Somehow, I got it in my mind to do some writing this morning. Internally, I told myself that I would write this blog post soon after the last one... but a month and some change is still soon for me, right?
I'm about two month distanced from the event, but as you probably can tell from the title, I'll be taking a portion of this time to talk about Climax of Night. Continuing from the end of the last blog post covering CEOtaku, I was in a place where I wasn't sure what my relationship would be with fighting games even as I was returning from a satisfying end of that event.
I wasn't going to many, if any local events in Columbus partially out of my current hesitancy to put myself in crowds more than I had to and also because I wasn't interested in playing anything other than UNI at the time. That said, I was playing online with less frequency than I had in the early part of the fall so I was going into Climax of Night without much more additional practice.
For CoN, I actually overcompensated a bit on my non-tournament experience because the tournament took up such a large part of CEOtaku. I had the money and time to spend 4 days in a hotel room by myself. I'd put the money away for it, but even with a block discount that shit is expensive!! Really makes me appreciate my time with Sugoi Factory from a money perspective...
The new hotel was actually really amazing this time around, though getting food without a car/ubereats was more inconvenient than before. As expected of Shinobi, the place had arranged a space for us to set up and play casuals in the lobby for a set amount of time and it had an arcade room/casuals area available outside of the tournament area. The first night in, I went to dinner with Eva, Sikanto, Bri and one other person whose name I unfortunately didn't remember.
I didn't have to play in an official tournament until Saturday, so this was a really enjoyable time for me. It's unfortunate that I couldn't sleep very well though, lol.
---
On Friday, what I did have was teams tournaments. I entered UNI with Miller2B and God Hunta, MBTL with God Hunta and MBAACC with Hamel and Zepolete. Special thanks to all of you who decided to play with me! The SBO-style of team event was extremely creative and cool. I really liked that we had a full day where this was the focal point of the time. It was truly a main event instead of how teams events can feel tacked on, in regards to the dedication allocated to it.
I just wish that I had won a single game accross all of the team games I'd entered... Thankfully, I had good teammates to carry. Miller and Hunta carried us through round one of our team tournament, as did Hamel and Zepolete... and that was the end of our journeys. We got matched up with JJ and Fendo in MBTL too, lol. After that, I stayed around to watch a little more before getting dinner from Publix with Bryce and Chou, then going back to my room to rest until it was bed time.
There were a lot of strong players there, but for whatever reason I didn't choose to play a whole lot of games. I felt a little bad about it at the time, but in retrospect, I liked just playing a couple of sets and then leaving. I wonder if the Coronavirus pandemic has just changed the amount of time I want to be in crowds now, not that it's over or anything. Nevertheless, I couldn't end up sleeping that well... so I ended up watching dekillsage's stream whenever I couldn't sleep.
---
Saturday, I was actually awake from about 3:30 AM. I'd turned in the previous night around 8:30 or so, so I had gotten adequate sleep... but it was so early that I was up without anything to do. After failing to put myself back to sleep, I went down to the gym and worked out for about an hour. The gym in that hotel was really respectable and somehow or another it ended up envigorating me even though I finished my workout around 5 or something. From there, I did a test stream on the wired connection and went down to eat a light breakfast.
I didn't have to play until the afternoon, so after chopping it up with some of the early risers, I went back to my room and took a 45 min nap. My side of the pool had Guiseppe Byakuya and Liquid Floats Akatsuki before I had to play GreyFaiden. I don't typically like fighting Byakuya or playing the Mirror, but I felt like I was playing pretty well and won two contested sets.
I would go on to have to play Grey to attempt to get to Winner's Top 32. Now, Nanase is a matchup that I have a good amount of comfort in. I think it's a match where Akatsuki controls a lot of the engagement, especially if Nanase decides to play in the air or with certain fireball setups. Watching and playing Grey in the past made me feel like as long as I didn't mess things up too much that I could handle myself.
My conservative start saw me down 0-1, 0-1 though like when I played Duesta at Frosty Faustings before I committed to my reads and pushed the tempo. I had some sequences I liked, a hard call out here and there and I surived 2-1 to finish my Saturday early.
Much like the previous day, I stuck around for a little before heading back to my room to chill and watch the festivities on the stream. Tabby asked me to commentate EC vs WC's 10v10 later that night, so I needed to save as much energy as possible. That night was extremely fun, getting to commentate with Tabby, Cyn (foxof's wife) and Casey for a fantastic UNI demonstration. I ended it off with some shots of Blue Flame alongside NEFB+family and went to bed.
---
A foolish mistake because the alcohol dehydrated me and didn't let me sleep that well. I grabbed breakfast in the morning with foxof and cyn in the lobby and vibed for a bit before I was set to go down and play in Top 32. My opponent was PapaPesto, fresh off of a fantastic run at CEOtaku. Now, Carmine vs Akatsuki is not a good matchup for Carmine at all. Pesto also has experience with Salty and Silent near Texas, so I thought that I would have to work pretty hard for it. I think that my passive play was my downfall in this set here. Pesto did a fantastic job taking initiative even in spots where I thought he would wait. I never was able to get started and he won 2-0.
In loser's side, I had to wait a little bit until I would find out who my opponent was. Unfortunately for me, it would be TrockDemon. Trock and his Yuzuriha dumpstered me pretty badly in my trip up to New York for Crossover Arc 2022... but through talking to Ruric and a bit more practice, I had a little more confidence this time around. I didn't think it would be enough to win, but games still had to be played. I thought also that I had been doing well in my casual matches with Yuzu up to that point, too.
Yuzuriha vs Akatsuki is a terribly difficult match in the neutral phases because of her mobility and ability to set the pace. It requires a lot of patience to pick your spots while not giving up big hits. I think Trock was playing a bit nervously as well, which allowed me to storm off to a game one lead. Trock pulled it back in game two, baiting my antsy decisions to anti air before storming off into a commanding lead in game 3 as well. The ending of that match speaks for itself though...
Finally, my last tournament set of the tournament would match me up against Masoma. I lost to him at Frosty Faustings in Winner's Side Top 16 on his Seth and unfortunately, it happened again. Much like vs PapaPesto, I started slow and he took initiative from me pretty heavily. Some very unfortunate anti-air timings slammed the door on my runback and I lost 1-2 to finish at 13th place.
