of different deck
types and tech picks, the format is ending anyways
so why bother I say!
I would urge all players to attend the next Gencon
Indy. If you were to attend one premier event in the
next year, my order would be Nationals then Indy.
The four days spent at Gencon allow you to explore
all manner of games and acquire all sorts of free
stuff. We took a walk around and came back with free
tokens, free packs, and had all of our entry fees
refunded with packs.
Duel Area
Shop Area
Judge Area |