I'm not a fan of individual shoutouts, since those just end up being an unnecessary cheese fest, so I won't be posting that kind of thing here (though I probably would have done them had we won lol). What I do want to say though is that this has easily been the most enjoyable tournament I've participated in on this site so far. Even if we had just ended up getting eliminated in R1, I would not have wanted to be on any other team. R1 was a fantastic three weeks for me overall, be it the armchair calls, the pleasant surprise when we somehow started winning game after game or the near heart-attack when we almost had a meltdown on the last day. Playoffs was not quite as fun, especially due to me being super busy and not really having the time to appreciate just how well we were doing, but I guess it also started being a bit less about goofing around and more about winning games, which is of course to be expected. We all wanted this trophy after all.
These finals were definitely far from ideal for us, what with our SM OU Superstar TheThorn being missing in action, and maybe having a couple of games that could have gone differently on another day. Though most of us probably didn't expect to even achieve our goal of #semisatleast, let alone surpass it, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't disappointing to make it this far only to fall at the final hurdle. As for east, I think you guys are absolutely deserving winners no matter how much hate is thrown your way. If there's one thing I'd say about east, it's that they rarely 'donate' games, far less often than most of the other teams for sure. I've seen plenty of bitching about east always benefitting from 'donations', but if the rest of us are going to lose games that are very much winnable when it counts, we have no right to complain about 'plot armor' or east 'dominating' this tour year after year. Regardless though, I think every team Europe member (other than Kushalos) deserves to be proud of what they've done in this tournament. Whether you won or lost in this final, you've all been amazing, and deserve to go out of this tour with your heads held high. The way we've built up this team over the past couple of years has been nothing short of incredible, and this year we've struck on a great mix of new talent and old heads.
Now as I said before, I won't be doing individual shoutouts for everyone, but I have to give a special mention to
Pohjis. Low-key our MVP of the tournament, the amount of work you've put into helping everyone is mind-boggling. Easily the most useful scouting reports I've ever come across, the fact that you understand pretty much every generation of pokemon really shows when I look through them too. I wanted you to at least grab a win in this tournament so bad, shame that couldn't happen. But to everyone who's a manager in a team tour, snake/SPL or whatever, you should know that you're absolutely missing out if you don't pick up this man. And of course, I have to commend my captain
Tony for putting together such a phenomenal team. I know you had many tough decisions to make, but you stuck to what you thought was best for the team and the results are there for all to see. Glad you saw the light in the nick of time and benched Kushalos + started me (fwiw though, I don't hold any sort of animosity towards kush, but it is rather lame to sign up for a tournament like this and have your only activity being stuff like complaining about pu classic). I'm happy that I was able to reward your trust and deliver for the team this time.
But yeah, that's gonna be it from me. To everyone else, expect us to come back even stronger next year.
#TROPHYATLEAST will be the goal.