Everything equal, I thought I played well enough to give myself opportunities to get to Top 8 that weekend, even though I fell 2 spots short. I don't think anything in particulary clicked for me and it didn't feel like I elevated my quality of my play much either, so I'm not sure what I wanted to take from the weekend. That said, it was definitely the most enjoyable experience I had at a tournament outside of Combo Breaker and a good way to end my major run for 2022.
---
And so, here's what my major campaign looked like in 2022:
Frosty Faustings XV: 7th/162
Combo Breaker 2022: 25th/190
CEOtaku 2022: 17th/116
Climax of Night Season 5 [arising!]: 13th/199
I'm honestly happy that I was able to improve my placings at larger tournaments as I went along, especially with everything that went on in my life this year. I was also able to take a Tension Shift and MI Mixup #1 over strong Midwest competition to end the year. This year, I also did updates to the 17 Bible which is my Combo Document and also the #CLR_17_Trial advanced Akatsuki combo trials. If they're interesting to you, please play around with them as much as you'd like.
2023 comes with it a lot of uncertainty for me. I'm attempting to send myself to EVO Japan, where there isn't an official UNI tournament but I'll get to test myself against Japanese players.
If I can do that, I won't be at a major in the US until potentially Combo Breaker 2023. Otherwise, I'll try to make Crossover Arc and maybe even Slashback if EVOJ is a no-go. I'm still enjoying the journey. Thank you all for reading up to this point and also for spending any time you have with me this year, I can't believe it's been 5 years of blog posts already!
As always, if like what I do or you'd like to support me you can find me here:
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See you next time!
2022/11/10
Reflection - Hospitalization, Ennui and CEOtaku
Hello and welcome back! It hasn't been that long, has it? (lol)
I thought about writing all of the events post Combo Breaker in a long-form blog post and decided against it. The editing portion of putting up blog posts is often more cumbersome than I'd like it to be, so I'll just break this up into pieces to make it easier on me and hopefully more engaging for you all to take in.
Again, thank you for your time and let's move into part two of the post-CB reflection series.
---
Hospitalization. This is certainly a scary word. Though, honestly speaking, I wasn't as scared as I thought that I would be for my first ever time going into the emergency room. I don't think that I was disassociating away from what was happening to me, but by the time I chose to go to the ER, I think I had mostly understood that I'd reached the limits of what I could do by myself.
To explain a bit shortly for those who are new followers or missed that sort of "saga". I had gotten pretty sick in August with what I thought was influenza. I had fever, stuffy nose, sore throat and the whole deal. Took some time off, crashed fluids, rest and OTC (over the counter) medicine but for whatever reason I didn't feel like I was getting much better.
Went to urgent care to get checked out and also prescribed some antibiotics. They helped, but I was still generating mucus and I thought that I had swallowed something that was stuck in my throat. Fast forward to the trip to the ER and an x-ray, I found out that my tonsils had swollen to about 4cm and were threatening to block my airway. I had felt like there was something in my diaphram that was moving around and so when I tried to sleep for a time, I was constantly adjusting in my bed to get a clear breathing path. I'm glad that I did, lol.
Anyway. I was taken over to the ICU to wait about a day and a half to get surgery and by Wednesday, I was out and home for bed rest and recovery. I'm very thankful to some policies at work, the support of my friends and family and my Health Savings Account that allows me to mostly live the way I've lived up to this point.
---
Now, what this obviously meant is that I didn't really have much time to be going out to play video games here. The hospitalization also ate up a significant amount of my PTO so it made planning to go to events that much more difficult. Typically, I'd be able to travel down to the tournament destination with a day or two's worth of time off in order to get acclimated and in the mindset of being able to compete.
This time, because of my lack of PTO... I had worked a full shift on Friday and then left on the plane at around 8pm to go to Orlando and then subsequently took an early flight out on Monday morning to work a half-day shift back at the office. Not a fan of this and certainly don't want to do it again.
By the point that I had already made the arrangements for travel and such, I was still in the previous funk from after Juu-Yon-Kakuto (JYK) and so my mindset honestly wasn't very good. To be honest, there was also the thought that I had gotten slighted in seeding as well. A top 8 to start the year, 25th at CB, 3rd at Crossover Arc and the admittedly poor 9th at JYK made me wonder if people thought I was washed or something.
Needless to say, I wasn't very enthusiastic about playing that much. The side-ballroom where UNI and some of the other games were being run was also miserably hot. Absolutely dreary in there because the AC wasn't working well or something. Nevertheless, I was the 3rd seed in a pool with Defiant and Hiari.
I had managed to win my matches over Wormy Merkava and Pokecole Byakuya, but I wasn't terribly confident with my level of play at the event. Getting smoked by Ruric and BB in casuals certainly didn't help, but I played Defi pretty closely through most of our set. I wasn't sure which character he was going to choose to play, but he picked Hyde.
Defi is a fantastic defensive player and the strategy he had for disengaging with Akatsuki until I was forced to commit to some options was a very sound one. He built on a big lead in Game 3 and I had an important drop in what I thought was a momentum changer and he won cleanly off that.
I had to play two tough sets through gravyjones' Enkidu and the rematch with Pokecole, but I'd qualified out into top 24. Rikir, who had lost to Ruric, would be my opponent, though I didn't know it until a little later in the day.
---
My day on Saturday was rather full, as I entered on Melty Blood Type Lumina a whim, went 3-2 and finished at 65th with my new Kohaku. I also went around to watch a bunch of my friends play in various games since it would be more of a hassle to go back to the hotel room and rest prior to Top 24.
I will reiterate that I was very annoyed about the Top 24 situation. We didn't know much about how it would work. UNI had a lot of time allocated, so we didn't know if all of our matches would be streamed. There wasn't a spot in the main ballroom allocated for us and so we didn't know if we had to go to the other ballroom to play and come back or how that was going to work.
I'm glad I ended up asking before our pools were set to begin at 6pm or so, but ultimately we had to convert 3 setups over and I had to sit down cold to play against Rikir after helping to find and locate everyone and get them over into the main ballroom. Truth be told, I don't remember too much about this set except that I missed another combo with tk.236a on throw tech timing and that Rikir beat me in straight rounds. So, my tournament ended with a frustrating but I suppose respectable 17th place.
I guess that I'm happy that I'd gotten out of pools every time so far for every major, but by the end of my run I wasn't sure if I would even bother trying to continue to play in 2023. I was extremely burnt out, feeling like I was washed and people thought I was washed. Just generally upset again with tournaments and tournament performance.
