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Showdown Shoguns (0) vs (0) Circuit Breakers
SV OU: Vert vs Rubyblood
SV OU: Silent Waltz vs SoulWind
SV OU: Axzel vs Let's Rumble Shall We
SV Ubers: Sheik : vs Vitiate
SV DOU: KCric vs Ann
SV UU: Sabella vs JustFranco
SV RU: hjkhj vs xavgb
SV NU: lax vs Nat
SV PU: Trichotomy vs MZ
SV LC: Eniigma vs Lokifan
Arena Spartans (0) vs (0) Mt. Silver Foxes
SV OU: Patatexv vs vk
SV OU: Attribute vs Pkel SweeTforU
SV OU: Niko vs Stareal
SV Ubers: Fc vs Skyiew
SV DOU: Nails vs qsns
SV UU: etern vs pdt
SV RU: Spitfire vs DugZa
SV NU: Shadow079 vs Danny
SV PU: MichaelderBeste2 vs Mako
SV LC: JuanSG vs Laroxyl
didn't do predicts last week since they didn't matter and I had to focus on my own SCL game. But after that week break, I'm back again doing predicts (hopefully for the last time this tour). And since I can only predict one series, I'm going to be doing UU to PU :D
SV UU: etern vs pdt
Etern hates UU now, so he may want to load some devious shit (he loaded oricorio pom pom last week, which even if that didn't matter for the scores, is still evil) but his teams have still been mostly working aside from hax. pdt meanwhile, while sharing the same record, has felt like a few of his wins come from getting lucky/opponents playing weird. 4-5 is still a decent record, so he does have sauce, but with his builds sometimes being abusable, I feel etern is also going to abuse that. Maybe I'm wrong, cause pdt beat etern last time, so not like, one sided. Sidenote, but etern needs to make sure his nickname game is on point, that buffs his chances of winning by 50%.
SV RU: Spitfire vs DugZa
Spitfire has not had a bad RU season, but also some of the builds have been a bit questionable. Meanwhile dug has been top of the pool and doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon. While spitfire won the last fight, and if he loads HO he will prob have a good chance against the slower BO to stall builds, I think dug still has this in the bag.
SV NU: Shadow079 vs Danny
The two people who before this tour, I would have not predicted to be top of the pool. Some might say that NU flopped.... (just kidding, gj especially to shadow for doing this in his first SCL). I think shadow while getting lucky, has also been very good this season. Danny hasn't been nothing to scoff at (when he doesn't decide to not trick with chandy against a clearly DD gon that would neutralise it immediately) so this will def be close. I'm still leaning shadow, though danny has a good shot still.
SV PU: MichaelderBeste2 vs Mako
Mdb's builds recently IDT have been top notch to be honest, they feel like they lack very fundemental things (like no fire resist or no mowtom answer as examples) which certainly hurt him in weeks 8 and 9, but also like, he makes it work with a 6-3 record so the point is more moot. Mako is back in the PU slot so Dugza can sabotage i mean uh, so they can lock in for playoffs. Jokes aside, foxes PU slot has been struggling a lot, with only 1 win so far. I very much doubt playoffs will change that, but hey, maybe mako loads a team which abuses a hole mdb's team has and wins, which would honestly be a very big upset.
finally out of regular season, shii was getting boring
Showdown Shoguns (5) vs (5) Circuit Breakers
SV OU: Vert vs Rubyblood - 30k+ is a lot
SV OU: Silent Waltz vs SoulWind - should be an even match but Waltz was slotted in SVOU 2 of a side tour
SV OU: Axzel vs Let's Rumble Shall We - rumble started well but lost last 2, feels like he lost the momentum
SV Ubers: Sheik : vs Vitiate
SV DOU: KCric vs Ann - he is having a great tour
SV UU: Sabella vs JustFranco - 30k+ is a lot
SV RU: hjkhj vs xavgb - 60k in 2 is a lot
SV NU: lax vs Nat - nat is having a good season
SV PU: Trichotomy vs MZ
SV LC: Eniigma vs Lokifan - pretty even match in LC, you will never know who wins from how cheeks this tier is
Arena Spartans (0) vs (0) Mt. Silver Foxes
SV OU: Patatexv vs vk - bro got sacrificed
SV OU: Attribute vs Pkel SweeTforU - ive been a pkel believer lately (until i bet on him in olt on the one week and he lost instead when i was betting against him all the other weeks, so i might be doing him a favour here instead)
SV OU: Niko vs Stareal - 6-3 showdown, think ill take stareal
SV Ubers: Fc vs Skyiew - if fc locks in he should have this
SV DOU: Nails vs qsns - this is not SS but im still a nails believer
SV UU: etern vs pdt - close game
SV RU: Spitfire vs DugZa - heavy favourite
SV NU: Shadow079 vs Danny - good szn
SV PU: MichaelderBeste2 vs Mako - this might end up being a season to forget for mako
SV LC: JuanSG vs Laroxyl - laro has ramped up after his lost to juan, while juan has slowed down, i wish i could go juan but i have to give it to laro for the momentum (i think juan is x-0 vs laro from scl and lcpl though)
SCL has gone by quickly and there have been lots of intense battles. So you could say it’s really been a fast and furious tournament. With that said, here’s some live footage of me and THE_CHUNGLER
It’ll be a long playoffs, without you my friend
And I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again
We’ve come a long way, from where we began
Oh I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again
When I see you again
Preseason I called the Spartans, Foxes, and Breakers for playoffs, and was only confident that the Platoons, Terrors, and Dynamos would miss. The Foxes and Spartans were good in basically the exact way you would have expected them to be good. The Terrors were mostly solid once they sorted out their bench churn (the lineup they started in W4 actually finished with a +6 differential, but unfortunately the rest of their team went 0-14), and the Platoon were shockingly serviceable with the caveat that I refuse to believe that anyone, including the Platoon's managers, expected 5-0 out of Akaru Kokuyo and a combined 18-7 record from DOU Akaru/UU Mossy Sandwich/PU Cielau/LC+Ubers Gondra. Let's talk about the fun teams!
