EVENT
Shine 2022 was probably the most player-friendly major I’ve ever been to. It was my fourth major (Big House 7, SSC 2019, and Big House 9), and the reason for this was simple: setups, setups, and setups. I’m not really sure why Ultimate players go to tournaments; entry numbers for ult were almost the same as Melee for this event, and they appeared to have plenty of setups, but their setups seemed to receive immensely less use. By contrast, there were times where, despite having over 100 setups for about 450 players, every melee setup was in use. In short, Melee players go to tournaments to play melee, and I wish more TOs understood this as well as the Shine TOs did. Speaking of TOing, the TOing at Shine was pretty much flawless. I don’t think I have a single complaint about how the actual event was run, and I’m usually pretty good at finding nitpicks. Things ran quickly and smoothly without an undue amount of rushing players, and even when the at-a-major Saturday bracket frenzy was going on the chaos was completely controlled.
The biggest negative at Shine, however, was the well publicized situation with water. One working fountain is simply not enough for a thousand person tournament. 6 dollars for a bottle of water is in fact an insulting and unfair price, no matter how nice the bottle. I’m used to venue food being exorbitantly priced (and honestly, we all should be by now) but we should not have had one water fountain (that was very far from the setups) in the venue at a time. We shouldn’t have to weigh our options with the bathroom sinks. Exceptions to the strict no outside food/drink policy should have been made for the circumstance.
The only other negative I can think of was how little of the doubles bracket was Bo5. I really don’t understand why. There was plenty of time, and player experience/good sets were clearly a priority with bo5 starting quite early in the singles bracket. Not a big deal, but a little odd.
BRACKET
Besides Axe’s spectacular and well-publicized run, three bracket runs I think stood out for the weekend: Panko, Mekk, and myself. I think Panko’s was the most impressive, as he was the lowest seeded out of all of us and beat Magi and Kodorin back to back. I can’t say that I was surprised at all about Magi (Panko is very underrated and Magi can definitely be a bit of a Puff loser-toer some days), but the Kodorin win floored me. Just amazing stuff, and a great weekend for him. For Mekk’s part, he managed to upset Ginger and Polish back to back, which is just incredible. I’ve heard a few people downplaying those wins since both of those players historically struggle somewhat vs Falcon, but frankly those people should shut up. Beating number 14 and number 19 in the world back to back is great for someone outside the top 30, regardless of circumstance. For my part, I also beat Polish, and then a slew of very strong, relatively unknown and underrated players (more on that later). None of this is to say other players did not perform well: Lunar Dusk, Dr Lobster, and Kalvar did quite well, to name a few, but at some point I can’t review the entire bracket for the major.
In terms of bad bracket runs, I think the only one that really stood out to me was Magi, who got 33rd. I honestly think she just ran into two matchups she’s relatively weak in vs 2 very underrated players (Panko as mentioned and also Lunar Dusk, the mighty Montreal ICs), and this in no way indicates a slump in her play. Ginger also did poorly for his standards, but that was more due to getting upset and then having to play Kodorin extremely early than a real “bad” tournament.
PERSONAL
For this section, I’m going to include thoughts and retrospectives about events not strictly related to the Shine brackets, including money matches, the pre-weekly etc. I know those aren’t technically part of Shine 2022, but they were part of the weekend for me and similarly fresh in my thoughts.
Out of game, I don’t think I could have done a much worse job at Shine. I think the only meals I ate all weekend that weren’t pizza were a terribly overpriced hotel omelet, and some VERY spicy Jamaican jerk wings for dinner Friday. I tweeted about it, but please punch me if I ever order something that spicy before a tourney again. I was in great pain all of Friday night and much of Saturday. Furthermore, even including pizza I think I probably only ate around 1100 calories a day, and so was very hungry. I also slept extremely poorly this event, going to sleep late and getting up relatively early. Starving zombie with diarrhea is not a vibe I’m trying to recreate at further majors, and I need to keep this in mind next time I start to make bad life choices at a Melee tournament.