However, I had a very enjoyable time watching the rest of Top 24 and later Top 8 after I got eliminated. There's just something about the crowds and the atmosphere in UNI that has a pretty invigorating effect. The amount of effort and the talent that were shown off by all of the players there was simply amazing. In particular, I was very impressed with OmniDeag and PapaPesto. The "next generation" of UNI players have absolutely arrived and I'm excited to see how things continue to develop. Now, truly, we're waiting on French Bread to allow us to help further develop the amazing talent and community that has been fostered.
I also have to make a huge shoutout to cookie and F O X, who graciously let me chill and eat dinner with them in their hotel room. There was some venting, some real talk and just a very relaxed atmosphere that helped me put a lot of things back into perspective. You two are definitely some real ones for that.
Two more people I have to shoutout are Ryker and Deitz, who were my roommates over the weekend. We certainly missed you there too, wampuh! I honestly really missed being able to chat with and spend time with you as well. We haven't gone hard in the same game since the Yomi days and being in the hotel room felt like a time machine back into those times as well. I forgot how fun BBTag was, even while getting smoked. I hope we can meet up at another event soon.
Nevertheless, I still wasn't in great spirits coming back home for the reasons I mentioned and I was stuck between a mental rock and a hard place of no motivation while back in Columbus. Still not really sure what level of commitment to playing fighting games I was going to have, I looked forward to Climax of Night...
I thought about writing all of the events post Combo Breaker in a long-form blog post and decided against it. The editing portion of putting up blog posts is often more cumbersome than I'd like it to be, so I'll just break this up into pieces to make it easier on me and hopefully more engaging for you all to take in.
Again, thank you for your time and let's move into part two of the post-CB reflection series.
---
Hospitalization. This is certainly a scary word. Though, honestly speaking, I wasn't as scared as I thought that I would be for my first ever time going into the emergency room. I don't think that I was disassociating away from what was happening to me, but by the time I chose to go to the ER, I think I had mostly understood that I'd reached the limits of what I could do by myself.
To explain a bit shortly for those who are new followers or missed that sort of "saga". I had gotten pretty sick in August with what I thought was influenza. I had fever, stuffy nose, sore throat and the whole deal. Took some time off, crashed fluids, rest and OTC (over the counter) medicine but for whatever reason I didn't feel like I was getting much better.
Went to urgent care to get checked out and also prescribed some antibiotics. They helped, but I was still generating mucus and I thought that I had swallowed something that was stuck in my throat. Fast forward to the trip to the ER and an x-ray, I found out that my tonsils had swollen to about 4cm and were threatening to block my airway. I had felt like there was something in my diaphram that was moving around and so when I tried to sleep for a time, I was constantly adjusting in my bed to get a clear breathing path. I'm glad that I did, lol.
Anyway. I was taken over to the ICU to wait about a day and a half to get surgery and by Wednesday, I was out and home for bed rest and recovery. I'm very thankful to some policies at work, the support of my friends and family and my Health Savings Account that allows me to mostly live the way I've lived up to this point.
---
Now, what this obviously meant is that I didn't really have much time to be going out to play video games here. The hospitalization also ate up a significant amount of my PTO so it made planning to go to events that much more difficult. Typically, I'd be able to travel down to the tournament destination with a day or two's worth of time off in order to get acclimated and in the mindset of being able to compete.
This time, because of my lack of PTO... I had worked a full shift on Friday and then left on the plane at around 8pm to go to Orlando and then subsequently took an early flight out on Monday morning to work a half-day shift back at the office. Not a fan of this and certainly don't want to do it again.
By the point that I had already made the arrangements for travel and such, I was still in the previous funk from after Juu-Yon-Kakuto (JYK) and so my mindset honestly wasn't very good. To be honest, there was also the thought that I had gotten slighted in seeding as well. A top 8 to start the year, 25th at CB, 3rd at Crossover Arc and the admittedly poor 9th at JYK made me wonder if people thought I was washed or something.
Needless to say, I wasn't very enthusiastic about playing that much. The side-ballroom where UNI and some of the other games were being run was also miserably hot. Absolutely dreary in there because the AC wasn't working well or something. Nevertheless, I was the 3rd seed in a pool with Defiant and Hiari.
I had managed to win my matches over Wormy Merkava and Pokecole Byakuya, but I wasn't terribly confident with my level of play at the event. Getting smoked by Ruric and BB in casuals certainly didn't help, but I played Defi pretty closely through most of our set. I wasn't sure which character he was going to choose to play, but he picked Hyde.
Defi is a fantastic defensive player and the strategy he had for disengaging with Akatsuki until I was forced to commit to some options was a very sound one. He built on a big lead in Game 3 and I had an important drop in what I thought was a momentum changer and he won cleanly off that.
I had to play two tough sets through gravyjones' Enkidu and the rematch with Pokecole, but I'd qualified out into top 24. Rikir, who had lost to Ruric, would be my opponent, though I didn't know it until a little later in the day.
---
My day on Saturday was rather full, as I entered on Melty Blood Type Lumina a whim, went 3-2 and finished at 65th with my new Kohaku. I also went around to watch a bunch of my friends play in various games since it would be more of a hassle to go back to the hotel room and rest prior to Top 24.
I will reiterate that I was very annoyed about the Top 24 situation. We didn't know much about how it would work. UNI had a lot of time allocated, so we didn't know if all of our matches would be streamed. There wasn't a spot in the main ballroom allocated for us and so we didn't know if we had to go to the other ballroom to play and come back or how that was going to work.
I'm glad I ended up asking before our pools were set to begin at 6pm or so, but ultimately we had to convert 3 setups over and I had to sit down cold to play against Rikir after helping to find and locate everyone and get them over into the main ballroom. Truth be told, I don't remember too much about this set except that I missed another combo with tk.236a on throw tech timing and that Rikir beat me in straight rounds. So, my tournament ended with a frustrating but I suppose respectable 17th place.
I guess that I'm happy that I'd gotten out of pools every time so far for every major, but by the end of my run I wasn't sure if I would even bother trying to continue to play in 2023. I was extremely burnt out, feeling like I was washed and people thought I was washed. Just generally upset again with tournaments and tournament performance.
