SHEGUIANDAH—Ryan Kuntsi of Manitowaning competed in the North American Yu-Gi-Oh! (card game) championships in Austin, Texas, July 19-21.
Ryan, who is 17, told The Expositor, “I qualified for the North American championship from the Toronto regional qualifier held November 11. I finished 45th of 396 people competing. I qualified for the North American championships from among about 3,000 people who had sought invites to the competition.”
The North American Yu-Gi-Oh! championship, also known as the North America World Championship Qualifier (WCQ) is a major tournament where top players from across North America compete for a chance to qualify for the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship. This event typically features a mix of Swiss-system rounds and single-elimination matches, culminating in a final showdown to determine the North American Champion.
The Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game is a collectible card game developed and published by Konami. It is based on the fictional game of Duel Monsters (also known as Magic and Wizards in the manga), created by manga artist Kazuki Takahashi, which appears in portions of the manga franchise Yu-Gi-Oh! and is the central plot device throughout its various anime adaptations and spinoff series.
The trading card game was launched by Konami in 1999 in Japan and March 2002 in North America. It was named the top selling trading card game in the world by Guinness World Records on July 7, 2009, having sold over 22 billion cards worldwide. As of March 31, 2011, Konami Digital Entertainment Co. Ltd. Japan sold 25.2 billion cards globally since 1999. As of January 2021, the game is estimated to have sold about 35 billion cards worldwide.
At the North American Championships “I didn’t do too bad. I had four wins and three losses,” said Ryan, who pointed out the top 64 of 2,400 players take part in the finals. He did not qualify for the finals. “On Sunday, the finals day, I participated in a separate tournament.”
“The game started out as a hobby when I was 10 years old,” Ryan told The Expositor. “I got back into it in high school and in December 2022 I got back into it competitively.” He plays the game with a few other people on Manitoulin on a regular basis.
In the trading card game, players draw cards from their respective decks and take turns playing cards onto the field. Each player uses a deck containing 40 to 60 cards and an optional extra deck of up to 15 cards. There are also an optional 15 card side decks which allows players to swap cards from their main deck and/or extra deck between games. Players are restricted to three of each card per deck and must follow the Forbidden/Limited card list, which restricts selected cards by Konami to be limited to two, one, or zero. Each player starts with 8,000 ‘life points’ with the main aim of the game to use monster attacks (and sometimes card effects) to reduce the opponent’s life points. The game ends upon reaching of the following conditions: a player loses if their life points reaches zero; if both players reach zero life points at the same time, the game ends in a draw; a player loses if they are required to draw a card, but have no more cards to draw in the main deck. Certain cards have special conditions which trigger an automatic win or loss when its conditions are met.