For doubles, I had the honor of teaming with New England native Shmeeli, who joined up with me relatively last minute about 10 days before the event. He was a pleasure to team with, but I think I will avoid Marth/Falco when possible in the future. It’s just a little too hard to kill, and I feel an enormous amount of time-based pressure to make something happen and it never works out. We ended up just playing Marth/Fox the majority of loser’s bracket, and it worked a little better. It’s a shame that the set I think we played by far the best we ended up being our last, as the strong static team of Icey/Vortex was just too much for us. Still, I was proud of our play and synergy in that set, whereas I was frustrated with it in much of the previous bracket. I’m still very much considering putting energy into a doubles Fox, and if I ever have more free time, I think I might commit. Fox is just very adjustable and absurdly powerful in the format, and I covet that greatly, as well as value doubles more than most players.
The Thursday pre-local was also a solid event for me, and I even had the privilege of playing most of my sets on stream. I also had the advantage of having an audio station on the stream setup, which I can definitely attribute a portion of my performance to. I normally don’t bother with my audio setup at locals/lower stakes events, but I figured why not use the one they already set up? There were no easy sets at this local, with my first opponent being the very strong Fox main Freezus (who I almost dropped game 2 to due to 2 stock swing SD on an edgeguard) and then local top 100 Marth player Kalvar, who I beat 3-1 but gained respect for in the process. I certainly didn’t lack respect for Kalvar before the event (of course), but his weirdly disparate online vs 2019/recent IRL results had me unsure of what to expect. Turned out I got a very “brain on” Marth player to face off against and had a good, competitive set. My next opponent was Chicago superstar Skerzo, who I very frustratingly lost g1 against on a sakurai combo after missing my edgeguard. Still, I managed to stay composed and take the set 3-1, even closing it with the same reaction fsmash edgeguard I had dropped to lose the first game. This set was my first time going for this reaction fsmash in tournament, so I was juiced to get it to work here. Skerzo complimented me on the fsmash as a read after the set, and I didn’t know whether to correct him because I thought doing so immediately after winning might be a bit rude. But if any CLM people read this, please tell Skerzo marth can fsmash side b reactively (on LAN with audio) and that it’s something to look out for. My WF set was against Panda, who had just upset Spark to get there. Panda did not play as well against me as he did Spark, and what’s more, every metaphorical bounce of the ball in that set seemed to go my way. Every time we played a mixup for the first time, it felt like I won it. I got almost every gimp I went for. Etc. It ended up being a somewhat dominant-looking 3-0, but I just don’t think the results in that set really reflected our relative skill levels at all. My last sets were against Spark in grands, who beat me 6-1. Honestly, the problems I had in those sets were simple and obvious, but not easy to fix immediately. I got eaten alive for disrespecting his ledgedashes and getting CC run up grabbed, and it took me entirely too long to adapt. By the time I had made appropriate adjustments, I had already gone down 0-2 in the reset, and while I took game 3 and played a very close g4, it was too little too late to win 2 DL games and I lost. Frustrating, but a valuable learning experience. Zain has shown a lot of ways to deal with the great Sheik-downholding problem lately, and I will study up.
On Friday I only got to play a couple of money matches, one vs Panko and another vs Doctor Lobster. My set with Panko was fun, but a little frustrating because I reverted back to some old bad/nervous habits vs Puff. Most notably, being too gunshy with the grab, and fighting seemingly every stock til 130. Not getting hit vs Puff is the most important thing to be sure, but the MU is so much easier if you can find some kills at 60-80. I also missed a couple of very important pivots I did get the opportunity to go for. To be fair though, he also missed a couple of rests, at least one of which was a very big deal for the set. On the positive side, I did a better job mixing in side b hit 2 than I ever have in a competitive setting, and introducing that mixup paid great dividends, and even had my thoughts/approach with it somewhat validated when Zain used it to great effect vs Hbox on Sunday. I closed the match 3-2, and definitely wouldn’t have if not for that improvement. For my money match vs Doctor Lobster, I’m going to be frank and say that I remember very little of the process. Going to give myself the Hbox excuse and say my heart wasn’t in it, and lost a fairly uneventful 3-1 to an excellent player. It happens. Perhaps most notable about the match however was the fact that I received a business card afterward detailing how I had been slain and was in fact free. This was all in good fun, and Dr Lobster is by all accounts a great guy, but it was funny.
Bracket Saturday for me was interesting. For r1 pools I had a bye for the first round, and my r2 match was against a Sheik main who was alarmingly technical relative to their seed/skill level, and did things like buffered crouch walk and cc run up boost grab. Fortunately for me they were not yet very well versed in actually using those tools and made the usual newer player drops/unforced errors, so I won the set pretty summarily. My next was was against Cali Fox player TinderMaster3000, who was significantly better than I assumed he would be. I nearly secured a four stock on the first game, but the second game was a competitive last stock game, and I think I needed that to get some of my jitters out. TONS of drops/movement flubs during that game, but managed to punish/edgeguard monkey my way to victory eventually.
