TL;DR PREDICTS BELOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO READ COMMENTARY, PREDICTS AND TIER ARE BOLDED:
I may have accidentally cursed drizzlers by saying Kyogre > Eternatus last week. Eternatus put a lot of Pressure on those matchups. my heart will forever be with the big blue whale though.
Moving onto this week, I have barely touched RBY and SV and don't feel comfortable talking on them, so I'm leaving those(and by extension BO3) blank).
Before I predict a winner for
GSC Ubers, I want to say I've been incredibly impressed with BigFatMantis and Dawnbuster's GSC play, with strong performances from both all season. GSC isn't part of the "Penta" Ubers generations(3 through 7), so it doesn't necessarily get the same love and attention that those do, and the player overlap between GSC and the other Ubers tiers has not historically been very high. One reputable player/manager in this UPL once made a comment to me that securing great talent for GSC matters a lot for teams as there are so few people who play it, and I believe that the tiebreaker in semifinals proves mitana's point very well.
For this reason, it has been a pleasure to see
cyberacc break out in this tier as much as he has and while I don't necessarily want to put any pressure on the guy I'm thinking of, I believe
Cawil Maxamad is going to be the next big thing in GSC next year should he keep playing it. He may be a friend of mine but given that Cyber has also vouched for him I feel much less biased in openly saying this. I hope that others will follow in their stead and get involved in this tier, whether it be newer players to the scene or more experienced veterans who want a change of pace.
I'm incredibly excited to see this match and I think it will be a great demonstration of what this tier has to offer. I am going to bold
dawnbuster tentatively just because it's hard for me to vote against someone who piloted a
great game like this. Consider my pick more like 55/45 here though, as BIgFatMantis' taking two wins over Conflict cannot be emphasized enough.
For
ADV Ubers, I have to go and put my full confidence with
Heysup. Despite this being the Ubers tier I like/involve myself in the most, I'm not basing this off any experience playing him as much as I am word of mouth and watching Heysup's performance throughout this season. Heysup has proven himself to be an incredibly formidable ADV Ubers and UU player many times over and has the respect of many players I look up to in this tier. He clearly knows ADV as a generation and it will be incredibly hard to knock him off, especially when the lights are going to shine the brightest. I admit that I could be underrating Shitrock Enjoyer's ability to translate fundamental skills to a new tier(I personally don't think BW and ADV go hand in hand in the same way other Ubers tiers might), but as far as I've looked I could not find anything regarding his name for Gen 3. I'm hoping for as relatively clean a game as ADV Ubers allows so we can see just what Mr. Enjoyer has to offer. Without getting too deep into ADV Ubers analysis, there are one or two specific team compositions I'm thinking Shitrock might be passed in order to maximize his chances vs. Heysup and I'm curious to see if they come to fruition - as well as a hope that Shitrock becomes more of an ADV player following UPL as well.
Brief shilling here: ADV Ubers is a great tier if not a little chaotic(anyone who plays it semi-seriously has bad memories of paralysis in a critical game turn); I would highly recommend giving it a fair shake if you haven't already.
For
DPP Ubers and BW Ubers, I run into an issue with predictions due to a similar theme of momentum. RobJr and Hack are on such hot streaks right now that it becomes incredibly difficult to bet against them, and that's before you get into their strength as players. However, Evuelf and susciety are both great players who I could easily see being the ones to disrupt the former two's impressive runs. I'm going to give
RobJr and Hack my predictions here. These should be great games, particularly the BW match, as long as
Extreme Killer Arceus doesn't do what EKiller does best.
In
ORAS Ubers, I think
Keys holds the keys to victory. I'm hoping that this game is less hax influenced than their
previous encounter, which featured a number of paras that plagued keys' ho-oh and company and a harsh crit Precipice Blades on Lasen's CM Groundceus in the endgame.
In
USUM Ubers I have faith in Rhmsitb to take this home. While Pokemon will never be fully bereft of hax entirely, I do believe that Ultra Sun and Moon offers a metagame where fundamentally strong play is rewarded with the victory more often than not. I believe he's one of the best players in this regard.
SWSH Ubers is another "black sheep" Uberin that it's not in the Penta gens, considered controversial thanks to Calyrex-Shadow escaping a ban near the tailend of its life as the current metagame, and is not often played as much except by diehards. Thankfully, we have two very devoted players for this meta closing out SWSH's final match for this tier. Their
previous game can be found here if you haven't seen it already and want to get an idea of how both might approach this matchup. I don't want to take anything away from Icemaster as I think he is one of the best SWSH players out there but we could have seen a very different result if lotiasite's second precipice blades didn't end up missing. We won't know unless both spreads are revealed, but even assuming the absolute most unoptimal spreads possible I doubt NDM lived unless it was max/max phys def.
+2 0 Atk Groudon Precipice Blades vs. 252 HP / 252+ Def Prism Armor Necrozma-Dusk-Mane: 334-396 (83.9 - 99.4%) -- guaranteed 2HKO after Leftovers recovery
I would normally look toward records to see if there is a major difference, but given that they are 4-2 and 3-3 respectively, it feels too close for me to make a reasonable pick. However, given that I feel like Icemaster's team was well accounted for in the builder, I am going to predict
lotiasite to win the rematch assuming
Precipice Blades does not have a mind of its own.
TL;DR predicts:
SV Ubers: Somebody clicks tera
SS Ubers: lotiasite
USUM Ubers; Rhmsitb
ORAS Ubers: Keys
BW Ubers: Hack
DPP Ubers: robjr
ADV Ubers: Heysup
GSC Ubers: dawnbuster
RBY Ubers: somebody gets frozen
BO3: There is no game 3
I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to everyone - players, managers and organizers alike - for putting on another great year of UPL. It has been incredibly fun following all of these different metagames. I've put together a brief compilation of my personal favorites from this year if you are interested.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen6ubers-776255 MYSTERIOUS M(sorry, Hoopa's Dad) vs. freezai
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen3ubers-779687 MMII vs. Mako, g3 of a bo3
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen8ubers-781823 Kate vs. Dark Shion
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen3ubers-781027 raph369 vs. Mashing
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen2ubers-780168 vani vs. iguana
Shuwri vs Mashing 
etern vs elodin 
myjava vs Kate 
Icemaster vs lotiasite 
Rhmsitb vs iry 
keys vs Lasen 
Evuelf vs Hack 
susciety vs robjr 
Heysup vs Shitrock enjoyer 
dawnbuster vs BigFatMantis 
YBW vs Unowndragon 
baconeatinassassin vs pdt 