Breakers:
If you told me before the season that the Breakers would make the playoffs and Ann and Nat would each go 7-2, I would have them as the surefire favourites. A stars-and-scrubs lineup construction in which two of the question marks look like MVP candidates? Yeah, I'll take that. On the other hand, if you told me that xavgb, crying, and MZ would combine to go 6-17 (3-16 after week 7), I'd guess that this team crashed and burned. The result is that I have no idea what to make of this team. I guess the major takeaway is this, the ranking of these four teams according to regular season differential of their semifinal lineup:
Foxes: +16
Spartans: +15
Shoguns: +13
Breakers: +7
The Breakers are probably the team that needs the most assumptions to go their way to be a real contender. I'm inclined to believe in them (I think stresh/MZ positive regression is slightly more likely than Ann/Nat negative regression), but they're the major wild cards here. Let it be known, though, that I think the Spartans are their on-paper worst matchups, and they got smoked in the W3 H2H.
Shoguns:
This team is starting 9 players that went positive this season and a tenth that went even. That is, to put it politely, bonkers. The Foxes and Spartans are each starting 3 players that went negative, 4 for the Breakers. The flip side is that only Trichotomy and Sabella went better than +1. I had anticipated the Foxes to be the team with the fewest holes, and it turns out that it's the Shoguns! Well, I don't love that metric, really, mostly because I think there's basically no difference between players that went +1 and players that went -1. And remember, in theory, if you had 6 guaranteed wins you could afford up to 4 holes.
Critical to mention, I think, is that the glaring issues with this year's OU pool are not nearly as much of a factor in this playoff; the Shoguns and Foxes both have excellent OU cores that run three deep, while the Spartans got an excellent season out of Niko behind Attribute. The Breakers were serviceable enough, although it's still probably the team's weakness. You could be pessimistic on teams that you perceive as racking up a bunch of wins against the weaker competition that won't be available in the playoffs. That's the hater's view on the Foxes, if you think Stareal/vk/Pkel are more solid and consistent than spectacular (I don't think that's how I see them, though). More to the point, though, I think a Shoguns fan could look at the Breakers' OU group and see three favourable matchups. They could do some cherry-picking and observe that Silent Waltz, for instance, went 0-3 against Bute/Ewin/clean and 5-1 against everyone else. This is a lot of words to say something pretty simple: the OU pool is stronger in the playoffs, so poor OU depth is more of a liability here, and the difference between a solid and a spectacular OU player may be more pronounced.
How would ego's team have done:
Well, we would have crashed and burned because I can offer basically nothing in the way of useful coaching and support. Point is, this is my way of reflecting on how my own SCL draft would have gone. I for sure wanted DugZa in UU, Chungler in RU, Shadow079 in NU, and Skyiew in Ubers. I then wanted Hasayo as DOU support and whoever Hasayo wanted as the starter (although in mocks I did get Akaru Kokuyo because I thought they were more interesting than their prices indicated). I thought MichaelderBeste2 was the obvious best PU player, and I honestly had no idea who to get in LC but figured that Lokifan would be safe and decent value. I had no plan for OU because I thought the pool sucked, most of the good players would get retained and the rest would be absurdly expensive. With that context in mind, I didn't have a tangible plan, but seeing how the auction went I would have tried to win the bidding on vk/Mako/SammyCe123. That lineup would have cost (at 0.5k more than the actual price for each player):
That's 133.5k for a 56-29 record. Obv it wouldn't have gone exactly that way, but honestly, that's basically in line with how my mocks went. Here was my mock 2 draft, for instance:
OU1: Stareal
OU2: Mako
OU3: Mattz_
Ubers: ox04
DOU: Akaru Kokuyo
UU: DugZa
RU: THE_CHUNGLER
NU: Shadow079
PU: xsus
LC: Eniigma
That's a 39-22 combined record in the actual tournament, which would have been pretty good! Here was my mock 3 draft, with a grain of salt bc retains but anyway:
Ubers: Skyiew
OU: Ewin
OU: kDCA
OU: LB
UU: DugZa
RU: Daharan
NU: Shadow079
PU: zS
LC: SammyCe123
DOU: Code
That's 42-28.