For R2, I had to play my Melee Stats sponsorship-teammate Abbe, which I was pretty displeased about. Not only was it a team kill either way, he was also frankly a big “question mark” player in terms of skill both in general and the ditto because of it being his first time in the states, and I knew it was very much a possibility for me to be the beginning of someone else’s breakout. The biggest thing I learned in this set before game one was even over was to RPS for port 4. Abbe took port 4 from the jump and was one of the few Marths I’ve played that really understood what that meant and how to use it. Better than I would have been with it, honestly. His juggling reminded me of Logan’s, maybe not quite as good, but very close, and when I got uthrown I knew I was in for a world of hurt. On a related note, I think I did a very poor job of making decisions when Abbe had respawn invincibility, going to plat vs an extremely adept juggler and dying sub-50 for it multiple times. I edgeguarded/recovered reasonably well this set though, and eventually made adaptations to his consistent p4 jump outs. This combined with having enough of an edge in neutral allowed me to win 3-0, although every game was quite competitive and winnable for him. Not someone I’m sleeping on in the future.
My next set was with Mango. Look guys…you can google the set if you wanna watch it. I got owned, pure and simple. Mango played amazingly and outdid me in virtually every facet in the game. I think he did about 90 on average from touching my shield and edgeguarded phenomenally. I was so stunlocked I dropped a good deal of my own stuff once I did win neutral. Some people speculated it was nerves, but that wasn’t even really it; he was just hitting me that hard and fast and I was struggling to process the shift when I got an opening.
For loser’s bracket, my first set was with Matteo, and it was an odd one. Arguably the most significant recurring theme of the set was me doing a nair, and somehow missing both my drift back and my fastfall, and then getting shield grabbed. I’m not calling Matteo a “shield grabber” or anything here. Shield grabbing my awful nairs was 100% the correct decision, and he capitalized well. I don’t know why that happened so many times during the set, but it was a game changer, and I need to address it. Otherwise, the set contained several things I would call emergent patterns in my recent sets vs Falcon: I was extremely comfortable on YS, and extremely uncomfortable on DL. On Dreamland in particular vs higher level Falcons I tend to just really struggle to extend/hang on to leads, as well as struggling to contest the top plat/getting blown up when I try to do so. I think I need to work on comboing Falcon more horizontally on DL in particular, and perhaps playing for the gimp/early edgeguard harder on that stage, as he can live tippers until past 120. I’m honestly not sure about what to do with the top plat dilemma on that stage. My last sets vs Salt, Mekk, and now Matteo all feature me getting bopped in that position, and I need answers, but haven’t found them. I also need to get a little more comfortable on Fountain, as I think I’m not leveraging it as a counterpick hard enough. I spend too much time challenging stomp through the platform for no reason, and not enough dash dancing underneath the platforms when they’re positioned awkwardly for him. I need to reverse those proportions. Those platforms are part of the reason I pick the stage, and instead I allow them to benefit Falcon. Luckily I use the closed in space reasonably well, but if Matteo hadn’t SD’d at near-zero on a race to the ledge situation in that game, him winning that set 3-1 would have been very plausible. I also need to work on not throwing Falcon to the top plat on FoD. It’s just bad and wrong, not a lot else to say there.
My next set was against Vortex. If an opponent committed a tactical error against me during Shine, it was Vortex switching to Sheik games 2 and 3. Game one against the Fox ended up being a two stock in my favor, but in all honesty I felt very threatened the whole time and was dropping some stuff. Maybe if I had been nailing all my edgeguards it would have been a wash badly enough to warrant the character switch, but in the moment it just wasn’t, at all. Once Vortex switched to Sheik I kinda just…won. I played a little too “tournament” and didn’t go offstage with my edgeguards enough, and allowed his stocks to last too long as a result, but never did I feel the urgency/threat that I felt from his Fox, and so took the set 3-0.
