Jerry Zhang Wins Oceanic WCQ With 60-Card Pile

The Oceanic World Championship Qualifier in Melbourne was supposed to be a standard battleground for established strategies, but Jerry Zhang threw a wrench into everyone's expectations. Grinding through a field of 299 duelists at the Malvern Town Hall over July 11 and 12, Zhang captured first place with an absurd 60-card pile. The deck, a chimeric mashup of Fiendsmith, Mitsurugi, Yummy, and the newly released Light and Darkness Ritual engines, proved that the traditional deck-building limits are meant to be broken. Zhang defeated Dillon Taylor, who was piloting a Power Patron Artmage build, in an intense final match to secure his invite to the 2026 World Championship in Japan.

This victory marks the explosive competitive debut of the Chaos-themed cards from the brand-new Chaos Origins booster set. While many duelists spent the weeks leading up to the tournament debating whether to run pure builds of the retro-inspired strategies, Zhang realized that the real power lay in combining these engines. The synergy between the Reptile-based Mitsurugi cards like Ame no Habakiri no Mitsurugi and the fresh Chaos Ritual tools is terrifyingly real. By using Griffoh to set Mind Shuffle straight from the deck, and pitch-enabling with Skull Archfiend of Chaos, the deck is capable of pumping out massive material while easily summoning game-ending boss monsters.

While the rest of the Top 8 was largely populated by Kewl Tune and other standard meta threats, Zhang's victory proves that the post-Chaos Origins era is going to be wildly unpredictable. Taylor's second-place finish with Power Patron Artmage also highlights that rogue strategies are finding creative ways to exploit the modern card pool. Both Zhang and Taylor are heading to Japan to represent Oceania on the grandest stage, and you can bet the rest of the world is scrambling to dissect this 60-card monstrosity.