I am disappointed by the lack of posts/shoutouts, but I can't really talk, since I'm posting this a week but here we go:
As someone who's been around the tier for a bit over a year now, it was awesome to see and be a part of the first ever ZUPL. The community has grown a lot since the days when we didn't have an official chatroom or ladder, and it's cool to see it getting some attention from "actual-good players".
My personal experience was a positive one, despite my horrific record and slight amount of drama.
BloodAce0107 did a great job drafting, managing to build an army of washed-up ZU mains (notably,
RawMelon,
czim,
Tack :], and myself, though I am definitely the worst player out of the bunch), and it gave us a really strong teambuilding/tweaking/testing core to support the young blood
yovan33321 and
Quantum Tesseract (how the heck did he manage to get them for 15K total? Unreal). I'd never been part of a large teamtour like this before, and this was an excellent introduction. There was very little internal strife within the team, and everyone showed up and did their part; when our undefeated ZU core faltered mid-late tournament, Raw and oldgens players picked up and performed well (
Ninjadog13 - it's insane that we drafted you for 3K; it was an honor building teams for you that you could win with). I know I'm not alone when I say that the atmosphere of the team was fun and enjoyable and we all would do it again if we could.
Now the elephant in the room - my performance. At the beginning of the tournament, I was excited to learn ORAS ZU (f*** Z-moves imo), and I saw (and still see) immense potential in its development/mon choice. My one teambuilding regret is I never managed to fit Ivysaur into a team, but I promise you, her time will come. Week 1 was dramatic, with a misunderstanding causing me to be extremely late to hang out with a friend, so I was really pissed when my opponent joined an OU tournament in the tournaments room and refused to leave it once I managed to get into contact with him. It was rude, inconsiderate, and disrespectful, and I refuse to feel bad for freezing his Gogoat - karma's a bitch. I'm fairly confident I had the tools to win without the freeze, but we'll never know. I wish that this had not been my one victory for the tournament.
I was feeling pretty good going into Week 2, and I knew that webs would have a good matchup vs the fast-offense my opponent had been bringing, so I brought a team
pinktidal helped me build and tweak. Unfortunately for me, he brought freaking Klang, Servine, AND Swoobat, and my matchup was poor. I managed to bring it back, but my inexperience in bo1s and in team tournament settings (And just general inconsistency as a player) caused me to choke it away in the last 4 turns; all I had to do to secure my team the win for the week was click Frustration, and I'll never mentally live down this mistake. I wouldn't say it crushed my confidence, but I was happy to let Ninja play the next week.
Here's a fun screenshot from my prep for this match with The Good Doctor; I'd just played BloodAce on an alt I wasn't familiar with:
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He gave me a heart attack, and I'll never forgive him for that.
I wouldn't play again until our first matchup against the Flamencos, where I misplayed and generally got outplayed by Kushalos because he's the superior player and was using his most comfortable team. I missed a couple of rolls that I ended up playing for (if I got either of them, the game didn't end up as poorly, but I ended up on the wrong side of 68% chance, which is fine). I was pretty sad about this, because it was my chance to outprep and prove myself, but I failed. At that point, I just wanted to hand the reigns to Ninja and just build.
...except that there were scheduling conflicts in the final week because Kushalos ignored Ninja's post until THURSDAY NIGHT and they missed each other, so I was forced to sub in at short notice and after a stressful/emotional/dramatic personal week. Maybe I'm alone in thinking this, or just "don't understand big tournaments and should just stick with lower tiers", but it seems extremely rude to me that Ninja's post was straight-up ignored for so long. I understand that the entirety of the Flamencos thought they were too good for this tier/tournament, but that's just asking for issues/problems and is disrespectful to the opponents and tournament. But whatever, I still played and forgot the #1 rule of playing people who don't know your tier: they won't guess your sets. I missed two opportunities to completely win the game, and lost my team the tournament as a result.
Sorry about this one mates, I know I contributed a lot to building, tweaking, and testing USUM and ORAS, and I don't think BACE made a mistake drafting me, but I know that I let the team down when they needed me to be consistent.
I know I've thrown a fair bit of shade in this post, because I really don't understand why this tournament became a bunch of trash-talking on the tier and its players by "better" tournament players. I guess I'm naieve and expected that, overall, the atmosphere would be respectful and fun, rather than a constant "us vs them" and bashing on players/teams/the tier. I'm glad that the Hakamos got at least second, to show that ZU Mains aren't complete trash as players. I just wish the big tournament players on the Flamencos weren't kinda jerkish about the fact that they won, that's all.
Ok now that's out of the way, here are some of my favorite humorous moments from the tournament:
Hakamo council decision after Leaf Storm lost us our third match:
By far the funniest match of the tournament; I was in stitches laughing the whole time and loved the banter
For the record, that was not a matchup fish, just common sense. You'd have to be an idiot to not bring a stallbreaker vs Finch.
I think you're awesome QT, but that Seaking/Mare team really should have been run by us :) We're not your enemies!
And finally, Drunkza is always fun to watch. I wish Raw had been able to drink with him!
So yeah. Tl;dr, draft me as a support player and don't diss on my teammates or be disrespectful or I will chew you out. Also, as someone who was in conversations regarding every team used in the tournament, the ONLY time we explicitly matchup-fished was Yovan being a beast and completely CTing Ho3n. Otherwise, the teams we brought were versatile enough to handle most matchups and had generally positive MUs vs the metagame. Y'all just bitter bitches!
Shoutouts
I've already shouted out the individual competence of our USUM ZU players; it was really a great experience getting to work closely with you tweaking teams and testing. The teams we created for this tournament are really solid, and I especially appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with
czim and
RawMelon. Additional shoutouts go to
love chants for being a much better player than he gives himself credit for and for being able to run with what we handed him,
Oathkeepre for providing a great sounding-board for ideas/tests and being a great positive influence on the team,
Ampha for being generally badass and not whining about being benched in favor of our stacked USUM lineup,
Cigtar for being a great trade and DPP backbone, and
Toy Time King for being a great bloke who I knew would be a certified badass at DPP. Also
Hys for appreciating the beauty that is the new Slipknot album.
For non team-related shoutouts, thanks to all the managers who participated and made this happen -
LPY's team made an incredible comeback after crappy luck in the first few weeks. Additional shoutout to my fiancee, who did not break off the engagement despite "wanting to murder every Pokemon and stick their heads on a spike in front of the computer". Little does she know, but we just started the fall seasonal.....also
Descending is going to win; he's already slain two Hakamos and is coming for BAce next.
I'm glad I can play without /ionext, not gonna lie. The game's too fun to keep to yourself.
I love this tier and I'm looking forward to seeing it continue to grow. BuilderClaw out!
Edit: I might be way off-base. I'm just vomiting my feelings/thoughts from what I observed, because I feel like the tournament could have been a better experience for people.