If you are frequent flyer of this blog, I am sure that you know who is Asahara. Hikaru Asahara is one of the main writer of official Japanese EOJ site called EOJ Connection. In the most recent EOJ Connection article, Asahara has posted his EOJ online ID as “Mark_Justice_IR.”
It feels like I have played against him before, but I don’t recall the result of the duel. Have you ever played against with him? Well even if you haven’t yet, now we all know that if we see “Mark_Justice_IR”, we are playing against one of the most famous EOJ writer or professional Magic the Gathering player.
Tech & Game Focus 
Hmm, I never knew that. Someone on the PSU forums said it might be an old Magic player, so I watched a few replays. He was a Zealot user prior to the 2.01 patch.
i’d love to know what he’s running now
@jongjay
Are you sure about Asahara using Z deck?
That’s sucks.
The ID seems familiar but there’s thousands of players and remebering all the tags just isn’t possible. If he was using a zealot deck then I probably havn’t played him as I put all zealot players on my block list so I know who they are, and can be ready for them next time. I guess I can clear that now though as I doubt many players will try to use zealots any more.
I know you’ve played against this guy. I remember commenting about how he had the same name as the (semi)famous Magic player. I’m pretty sure you beat him and then we laughed about how it couldn’t actually be him because of how easy the match was.
@Shane
Oh really? I remember the conversation. Man, Asahara sucks….
@houshasen
Lol dude! What is it about people who make games, or are professionally linked to them, that makes them suck at that game? I remember last year at the Microsoft press conference that the head of Mistwalker Studios (can’t remember his name now but he’s the one who created Final Fantasy) was showing off Lost Oddessy (which isn’t all that good apparently) and got his arse handed to him by a crappy boss who shouldn’t have been that hard to kill. What kind of a noob do you have to be to get beaten so badly at your own game? He was especially embarresed because the demo was supposed to go on for another 10 minutes and he had to ramble on about nothing in particular to fill the time.
@Rufus Omega
Actually Lost Odyssy is is one of a few games that makes me want to buy 360.
I originally thought Asahara had been purposely making sample decks requiring tuning to make them truly competitive, but based on my conversation with Shane in the past, may be Asahara really does not know how to play EOJ….
@houshasen
I wanted to get Lost Oddessy too but now i’m not so sure. I don’t play 360 much anymore anyway. Especially not since I got EOJ. The whole concept is the kind of thing that Microsoft sees as too much of a risk, an unknown if you will. Their own attempts at doing something new, like cross platform gaming with Shadowrun, havn’t worked out well and now it seems they’re a bit scared to try anything else. That’s one of the things that lured me back to Sony. They’re never scared of giving a new idea a go, even if it doesn’t work out. Take Betamax and mimi-discs for example. Fortunately Bluray is becoming quite popular and EOJ is an exellent game. That they’re still releasing set 3 shows they have confidence in the game.
Sorry, bit off topic there but, yes, Asahara’s sample decks would need a lot of tweaking. But I guess that’s why he says they’re sample decks, just to give players an idea as to the concept of a deck. I would love to see his deck lists though to see what he actually plays. Most players can come up with at least one strong and competitive deck.
You can watch his replay matches, he uses a bio deck.
Asahara runs a new school lith deck and he very much DOES know how to play the game. He’s ranked in the top 30 with this deck and from my understanding he is the first one running this new style of deck. Very innovative and devastating to play against.