Now UC Me

Tournament

Now UC Me was an interesting event. Located in a very nice, new-feeling venue that had obviously been furnished and supported by a university esports program, it had a different vibe than most melee tournaments. It featured an interesting mix of older veterans like myself as well as newcomers that looked perhaps even too young to be a student there. There were numerous projections of the bracket available for competitors to look at in the walls throughout the room, which was a very cool perk of the venue, which were also used to provide a stream of the GOML pools matches that were happening Saturday.

As for how it was run…some tournaments are just set up for success. This was one of them. It lacked any really difficult “top player” types to wrangle, had plenty of veterans to help newer players through the process, and a good venue. All of those advantages would make it tempting to paint the narrative that running it was easy, but I think Thrive and company went above and beyond, taking full advantage of the amenities the venue afforded them, and deftly handled what could have been potential hiccups (P+ bracket running slightly over, Summit 3-way tiebreaker match needing to happen) without causing any significant delay. There were also two streams (shoutout Wagro) that run simultaneously without any issues, which is unusual for a tournament of that size. Clearly located/assigned pool captains are also something you don’t always see at events at this scale, but having them made things significantly smoother. Since it was so void of major challenges, can I really say it was a heroic TOing performance? No, but for a first time event by Thrive I thought it was outstanding, and those helping (pool captain etc.) did great too.

If I had to pick a couple of negatives, the biggest one was that the relatively narrow chair/table layout meant it was hard to arrange chairs for a 3 person friendly rotation, but that was an unavoidable consequence of the venue layout and I think a more than fair compromise for all the positives it offered. It will, however, be a challenge should they ever opt to run doubles (PLEASE DO) in that venue, and some strategic extra tables may have to be in order. Lastly, some of the CRTs were comically small. If you are a TO, do the world a favor and smack the 6in CRT out of your attendee’s arms when they bring it into the venue, or at the very least refuse the venue refund. We can and should do better than TVs for ants.

One thing I will also point out is that I saw more women at this event (in terms of percentage of players/audience) than just about any other I’ve been to, which was cool. It didn’t really affect anything as far as the event was concerned, but I believe melee is a special and beautiful enough thing that it is a shame that it reaches an almost exclusively male audience, and it’s nice to see anything that bucks that trend.

As for the bracket, I’m not well-versed enough in Ohio standings/lore to speak on any standout runs (people acted as though Simian>TwoTran was significant, but I think that might have been due to an OH Summit spot on the line), but altan performed significantly above seed, making top 8 while seeded to get (I believe) 17th. Honestly, though, that was more or less what I expected, and I believe it was the case that he was only seeded where he was due to relative inactivity. At the very least, none of his wins surprised me at all. 13StealDuck 3-0ing Iceking feels notable given the MU and that it was a 3-0, but it was not an upset seeding wise nor should it have been.

PERSONAL

These personal sections are always meant to be skippable and as much for me to journal as anything else, and I only don’t separate them because people tell me they like reading them. Occasionally, strange parasocial twitter people take offense to their contents, but for the most part reception is positive. However, I had a major controller mishap at this event after a year of struggling with such things, so some sad boy posting is probably ahead. Continue reading only if that does not deter you.

For anyone interested in the story of what happened with my controller at this event, it is pretty mundane: Free Palestine and I sat down to play Winner’s Semis, and he wanted to go grab a chair that didn’t have armrests. I said “here let’s just switch”, since I don’t mind the arm rests, and as we moved the chairs my controller got knocked off the desk that had the TV etc. This was a pretty unavoidable, totally faultless occurrence, but when I picked it back up the X axis of my analog stick was completely non-functioning. This turned out to be caused by a magnet that had popped out (Phob moment), but fortunately a very competent controller modder (shoutout Specs) was present and put it back in for me. Unfortunately, this both required a recalibration and made the controller feel immediately different. I made the decision to play out semis anyway, but in all honesty I can’t help but feel like that was a mistake; the outcome of the set became clear to me after only a couple of stocks (more on that later), and I ended up DQing out of loser’s rather than play it out. Could I have maybe won some more sets anyway? Anything is possible. Some Marth nonsense could have happened vs Suidt’s Fox and Samus is not a MU where movement is emphasized for Marth, but I knew there was no way I was taking the tournament, and more importantly, no way I was going to be even remotely okay with the play that I would be demonstrating. I bowed out, to the disappointment of a few, and elected not to suffer further embarrassment.

As for how my matches went…

I played a box (grrr) Sheik called boyswhocry (presents feminine and uses those pronouns, which makes the name in no way confusing at all) and it was unfortunately the best I played in bracket all day. In particular, I think I did an uncharacteristically strong job of covering roll this set, and I was proud of most of my punish/juggle options as well as the execution thereof. I could have been significantly more aggressive in my offstage edgeguards, but otherwise I was pleased with the set. For boyswhocry’s part, I think she was actually a surprisingly solid player to be fed to a really high seed so early, and just got a little off balance by being outsped and hit really hard, which led to some questionable panic options and rolling.