The point here is that I feel like I get to brag about a few of these:
- Shadow079 was a steal. Dominated the NU circuit, one of the most promising rookies in the entire tour, 4k was a bargain. I didn't expect them to go 7-2, obviously, but I did feel very confident that they'd go positive. (side note: my fantasy team most certainly would have had Shadow on it if not for the stupid 3-players-per-team limit, and Fc/Attribute/MDB were too broken. that said, maybe if things had played out that way I would have gotten someone other than Skyiew and lost value overall, so who knows. let it be known though that I was high on Shadow all tour)
- Skyiew had a solid Ubers track record and had also been excellent in LC subforum tours (which could mean nothing, of course). Assuming Fc was getting retained and so I viewed 2-6ish in the pool as basically the same, I figured Skyiew would be the best bargain. Another player that I figured was a safe bet to go positive
- Admittedly I thought Chungler and Daharan profiled basically the same way, so I don't get full credit here, but I was surprised by how low Chungler went! They looked like a solid and cheap back-end starter to me
- SammyCe123 was and is really good! Better record than stresh when are we gonna start the agenda train smh
- people should probably react to lowtier circuits and teamtours more. Ann and Akaru were both better than their past SCLs indicated
- Among the expensive buys, I really liked DugZa, I got them multiple times in mocks. The only two players in the whole tournament that I thought the likeliest outcome was a 7-win season were Fc and Attribute (can you tell I thought the Spartans were really good this year), and while there were other multi-tier stars that I thought were likelier to go for 6 wins (Franco, zS, stresh), I thought DugZa looked like maybe the most well-rounded in terms of support! I also just think they're pretty underrated now. Deep OST and Masters runs, solid teamtour performances overall lately
Odds and ends:
- My hypothesis on drafting oldgens players as cheap SCL options seems to mostly hold. Sheik went +1, ChrisPBacon went -1. GaryTheGengar went 0-2. All of those three went cheap, which is what you'd want. In retrospect, I liked Ruffles and would have wanted him on my team, but that was a steep price for someone with like a couple months of Slam cups as experience
- Flipping through the records sheet, we'll have more time to talk about most of the players at the top. kDCA is one of the best OU players, Metallica had a great season, Chungler broke out, bacon mostly lived up to the hype, clean earned his price...why is nobody talking about Havocknight going 6-1??? I think people are more interested in the breakouts that made playoffs, i.e. Ann, Shadow, and Trichotomy, but this is a pretty insane record for someone who started the season on the bench??
- I went as Frog from Frog and Toad for Halloween. Easily thriftable
- Stay tuned for ego tour signups next week!!!
I feel like my patented prediction method (tm) has led me astray this time...
Showdown Shoguns (3) vs (7) Circuit Breakers
SV OU: Vert vs Rubyblood
SV OU: Silent Waltz vs SoulWind
SV OU: Axzel vs Let's Rumble Shall We
SV Ubers: Sheik : vs Vitiate
SV DOU: KCric vs Ann
SV UU: Sabella vs JustFranco
SV RU: hjkhj vs xavgb
SV NU: lax vs Nat
SV PU: Trichotomy vs MZ
SV LC: Eniigma vs Lokifan
Arena Spartans (8) vs (2) Mt. Silver Foxes
SV OU: Patatexv vs vk
SV OU: Attribute vs Pkel SweeTforU
SV OU: Niko vs Stareal
SV Ubers: Fc vs Skyiew
SV DOU: Nails vs qsns
SV UU: etern vs pdt
SV RU: Spitfire vs DugZa
SV NU: Shadow079 vs Danny
SV PU: MichaelderBeste2 vs Mako
SV LC: JuanSG vs Laroxyl
someone answer his question please. posho needs this. why are five of the nine reactions ha ha tell him what he needs to know if he wasn't told already.
That is an excellent question! Teams are required to gather a number of points in order to classify for the play-offs. A win earns you two points, a draw earns you one point, and a loss earns you no points. Throughout the season the Power Plant Dynamos attained no victories. They were only able to draw three weeks out of the previous eight, making it so they possessed three points in total.
As observed in the SCL VI worksheet, the minimal threshold for a team to classify into playoffs was ten points. If we observe carefully, even with their hard-earned victory, the Power Plant Dynamos obtained two points last week, making the total of points gathered five. That still places them five points away from a play-off spot and that is why they were not able to make it.
That is an excellent question! Teams are required to gather a number of points in order to classify for the play-offs. A win earns you two points, a draw earns you one point, and a loss earns you no points. Throughout the season the Power Plant Dynamos attained no victories. They were only able to draw three weeks out of the previous eight, making it so they possessed three points in total.
As observed in the SCL VI worksheet, the minimal threshold for a team to classify into playoffs was ten points. If we observe carefully, even with their hard-earned victory, the Power Plant Dynamos obtained two points last week, making the total of points gathered five. That still places them five points away from a play-off spot and that is why they were not able to make it.
sappy and lame but we've played a shit ton of sheet/indiv playoff games that are somehow always close and this rlly could be the last 1, who knows. so as much as 1 can not seem like a dickhead saying this after a win, ty for all of the good competition.
