Yu-Gi-Oh! Asia Championship 2000

Yu-Gi-Oh! Asia Championship 2000 was held on 20 August 2000 in Tokyo, Japan.

Asia Championship 2000 was the very first international Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament and it was held 3 years before the first World Championship.

This tournament used a single-elimination format, but gave Japan the advantage of being seeded directly into the final. On one side of the bracket has the champions from East Japan and West Japan playing against each other. And the other side of the bracket has Hong Kong going against Taiwan.

Image from : @DS_yp

Source: Asia Championship 2000

In the early Yu-Gi-Oh! OCG metagame, beatdown deck is the most common build, using high ATK monsters such as Gemini Elf and Summoned Skull to overpower the opponent.

The first Asia Champion took a different approach, running small monsters with useful effects to create a powerful synergistic strategy. The deck opens with Painful Choice to select 3 Sinister Serpent, 1 Graceful Charity and 1 Ultimate Offering. The opponent would opt to give 1 Sinister Serpent, sending the other 4 cards to the graveyard. The Sinister Serpents would always return to hand on the next Standby Phase, providing him with free fodder to discard for Graceful Charity, Tribute to The Doomed and Magic Jammer.

Sending Graceful Charity and Ultimate Offering to the graveyard would allow him to retrieve them using Magician of Faith and Mask of Darkness respectively. Graceful Charity is pure card advantage when discarding Sinister Serpents.

Ultimate Offering would allow him to end the game fast by flooding the board and attacking with all monsters, before finishing off with Cannon Soldier‘s burn effect. Cannon Soldier could easily deal 3000 damage, simply by tributing Sangan or Witch of the Black Forest, whose effect could search for another copy of Sangan or Witch of the Black Forest, which could be summoned immediately with Ultimate Offering, rinse and repeat.

The key components of the deck, Cannon Soldier, Magician of Faith and Mask of Darkness, are all below 1500 ATK and DEF, allowing them to be searched by Sangan and Witch of the Black Forest.

This deck was aptly called “Ju yoku go o seisu” (柔よく剛を制す), a popular Judo phrase that says flexibility can overcome strength.