Alejandro Garcia Moreno from Mexico City lost in the Top 64 of this weekend’s Central American World Championship Qualifier. Nevertheless, he will be invited to represent his country in the 2017 Yu-Gi-Oh! TRADING CARD GAME World Championship in Japan. How did he do it? Read on to find out!

Alejandro Garcia Moreno is the Latin American Duelist who has the most 2017 World Qualifying Points. Consequently, he is invited to compete in this year’s World Championship.

Garcia won the Ultimate Duelist Series (UDS) Championship in Peru this past February, and made Top 8 at a recent UDS Championship in El Salvador. He has also been competing in lots of Regionals in Mexico City, and traveling to YCS events to accumulate points with his top finishes. Garcia says that in the past year, he competed in YCS Colombia, YCS Guatemala, YCS Brazil, YCS Anaheim, YCS Mexico City, and YCS Pittsburgh.

Even though Garcia used a True Draco Zoodiac Deck this weekend, he had used all sorts of Decks to rack up his points over the past year, including multiple Zoodiac variants, Blue-Eyes, and ABC. Garcia had a tremendous lead on the 2017 World Qualifying Points leaderboard going into this weekend, but wasn’t yet locked into an invitation to the World Championship. Now that he ended the weekend with a Top 64 finish, gaining some additional World Qualifying Points, he is guaranteed a seat at the World Championship!

Garcia loves the new path to get to the 2017 World Championship. “It’s nice because now, players who get top finishes constantly can go to Worlds, instead of just players who have one lucky weekend. It allows high-caliber players entry into Worlds,” he says.

While Garcia certainly needed to play a lot of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TRADING CARD GAME to amass the points needed to end the season atop the leaderboard, he loved every second of it. “I met a lot of people and made a lot of new friends,” he said.

Now, thanks to his successes over the past year, he will be able to meet even more people and find additional friends at the World Championship in Japan.

Congratulations to Alejandro Garcia Moreno!