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