For my second set, I played a Marth/Fox called St. Brick. I’m going to be honest with everyone: most of this set is lost in my old man memory void. I remember thinking that his Fox was significantly better than his Marth, being very frustrated at the number of conversions/edgeguards I dropped vs the Fox, and disagreeing with his stadium counterpick with Fox. If you read this your holiness, I humbly suggest you try Yoshi’s or Dreamland when counterpicking Marth with Fox. I can’t comment on your Marth as I legitimately remember nothing about the first game and I really do apologize for that.

Next, I played Simian, and while I don’t think I played particularly badly this set, I was not at all proud of my mental game. Game two I went down on Dreamland, and when it became obvious that playing very defensive was his strategy, I checked out and mentally said go next. This is totally unacceptable. I have rehearsed answers when Sheik does repeated bair in place/retreating bair, and methodical, practiced ways to get underneath her when she plays the needle/bair platform game. I abandoned those in favor of artlessly flinging myself at my opponent, and was rewarded accordingly with a game loss. Otherwise, I sort of just won all the other games pretty handily, including a Marth switch for FD which I respect but was not quite on the level of the Sheik yet. I got an early lead in all the other games and Simian’s very defensive playstyle appeared to be pretty dependent upon having one. It is hard for me to offer advice/critique in this situation because our scene has so many weird hangups about what I call “Moral Melee” (Camp = Evil. Approach = Good. Floaty = Evil. Spacie = Good.) that I feel like I’m insulting my opponent when I say this, but to Simian: you have to have greater offensive presence at higher levels. Good players (myself in game two excluded >.>), will not often give you openings with unsafe approaches if you do not exert offensive pressure. If your attack never comes, it only serves to give them infinite time to set up their own. Rest assured, I am not insulting you/do not care at all about being “camped”, at least in tournament. If that is what you feel like you need to do to win, please do it. I just disagree with it being generally optimal.

Next I played Altan, which was…very far from my best work. I SD’d twice at low percent in game two and lost it, and narrowly won a VERY sloppy Yoshi’s Story slugfest for game four. Mostly, I am frustrated that I allowed very simplified grab vs big swing situations to keep materializing. Altan was comfortable playing them, and played them well, but I really do believe those are best avoided when consistent wins is the goal. I did a poor job of maintaining the proper distance for a more methodical dash dance and poking game, and instead repeatedly allowed both huge separations and 50/50 scrambles to occur. I eventually won the set on the back of a little cleaner execution and recognizing his propensity for big swings with dash attack and especially fsmash, but “shield the big move and hope they don’t grab” is not the recipe for success I’m looking for in Marth dittos. I need to seize the tempo and not eat that mixup repeatedly, even if I came out on top this time.

Next was my ill-fated set with Free Palestine. I was really disappointed in this one for obvious reasons, but doubly so because we had a couple of really tight sets back before the COVID pandemic, but I lost them both and was eager to show how much I’ve improved. Obviously, that was not to be, and I got pretty much hosed disregarding the DK game on FD (Still not really sure what that was about). The games weren’t actual blowouts in terms of stock counts, but at no point did I feel in control or like I SHOULD win. I was in my own head bad enough during this set I can’t really note any habits/key interaction patterns we had, other than that I repeatedly opted to cover spotdodge and instead he would roll. Really, I could sit here and john about my controller forever, but at the end of the day the VOD of the set exists and any reader can judge it for themselves if they’d like. Suffice it to say, the issues were bad enough that I dropped out of bracket rather than play out loser’s, which is something I’ve NEVER done before, and am generally critical of players doing.

Outside of tournament, I mostly played friendlies with streamer and Nashville TO/homie Wagro, as well as some with Zamu. I really enjoyed my friendlies with Zamu (which is surprising, because as twitter goblins know we HATE each other and are actually arch-nemeses), and was impressed with the improvements he had made to his punish game and ESPECIALLY his recovery. I don’t remember the last time I struggled like that to edgeguard a Fox in LAN, and it illustrated to me the need to seek high level Fox practice out. Theory is fine and good, but putting it all together against an opponent that will hit as hard as him if you mess up is simply different. I am not into friendly counting, but I’m pretty sure I was getting the worse of those games, especially at first, and it was largely thanks to his being able to regularly extend his stock to 150+. On the bright side, I felt better about my ability to circumnavigate small stage top platform play than I did when we played in March, and saw some improvements in my techchasing. The edgeguards, however, were simply not where they need to be, and I’ll work on them.