However, I had a very enjoyable time watching the rest of Top 24 and later Top 8 after I got eliminated. There's just something about the crowds and the atmosphere in UNI that has a pretty invigorating effect. The amount of effort and the talent that were shown off by all of the players there was simply amazing. In particular, I was very impressed with OmniDeag and PapaPesto. The "next generation" of UNI players have absolutely arrived and I'm excited to see how things continue to develop. Now, truly, we're waiting on French Bread to allow us to help further develop the amazing talent and community that has been fostered.
I also have to make a huge shoutout to cookie and F O X, who graciously let me chill and eat dinner with them in their hotel room. There was some venting, some real talk and just a very relaxed atmosphere that helped me put a lot of things back into perspective. You two are definitely some real ones for that.
Two more people I have to shoutout are Ryker and Deitz, who were my roommates over the weekend. We certainly missed you there too, wampuh! I honestly really missed being able to chat with and spend time with you as well. We haven't gone hard in the same game since the Yomi days and being in the hotel room felt like a time machine back into those times as well. I forgot how fun BBTag was, even while getting smoked. I hope we can meet up at another event soon.
Nevertheless, I still wasn't in great spirits coming back home for the reasons I mentioned and I was stuck between a mental rock and a hard place of no motivation while back in Columbus. Still not really sure what level of commitment to playing fighting games I was going to have, I looked forward to Climax of Night...
Reflection - Juu-Yon-Kakuto and Mentality
I'm really not consistent with these things...
Uh, hm. So, with the exception of a potential trip over to Ann Arbor looming this week, I can say that the 2022 campaign for UNI has been completed.
This has been a pretty wild year so far. I've had some ups and some downs through the duration of 2022. After reading my reflection from Combo Breaker 2022, I suppose I have a few other things to fill in. I'll try to cover a bit of these things in the coming posts. They'll be shorter than usual and not all of them will strictly be UNI related, but naturally they have something to do with my journey in the game thus far.
----
First up, I'd like to talk about Juu-Yon-Kakuto-Geemu. This was a tournament that I organized with my mentor TheKiest to run an event half to prepare people for EVO and half to give myself something to play in as I was not going to anything until CEOtaku. Silent and iThatGuy-_- came into town and stayed at my apartment and it was certainly a pleasure to have them both.
As an organizer, I really can't say that I had much to complain about. We were able to get people from multiple states to come by and spend some time playing games. The schedule had been meticulously crafted in a way that allowed ample time between games and let most people leave at a reasonable time and we actually essentially got to run everything in one room. Honestly, Coffee Underground is such a fantastic venue and I hope in the future that more of the people who might read this have the chance to come to Columbus and play here with us. I think we've got a real hidden gem in this place.
As a player... well, I guess I'll say that I wish I had a better UNI tournament showing. I remember more or less feeling like I played well through the entire weekend in casuals. I had been talking to Gosuda more leading up, attempting to adjust my mindset and recieve some coaching and I felt like it was paying off. Specifically, some of the concepts that we drilled after watching footage were fine-tuning my resource management while keeping future game-states in mind, curbing unnecessary aggression and standing my ground when in uncertain situations.
However, things didn't go as well as I hoped they did when it came to playing in tournament. I couldn't quite put it together vs Glacey and White Beast, losing 1-2 to them both, finishing at 9th in my own tournament. It really bummed me out both because 9th was the worst I'd done in UNI in my own back yard in years and also because I felt like I could handle organizational duties and playing at the same time still. In this case, maybe I can't anymore lol.
I also played Silent in my home in an exhibition based on something that Clearlamp put together. We played a FT5 game, FT3 set win exhibition between my Akatsuki and his Phonon. Gosuda also helped me with my gameplan for this one as well and we thoroughly broke down games that he played in. I had a gameplan that I felt comfortable with and mostly felt I was okay playing after the tournament day prior.
Ultimately, I lost 0-3 and wasn't able to put things together well enough to have the sort of success that I would have liked in the matches. Everything started well enough, but I wasn't able to stay up in adaptation and Silent capitalized on key mistakes to wrench momentum and run away with things.
Between these two events, I definitely think that my confidence was shaken. I thought I had a pretty good Combo Breaker and with a local win over Spoink and Bryce in June, I thought that afterwards, I was moving in the right direction. Now that I'm a couple months removed from that, I still think that I am moving in a good direction with actionable objectives I can achieve in my UNI play. At the time however, it'd caused me a mental spiral of sorts that took me a while to break out of.
Uh, hm. So, with the exception of a potential trip over to Ann Arbor looming this week, I can say that the 2022 campaign for UNI has been completed.
This has been a pretty wild year so far. I've had some ups and some downs through the duration of 2022. After reading my reflection from Combo Breaker 2022, I suppose I have a few other things to fill in. I'll try to cover a bit of these things in the coming posts. They'll be shorter than usual and not all of them will strictly be UNI related, but naturally they have something to do with my journey in the game thus far.
----
First up, I'd like to talk about Juu-Yon-Kakuto-Geemu. This was a tournament that I organized with my mentor TheKiest to run an event half to prepare people for EVO and half to give myself something to play in as I was not going to anything until CEOtaku. Silent and iThatGuy-_- came into town and stayed at my apartment and it was certainly a pleasure to have them both.
As an organizer, I really can't say that I had much to complain about. We were able to get people from multiple states to come by and spend some time playing games. The schedule had been meticulously crafted in a way that allowed ample time between games and let most people leave at a reasonable time and we actually essentially got to run everything in one room. Honestly, Coffee Underground is such a fantastic venue and I hope in the future that more of the people who might read this have the chance to come to Columbus and play here with us. I think we've got a real hidden gem in this place.
As a player... well, I guess I'll say that I wish I had a better UNI tournament showing. I remember more or less feeling like I played well through the entire weekend in casuals. I had been talking to Gosuda more leading up, attempting to adjust my mindset and recieve some coaching and I felt like it was paying off. Specifically, some of the concepts that we drilled after watching footage were fine-tuning my resource management while keeping future game-states in mind, curbing unnecessary aggression and standing my ground when in uncertain situations.
However, things didn't go as well as I hoped they did when it came to playing in tournament. I couldn't quite put it together vs Glacey and White Beast, losing 1-2 to them both, finishing at 9th in my own tournament. It really bummed me out both because 9th was the worst I'd done in UNI in my own back yard in years and also because I felt like I could handle organizational duties and playing at the same time still. In this case, maybe I can't anymore lol.
