Shota Yasooka made it to thirty-fifth place this week at Pro Tour Austin. You may have heard about the super quirky Gifts deck he ran in the Constructed portion of the PT. If not, well, click on through to the extended entry below where we’ll move back through time and take a look at the often unique decks that Yasooka has brought to premier events over the years.

Pro Tour Austin 2009 – Miren Gifts

Starting with a four-color Gifts frame, Yasooka here adds in a fascinating potential finisher in the form of the Emeria, Yosei, Miren triad (rounded out in a Gifts package, we might imagine, with Life from the Loam). With the deck’s lands largely being Plains of one form or another, it can actually hit a late game situation where it is recurring Yosei each turn with Emeria, then sacrificing it via Miren to (1) gain a bunch of life and (2) lock the opponent out of their untap step forever.
This deck highlights the value we gain in Extended from having Day of Judgment be a functional Wrath, as you can now run both and Gifts for packages that include Day, Wrath, and Explosives.
Also, check out double Pulse of the Fields. Who expects that?
Pro Tour Honolulu 2009 – Cascade
At Honolulu, Yasooka played a fairly mundane, mostly Jund cascade list. You can find it here.
Pro Tour Kyoto 2009 – Faeries
I’m similarly unexcited by Yasooka’s Faeries build from Kyoto, which you can find here.
Pro Tour Berlin 2008 – U/B Tron

Although I’m largely unexcited by Tron builds, this is a pretty solid blue-black take on the archetype – and it’s impressive to see a day two performance with this deck in an environment awash in Elves, as Berlin was.
Pro Tour Hollywood 2008 – Faeries

At Hollywood, Yasooka ran a Faeries build with a fascinating twist, bringing in two copies of Mystical Teachings. I would imagine this made the deck’s long game significantly better. It also has the advantage of freeing up option space, effectively giving the deck three copies each of Slaughter Pact and Pact of Negation, assuming one was happy to pay 3U for either as a down payment.
GP Krakow 2007 – “Jund” control

At GP Krakow, the first premier event after the release of Lorwyn, Yasooka brought this deck that pushed the limits of color sanity and ran spells requiring BB, RR, and GG, capitalizing on the availability of decent color fixing to let him play out a series of bombs into an opponent’s face, overpowering them with quality cards in a manner reminiscent of later Five-Color Control Reflecting Pool decks. While not as all-in on the VIvid plan as later players would choose to be, Yasooka nonetheless ran rather more than most were willing to (notably, Manuel Bucher also ran Vivids in his GP Krakow deck).
This deck list was almost certainly transcribed in error, with Vivid Crags replacing those dubious Vivid Creeks.
Pro Tour Charleston 2006 – Control
Charleston was three-player team Ravnica block constructed with unified deck lists. As such, it’s hard for me to really say whether Yasooka’s deck stood out or not. Nonetheless, his team won the event, so you might want to check out his deck list here.
Pro Tour Kobe 2004 – Pristine Angel Control