Ruben Penaranda won the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG World Championship 2024 after beating Mark Solis 2-0 in the final on 8 September. Penaranda’s victory ensures that the biggest title in the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG remains on US soil following Paulie Aaronson’s triumph a year ago.

Swiss Rounds and Quarterfinals

The two-day tournament started on 7 September with 28 players showing up at Fremont Studios in Seattle set to contend for the world title. Seven Swiss rounds later, the eight players with the best win-loss records advanced to the quarterfinals, in which the matchups were as follows as arranged by seeding:

(1) Mark Solis (USA) vs (8) Giancarlo Valdez (Dominican Republic)
(4) Kalist Uremovic (Australia) vs (5) Yūto Kondo (Japan)
(3) Julio Valls (Spain) vs (6) Jose Santiago (USA)
(2) Zhang Jiawei (China) vs (7) Ruben Penaranda (USA)

In the quarterfinal shown on livestream, Solis beat Valdez 2-1 in the only one of the four quarterfinals to go to three games. Meanwhile, in the off-stream quarterfinals, Kondo, Santiago, and Penaranda all claimed 2-0 wins.

The eliminations of Zhang and Valls guaranteed that the 2024 world champion would be, as expected, using a deck including the dominant Fiendsmith engine. Zhang had been playing a Tenpai Dragon deck while Valls was using a Ritual Beast deck.

Semifinals and Final

The semifinal broadcast on-stream had Penaranda going up against Santiago for a spot in the final. Penaranda came out on top by a 2-1 scoreline after taking advantage of a crucial die roll that went in his favor in Game 3. The off-stream semifinal saw Solis beat Santiago 2-0 to advance to the final, winning a mirror matchup between Fiendsmith Snake-Eye decks.

The final ended up being surprisingly one-sided with Solis making key errors that ended up being turning points as Penaranda, playing a Fiendsmith Yubel deck, cashed in on his opportunities as he would go on to win both games convincingly and clinch the title.

What’s notable about this year’s results is that for the second consecutive year, players from Japan and Asia-Pacific were thoroughly outperformed by those from elsewhere; there are two separate metagames and therefore banlists in the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG. This has all but confirmed that the general meta has shifted to favor the more offensively-oriented, fast-paced approach that most Western players favor.

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