I also played Silent in my home in an exhibition based on something that Clearlamp put together. We played a FT5 game, FT3 set win exhibition between my Akatsuki and his Phonon. Gosuda also helped me with my gameplan for this one as well and we thoroughly broke down games that he played in. I had a gameplan that I felt comfortable with and mostly felt I was okay playing after the tournament day prior.
Ultimately, I lost 0-3 and wasn't able to put things together well enough to have the sort of success that I would have liked in the matches. Everything started well enough, but I wasn't able to stay up in adaptation and Silent capitalized on key mistakes to wrench momentum and run away with things.
Between these two events, I definitely think that my confidence was shaken. I thought I had a pretty good Combo Breaker and with a local win over Spoink and Bryce in June, I thought that afterwards, I was moving in the right direction. Now that I'm a couple months removed from that, I still think that I am moving in a good direction with actionable objectives I can achieve in my UNI play. At the time however, it'd caused me a mental spiral of sorts that took me a while to break out of.
2022/06/07
Reflection, Future Deliberation - Combo Breaker 2022
Hello everyone, it's been a while. Honestly, I haven't had an inkling to write for a minute, but I think I'm in a place to actually do it after some time. I realize too, that I didn't write much about my perspective as a player at CoN and truth be told, I don't remember enough about it now to make a post about that. My bad~
Over half a year since Climax of Night Type-4 [arising!] and a few events travelled since. I had a healthy Top-8 appearance at Frosty Faustings this year and a respectable 3rd place showing at Crossover Arc in New York, where I bought the new laptop that I'm keying this blogpost with! Then, with my sponsor Sugoi Factory disbanding and the sort of lull that I've been in since. Let me say that there's nothing for me to go into in regards the the last point and I would prefer not to be asked about it either. I'm very appreciative of the many years that I'd been able to work with such a cool team and the achievements that sponsorship has allowed me to hit. I won't say that I'm opposed to joining any sort of team that might be interested in having me, but I'm also not actively looking for anything right now either. Understandably, I also understand that Under Night (UNI) is not a sexy draw for this sort of thing at the moment in spite of it's dedicated player base and I'm not the most decorated player either. It is what it is.
With all of that out of the way, we are now over a week past Combo Breaker 2022.
I find myself pausing as I write that without too much to say actually... and this will be meaningful as I transition into a recap of that weekend's events:
On Thursday, our car took the trip over from Columbus to Schaumberg out from the morning and arrived at a healthy spot in the afternoon. The trip was a little longer than I had anticipated, so I was very happy to see that so many people were already set up in the lobby and playing! Once I dropped my stuff off at the hotel room, I was already down and mingling with them. It was so nice being able to catch up with some that I hadn't seen since Frosty Faustings or earlier and meeting some people for the very first time. I played some casual matches with Yuuno, Squish, Masoma and foxof then played some extended matches with Jaca. It was super enjoyable! After a while, where I had set up my recording setup for people to play at, I went down to get my badge and to confirm my vaccination. The latter line went smooth and my time in the former was absolutely brutal... The Hot Honey Chicken Sandwich from Wendy's was absolutely brutalizing my stomach while the line was actually not moving. The large group in front of us constantly had people coming and going, chatting them up while not paying attention while the line was already going slowly for registered badge pickup. Eventually my group, which included Ebonic Plague just cut them in line to get our own stuff. I took care of what I needed to, met up with Fran for dinner and ended my night.
Friday was a pretty up and down day. My stomach was still messing with me a bit, but Suna, Silmerion and I took a trip to the grocery store nearby. I picked up some pedialyte, high fiber protein shakes, cliff bars, a fruit blend and water for the morning/midday. As mentioned in one of my tweets, I always try to eat lean on the days that I will actually be playing and will attempt to hydrate myself as much as possible. Today was going to be a long day as: I expected to run a good batch of the exhibitions I had planned for the weekend, had my own pool wave to play at 3pm CST and also had the exhibition on Pange Battaile vs Clim's Phonon later in the day. The distance from the hotel rooms to the ballrooms in question weren't terribly long, but they were not short either.
Nevertheless, things didn't start as planned. Canada had gotten held up with rescheduled flights the previous day and also a good bulk of the players would be arriving in the morning. I feel like I didn't quite communicate that I would not be waiting in the ballroom, but would be waiting in the lobby to commence the exhibitions. I made an assumption that they would know some information and I was wrong. For the record, when doing anything with recording setups like the Avermedia LGP series, the official tournament consoles are leased out by third-party affiliates (like DeadState or Gaming Generations) and they have a strict clause about what gets plugged into their peripherals. My stuff cannot be used on tournament setups at any given time. It'd been a while since we did an event and I think people navigate naturally to the ballrooms and stay there, much to my chagrin. After waiting until a bit after noon and not hearing much from anyone, the only initial set that I had been able to record was Carp vs Smartsteer. I was already annoyed and short, annoyed at yet another setback on something I was making time to arrange and be present for and tweeted in frustration that I was never going to do something like this again. It's like the 3rd time I said I'd stop doing it or so, but we'll try our best to stick to it lol.
Either way, I'll soapbox for a little bit for the readers of the blog: By nature of how events work and how people tend to act at events, I think it is absolutely imperative that players who are interested in improving do *something* to make a record of their progress. In the past, I ran exhibitions and other events with the goal of showcasing talent of players in longer formats that you may not see in tournament sections or to show of competitions between regions that do not normally see each other. Honestly speaking, I think I'm one of the few people with this interest. There's more people now than there were, but I think it'd pretty damning for players to ignore the opportunity to showcase themselves. I get really annoyed and feel like I'm wasting my time organizing for people who might say that they want things--- showcases, opportunities for improvement, footage to study, but don't take advantage of opportunities I or someone else gives them. I've tried to be flexible and organize around people and I've consistently come out more bitter about doing it. So, I won't! I'll try to hold my tongue and stop being pedantic if I see complaints though. Either way, I don't think I should have to ask people to record themselves. You should know who you want to play and how you want this information recorded. If you want to improve, do the work. I'm still willing to help anyone who wants to help themselves, but you have to fucking want it for yourself. There's no point in me having all this equipment, knowledge and so on and not using it.
