YCS AUSTIN, TX 2013 WINNER: OSCAR ZELAYA (& Coverage Highlights)

And YCS Austin comes to a close. Oscar Zelaya came out on top of a Water vs Fire final match with his Mono Mermail deck, a deck which (in one form or another) made up half of the Top Cut at literally every single stage of it throughout Sunday, if our sources are to be believed.

[Edit #1: Here's the winner's deck profile if you're curious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4wMQh0e-mw]

Speaking of the Top Cut, there were a lot of surprises in this event. ARG writer Sam Pedigo made it to Top 16 with Geargia, a deck that probably shouldn't be doing half as well considering Geargiarmor's weakness to Marksman and Bear. Frog Monarchs made it to Top 4, which is pretty surprising considering how little "derp" the deck is capable of. And Robert Boyajian also made Top 16 with a version of Hero Gate that can use Elemental Hero Electrum to spam Gustav Max's effect and OTK, which is really eye-catching (if not a bit degenerate). You can check out his deck here.

It feels like at nearly every event nowadays there is a ball drop from Konami. We've come to expect the refusal to publicly note the names and deck types of the top 32 or to even provide their decklists, but crashing servers seem to be standard for events as well nowadays. As you can guess, we were treated to THIS message

throughout the day on Saturday. One thing you might NOT have been expecting though is how quickly this message showed up - after a single Feature Match from Round 2 had been posted, the site crashed. And although the site recovered sometime last night, Konami only recovered a little bit at the time of this writing (6:40pm EST) by posting only a small number of other articles.

COME ON, KONAMI. Just make a fucking Facebook and Youtube and post updates through there. Your website has undoubtedly FAILED. Just fucking drop it.

Anyways, due to the lack of official coverage posted at this time, there isn't much for me to show you guys. Below is all of the coverage I collected (Top 32 and beyond supplied through Altereality Games).

Round 1 Feature Match: Thunder Family defeats Fire Kings

http://www.konami.com/yugioh/blog/?p=12522

Round 1 Feature Match: Gladiator Fire Fist Rabbit (a girl) defeats Genex Mermails

http://www.konami.com/yugioh/blog/?p=12527

Round 2 FM: Blackwings (a girl) defeat Dino Rabbit

http://www.konami.com/yugioh/blog/?p=12537

Top 32: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151275647996511

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151275674466511&id=2340212965101

(Pairings:) https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151275662936511

16 Mermail

5 Fire Fist

3 Dino Rabbit

1 Wind-Up

2 Geargia

2 Karakuri (one is the SAME GUY from 4^th place at Miami)

1 Hero Beat

1 Monarch

1 Electrum OTK

Top 16: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151275752236511

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151275772886511&id=234021296510

8 Mermail

1 Fire Fist

1 Dino Rabbit

1 Wind-Up

1 Geargia (Sam Pedigo)

1 Karakuri OTK

1 Hero Beat

1 Electrum OTK

1 Monarch

Top 8: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151275903331511&id=234021296510

4 Mono Mermail

1 Fire Fist

1 Macro Rabbit

1 Wind-Up

1 Monarch

Top 4: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151275957316511&id=234021296510

2 Mono Mermail

1 Fire Fist

1 Frog Monarch

Finals: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151276055836511&id=234021296510

Mono Mermail vs Fire Fist Rabbit

I will continue to update this post as more details come in, but I'm giving you the heads-up now that I probably am too lazy to go back and find all of the Feature Matches now that the tournament is over. As usual, take some of the information here with a grain of salt as much of it does not come from Konami itself. Anyways, thanks for reading and comment what you thought of this YCS! Later