After that was my set with Polish, which I think marks my new best win, and certainly my biggest win on LAN. To give someone else the Hbox excuse, I’m not sure if Polish’s heart was in it this set given their prior loss to Mekk and preoccupation with Fox for the rest of the weekend, but on the other hand I don’t think they played particularly badly either (other than a couple of missed ledge sweetspots I downtilted), so I wouldn’t call it a Mickey Mouse win or anything. I was, for the most part, pretty proud of the way I played this set. My biggest issue with Polish in the past (and this is something Wally is good at too) was dealing with them on the platforms, where even if they wouldn’t hit me they would inevitably end up coming back down for free with a turnip in hand. In this set I successfully made the adaptations I had worked on (and talked with Mai about) to deal with this, and was able to make it so the traditional wisdom of “don’t be above Marth” still held true. My recovery was also fantastic for this set, to the point that I might even recommend other Marths watch it. When I say that it’s a big deal, because usually I tell people to never study me, only Zain and maybe Kodorin. That said, my play was by no means perfect.: For one, I kept trying to repeatedly down air Peach like she was Puff or some weird low tier. This is unnecessary and bad, and I got getup attacked for it repeatedly. If I had just crouch techchased, I could have probably just won the set 3-1 or even 3-0. I also went for the M2K fair techchase rather than a normal techchase in some spots where it was clearly the wrong decision, and chalk that up to having no Peach warmup at all (first and I think only Peach I played in singles all weekend), and lacked confidence. Still, it was incorrect, and I need to work on that too. Probably should have gone back to FD after my loss game 2 as well but in all honestly I had just screwed up pretty bad there and wanted the change of pace/close quarters, and was liking the top plat escape this set.
My last set for Saturday was against Dr Lobster, who I had money matched (as mentioned) on Friday. I felt okay going into this set, but my throw in game two is almost certainly going to be the stuff of legends for those that saw it. To the commentators: it was pure nerves, not controller issues. I wasn’t tilted, just sort of overwhelmed, but man did it manifest in the worst possible way. The set in its entirety after that point was sort of characterized by nervous flubs on both sides, and while there were a lot of high-level ideas exchanged, we messed up an incredible number of them. Still, I managed to not tilt even in the face of a hard set and a lively crowd, and so I’m proud of at least that much. Unfortunately, I did not have the heart to hand Doc Lob back the “You have been slain” business card after that, as I wasn’t keen on throwing down with the entirety of New England, and did not want to make him feel bad, but it would have been really funny.
On Sunday, my only set was with Jmook, who in case nobody else realized, is a monster. Absolutely just beat the stuffing out of me game one, but I did manage to take game two thanks in part due to an edgeguard overextension by him, and some solid neutral by me (I did moves without getting cc run up grabbed!). The next two games I mostly got gapped in the punish. I felt like I had a strong presence in neutral, but he was so fast and hit so hard that I didn’t take my openings nearly as far as I could. Combine that with some nervous movement flubs in game three and a tragic SD on a ledgehog attempt at 0 in game four, and that was the set. Still, I felt like without those 2 things both games would have been fairly close, and I think that is pretty good against the best Sheik ever. Insufficient, but nothing to be ashamed of. In terms of new technology, I had never seen his soft bair->uair extension for the kill he hit a couple of times, and I believe he used the same technique on Kodoirn in the next round. I’ll need to learn how to DI for that, or just learn to accept it if I can’t. Very cool though.
In summary I have some mixed feelings about this bracket run. On one hand, I beat a top 20 player and made day three at a major! On the other hand, it’s a little frustrating that four of the five very good players I beat to get there were relative unknowns (or a returning vet people aren’t sure how to evaluate, in Vortex’s case.) Make no mistake: If Abbe, Matteo, or Doc Lob competed more on the national scene, people would know who they are, and Vortex has still got it. I’m very proud to have wins over those players, and have the utmost respect for them, but on the other hand I do wish people understood their skill level a little better so that they would be the feathers in my cap in terms of ranking/public perception that some similarly skilled players would have been. Still, this is ultimately a minor complaint, and on the whole this marks my best run at a major to date (although, given that my last one was three years ago, it would be kind of weird if it didn’t).
THINGS TO WORK ON
- Dealing with Sheik crouch
- Dealing with/respecting Sheik ledgedash
- Develop a better Dreamland gameplan vs Falcon
- Do not throw/early hit Falcon onto the FoD top plat
- Better leverage crouch cancel to escape the corner vs Sheik
- More mindfulness/more varied escape options under Fox pressure
- Hitting hard even when under pressure/being hit hard myself