Off the soap box and back to the tournament. I want to say that I felt like I was mostly playing at the level that I expected could do well. My stomach was still bothering me quite a bit, but I think it was still within reasonable expectation for me to do well. My first match was against BigBoyFargo who also played Akatsuki. It honestly didn't start all that good and I felt like I was reverting back to some of the old habits from previous tournaments rather than the stuff I was practicing leading up to CB. I got a 2-0 win after struggling at first and sat down to play Spoinkman in WQF of the pool. The first game basically went according the expectations and I felt like I won it pretty convincingly, but the second match felt... weird. There wasn't really anything in particular that wasn't working from a gameplan perspective, but all of my timings were off. Things that I felt would be combos would drop because I was too slow, extensions that I would be automatic I would miss and tactical unforced errors just kept adding up to a 1-1 split. Then Spoink simply took it from me in Game 3. Just like that, I was in losers.
With a congratulations to Spoinkman, I turned to focus on my next few opponents. I had to fight from a deficit vs SlamDonkey and against Miller2B, two Linne's... a matchup that I positively despise lol. Well, vs Miller is more or less a 50/50 considering our history and familiarity with each other. He'd beaten me in our last CB appearance (CB2018) and beat me in Columbus, so I was happy to get some revenge on both of those counts. Finally, I had to play against EthicsBuster's Byakuya to get out of the pool. If I'm to be honest, I don't remember much about this set except that I survived it. I think I won game three by timeout?
In any case, I wouldn't know my opponent until the next day so I finished my pool and went back to my hotel room to rest for a bit. I had thought that my exhibition was at 7pm, but it was actually at 9... right next to the stage that Tekken was doing NA vs EU. So, I went down and loitered for a little bit before returning to my room to lay down. Thankfully, I had requested to go first because I am "old". Prior to the tournament, I had asked Gosuda to help me prepare for Clim and so I was able to take some notes and write up some of the things I expected of him and what my approach would be. Around 9, I made my way to the Low Kick stage and helped brrrr set up the console in question before sitting up and waiting for things to begin.
The first two games started really slow as I was still feeling a bit lethargic and wanting to catch what sort of patterns that clim would be shooting for. I basically knew and had internalized that there was a spacing where he would disengage from Akatsuki and shifted up to playing a resource game from there. When I got hit at first, I more or less allowed myself to get thrown to death to feel out what sort of offense he would be running before making more decisions. I went down 0-2 and then made a run to 4 straight after I felt more acclimated. After two more games, we finished up at 5-3 my favor! Honestly speaking, there was a lot more that I was hoping to show off, but I'm thankful for the opportunity against such a strong opponent. I basically left the stage and went back to my room to fall asleep, lol.
Saturday was a lot less exciting of a time in the morning. I went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast with Miller and Silent and then went down to play in the ballroom. I had told myself and the people yet to do exhibitions that I would not even bother to attempt to run exhibitions or lug my recording setup anywhere on this day. I personally didn't have to play again until 4pm or so and had planned to spend a good chunk of the morning watching Vampire Savior after pools began. Upon getting my personal fill of casual matches just before pools for UNI and Melty were to start, I was making my way to the exit when I saw Shinobi looking around. I said what's up and he asked me if I knew where Suika was. Unfortunately, he had mentioned that he was held back in Vancouver due to a positive COVID test. It didn't seem like that was quite communicated to staff, so it seemed like Shinobi needed someone to fill in for the block. We did a short look around, but I didn't see anyone who would be ready as it was going to start imminently. With that said, I offered to help out with commentary if he needed. Lo and behold, I ended up taking the 10am MBTL block alongside Akimi out of nowhere. It was actually really fun and I got to learn more Lumina and provide color commentary for a game I hadn't played too much! Unfortunately, I missed a lot of VSav going back and forth between UNI pools and that room but it was still pretty enjoyable.
After VSav Top 24 was settled, I ended up chilling in the crowd to await my own Top 32 match after the last pool wave. The rest of the morning and early afternoon's festivities lead SwirlyGlasses to be my opponent. By this point, I was actually fairly confident in my abilites vs Hilda and felt like I had a good shot to win the set. I hadn't actually gotten any Hilda games during the weekend, which was probably to my detriment but even when I went down 0-1, I had mostly felt like I was a few adjustments off from taking the set in 3 games. I felt like I had a pretty dominant game 2 in spite of some mishaps, but things fell apart much like they did in the 2nd game vs Spoinkman. One thing that stuck out in particular were two opportunities to land Kamikaze against no resource Hilda that I had messed up. In game 3, it was more of the same and some long perfects sealed my fate at 25th place. As it turned out, had I won I would have had to fight Masoma... so I suppose I wasn't too beat up about it. I watched the rest of the crazy results until we had settled on our Top 8, then went to get some food with Ebonic Plague and Miller at Miller's Tavern. After a pleasant dinner, I turned in for the night.
Sunday was another pretty chill morning, where I went down and mashed casuals until it was time for UNI Top 8. I got to root for my boy Foxof as he progressed to winning his first major along with the many hype sets along the way. I also finally got to sit in Vampire Savior from Top 24 to Top 8 and had a good time. I pitched for VMP to try to make it up for the tournament I'm hosting in Columbus on July 16th and hopefully we'll be able to see a bunch of people come through for it. It was amazing to see Ethan (MiniMaw)'s run to 2nd place and also to see Zach (Ailerus)'s consistency in winning yet another Combo Breaker. I believe it's his 3rd one? Honestly, the North American Vsav scene has to be one of my favorite FGC scenes and I'm always happy to be around them and watch them. I don't play it as much as I probably should, but I've always said that them, the NA Skullgirls scene and the Midwest Brawl/PM scene were my inspirations as far as TO and event organization goes. But after that, I lingered around to see a couple of the people I hadn't seen up to that point and left the ballroom to set up my stuff in the hotel lobby.
It was there that I ended up finishing the last three of the planned exhibitions. Unfortunately, because Silent and Psykotik were too good at their games, I wasn't able to record their "secret" FT10 that I had planned. Joe went on to get 3rd in BBCF after doing the same in UNICLR, so he ended up pretty busy. Silent and I ordered a deep dish as I had the last few people do exhibitions. We were eventually joined by Yuuno, squish and many of the others later who all ended up playing on the setup for a while. I had sat down to play Ayr for a bit, intending to record a set when str4ng3r walked up and asked to pull Ayr away for a picture with the rest of the Vatista players there (flank, wootboost, jaca, foxof, and of course foxof42). It was there that I consigned them for the birthday kumite that I had been planning--- turned into a Vatista kumite, minus Foxof. The result is already up on Youtube, but it was really fun! Afterwards, we went to the bar and they all bought me drinks to celebrate my birthday! I turned 31 on the day and had passed it more or less the way I had wanted. Compy and some of the CBus VSAV crew joined us in drinks, since yesterday had been Compy's birthday as well. After we departed from the bar, I chilled over by my setup for a bit before breaking it down and going back to the room.
Monday we just checked out and went home, lol.
In recap... though it didn't start the best, I had experienced a pretty good birthday weekend. Now that I'm past it, I'm in a bit of a bind as far as what I want to do. I have a tournament on the horizon to prepare in Juu Yon Kakuto Geemu in July, a potential travel destination for MOsh Pit in Missouri, but other than that I think I'm going to chill until September for potentially CEOtaku. I don't have any tournament aspirations except for putting myself in the position to play my best and so things feel a bit hollow. Spitballing it with Gosuda and Vynis last night after mulling it over with myself during the week, I think for the rest of the year I'll be seeking out specific opponents at each of the events that I'm at to play long sets at. I want to take notes and prepare specifically for certain opponents, which is something that I haven't actually done much of since the Yomi days. So, for JYKG, CEOtaku and CoN5, I'll be diligently working on people to play FT10s with. This is the next step for me to keep myself invested, I think. Maybe I'll also approach people for money matches as well.
Anyway, thanks for reading. I recently made a new matchup chart for Akatsuki, but honestly I don't feel like I have things together enough to feel comfortable about it. We'll see what other content I ended up making. I do plan to restream cool stuff and tournaments coming in the future though, so look forward to that. Until next time.
Over half a year since Climax of Night Type-4 [arising!] and a few events travelled since. I had a healthy Top-8 appearance at Frosty Faustings this year and a respectable 3rd place showing at Crossover Arc in New York, where I bought the new laptop that I'm keying this blogpost with! Then, with my sponsor Sugoi Factory disbanding and the sort of lull that I've been in since. Let me say that there's nothing for me to go into in regards the the last point and I would prefer not to be asked about it either. I'm very appreciative of the many years that I'd been able to work with such a cool team and the achievements that sponsorship has allowed me to hit. I won't say that I'm opposed to joining any sort of team that might be interested in having me, but I'm also not actively looking for anything right now either. Understandably, I also understand that Under Night (UNI) is not a sexy draw for this sort of thing at the moment in spite of it's dedicated player base and I'm not the most decorated player either. It is what it is.
With all of that out of the way, we are now over a week past Combo Breaker 2022.
I find myself pausing as I write that without too much to say actually... and this will be meaningful as I transition into a recap of that weekend's events:
~o~o~
~o~o~
Friday was a pretty up and down day. My stomach was still messing with me a bit, but Suna, Silmerion and I took a trip to the grocery store nearby. I picked up some pedialyte, high fiber protein shakes, cliff bars, a fruit blend and water for the morning/midday. As mentioned in one of my tweets, I always try to eat lean on the days that I will actually be playing and will attempt to hydrate myself as much as possible. Today was going to be a long day as: I expected to run a good batch of the exhibitions I had planned for the weekend, had my own pool wave to play at 3pm CST and also had the exhibition on Pange Battaile vs Clim's Phonon later in the day. The distance from the hotel rooms to the ballrooms in question weren't terribly long, but they were not short either.
Nevertheless, things didn't start as planned. Canada had gotten held up with rescheduled flights the previous day and also a good bulk of the players would be arriving in the morning. I feel like I didn't quite communicate that I would not be waiting in the ballroom, but would be waiting in the lobby to commence the exhibitions. I made an assumption that they would know some information and I was wrong. For the record, when doing anything with recording setups like the Avermedia LGP series, the official tournament consoles are leased out by third-party affiliates (like DeadState or Gaming Generations) and they have a strict clause about what gets plugged into their peripherals. My stuff cannot be used on tournament setups at any given time. It'd been a while since we did an event and I think people navigate naturally to the ballrooms and stay there, much to my chagrin. After waiting until a bit after noon and not hearing much from anyone, the only initial set that I had been able to record was Carp vs Smartsteer. I was already annoyed and short, annoyed at yet another setback on something I was making time to arrange and be present for and tweeted in frustration that I was never going to do something like this again. It's like the 3rd time I said I'd stop doing it or so, but we'll try our best to stick to it lol.
Either way, I'll soapbox for a little bit for the readers of the blog: By nature of how events work and how people tend to act at events, I think it is absolutely imperative that players who are interested in improving do *something* to make a record of their progress. In the past, I ran exhibitions and other events with the goal of showcasing talent of players in longer formats that you may not see in tournament sections or to show of competitions between regions that do not normally see each other. Honestly speaking, I think I'm one of the few people with this interest. There's more people now than there were, but I think it'd pretty damning for players to ignore the opportunity to showcase themselves. I get really annoyed and feel like I'm wasting my time organizing for people who might say that they want things--- showcases, opportunities for improvement, footage to study, but don't take advantage of opportunities I or someone else gives them. I've tried to be flexible and organize around people and I've consistently come out more bitter about doing it. So, I won't! I'll try to hold my tongue and stop being pedantic if I see complaints though. Either way, I don't think I should have to ask people to record themselves. You should know who you want to play and how you want this information recorded. If you want to improve, do the work. I'm still willing to help anyone who wants to help themselves, but you have to fucking want it for yourself. There's no point in me having all this equipment, knowledge and so on and not using it.
Off the soap box and back to the tournament. I want to say that I felt like I was mostly playing at the level that I expected could do well. My stomach was still bothering me quite a bit, but I think it was still within reasonable expectation for me to do well. My first match was against BigBoyFargo who also played Akatsuki. It honestly didn't start all that good and I felt like I was reverting back to some of the old habits from previous tournaments rather than the stuff I was practicing leading up to CB. I got a 2-0 win after struggling at first and sat down to play Spoinkman in WQF of the pool. The first game basically went according the expectations and I felt like I won it pretty convincingly, but the second match felt... weird. There wasn't really anything in particular that wasn't working from a gameplan perspective, but all of my timings were off. Things that I felt would be combos would drop because I was too slow, extensions that I would be automatic I would miss and tactical unforced errors just kept adding up to a 1-1 split. Then Spoink simply took it from me in Game 3. Just like that, I was in losers.
With a congratulations to Spoinkman, I turned to focus on my next few opponents. I had to fight from a deficit vs SlamDonkey and against Miller2B, two Linne's... a matchup that I positively despise lol. Well, vs Miller is more or less a 50/50 considering our history and familiarity with each other. He'd beaten me in our last CB appearance (CB2018) and beat me in Columbus, so I was happy to get some revenge on both of those counts. Finally, I had to play against EthicsBuster's Byakuya to get out of the pool. If I'm to be honest, I don't remember much about this set except that I survived it. I think I won game three by timeout?
In any case, I wouldn't know my opponent until the next day so I finished my pool and went back to my hotel room to rest for a bit. I had thought that my exhibition was at 7pm, but it was actually at 9... right next to the stage that Tekken was doing NA vs EU. So, I went down and loitered for a little bit before returning to my room to lay down. Thankfully, I had requested to go first because I am "old". Prior to the tournament, I had asked Gosuda to help me prepare for Clim and so I was able to take some notes and write up some of the things I expected of him and what my approach would be. Around 9, I made my way to the Low Kick stage and helped brrrr set up the console in question before sitting up and waiting for things to begin.
The first two games started really slow as I was still feeling a bit lethargic and wanting to catch what sort of patterns that clim would be shooting for. I basically knew and had internalized that there was a spacing where he would disengage from Akatsuki and shifted up to playing a resource game from there. When I got hit at first, I more or less allowed myself to get thrown to death to feel out what sort of offense he would be running before making more decisions. I went down 0-2 and then made a run to 4 straight after I felt more acclimated. After two more games, we finished up at 5-3 my favor! Honestly speaking, there was a lot more that I was hoping to show off, but I'm thankful for the opportunity against such a strong opponent. I basically left the stage and went back to my room to fall asleep, lol.
~o~o~
Saturday was a lot less exciting of a time in the morning. I went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast with Miller and Silent and then went down to play in the ballroom. I had told myself and the people yet to do exhibitions that I would not even bother to attempt to run exhibitions or lug my recording setup anywhere on this day. I personally didn't have to play again until 4pm or so and had planned to spend a good chunk of the morning watching Vampire Savior after pools began. Upon getting my personal fill of casual matches just before pools for UNI and Melty were to start, I was making my way to the exit when I saw Shinobi looking around. I said what's up and he asked me if I knew where Suika was. Unfortunately, he had mentioned that he was held back in Vancouver due to a positive COVID test. It didn't seem like that was quite communicated to staff, so it seemed like Shinobi needed someone to fill in for the block. We did a short look around, but I didn't see anyone who would be ready as it was going to start imminently. With that said, I offered to help out with commentary if he needed. Lo and behold, I ended up taking the 10am MBTL block alongside Akimi out of nowhere. It was actually really fun and I got to learn more Lumina and provide color commentary for a game I hadn't played too much! Unfortunately, I missed a lot of VSav going back and forth between UNI pools and that room but it was still pretty enjoyable.
After VSav Top 24 was settled, I ended up chilling in the crowd to await my own Top 32 match after the last pool wave. The rest of the morning and early afternoon's festivities lead SwirlyGlasses to be my opponent. By this point, I was actually fairly confident in my abilites vs Hilda and felt like I had a good shot to win the set. I hadn't actually gotten any Hilda games during the weekend, which was probably to my detriment but even when I went down 0-1, I had mostly felt like I was a few adjustments off from taking the set in 3 games. I felt like I had a pretty dominant game 2 in spite of some mishaps, but things fell apart much like they did in the 2nd game vs Spoinkman. One thing that stuck out in particular were two opportunities to land Kamikaze against no resource Hilda that I had messed up. In game 3, it was more of the same and some long perfects sealed my fate at 25th place. As it turned out, had I won I would have had to fight Masoma... so I suppose I wasn't too beat up about it. I watched the rest of the crazy results until we had settled on our Top 8, then went to get some food with Ebonic Plague and Miller at Miller's Tavern. After a pleasant dinner, I turned in for the night.
~o~o~
Sunday was another pretty chill morning, where I went down and mashed casuals until it was time for UNI Top 8. I got to root for my boy Foxof as he progressed to winning his first major along with the many hype sets along the way. I also finally got to sit in Vampire Savior from Top 24 to Top 8 and had a good time. I pitched for VMP to try to make it up for the tournament I'm hosting in Columbus on July 16th and hopefully we'll be able to see a bunch of people come through for it. It was amazing to see Ethan (MiniMaw)'s run to 2nd place and also to see Zach (Ailerus)'s consistency in winning yet another Combo Breaker. I believe it's his 3rd one? Honestly, the North American Vsav scene has to be one of my favorite FGC scenes and I'm always happy to be around them and watch them. I don't play it as much as I probably should, but I've always said that them, the NA Skullgirls scene and the Midwest Brawl/PM scene were my inspirations as far as TO and event organization goes. But after that, I lingered around to see a couple of the people I hadn't seen up to that point and left the ballroom to set up my stuff in the hotel lobby.
It was there that I ended up finishing the last three of the planned exhibitions. Unfortunately, because Silent and Psykotik were too good at their games, I wasn't able to record their "secret" FT10 that I had planned. Joe went on to get 3rd in BBCF after doing the same in UNICLR, so he ended up pretty busy. Silent and I ordered a deep dish as I had the last few people do exhibitions. We were eventually joined by Yuuno, squish and many of the others later who all ended up playing on the setup for a while. I had sat down to play Ayr for a bit, intending to record a set when str4ng3r walked up and asked to pull Ayr away for a picture with the rest of the Vatista players there (flank, wootboost, jaca, foxof, and of course foxof42). It was there that I consigned them for the birthday kumite that I had been planning--- turned into a Vatista kumite, minus Foxof. The result is already up on Youtube, but it was really fun! Afterwards, we went to the bar and they all bought me drinks to celebrate my birthday! I turned 31 on the day and had passed it more or less the way I had wanted. Compy and some of the CBus VSAV crew joined us in drinks, since yesterday had been Compy's birthday as well. After we departed from the bar, I chilled over by my setup for a bit before breaking it down and going back to the room.
Monday we just checked out and went home, lol.
~o~o~
In recap... though it didn't start the best, I had experienced a pretty good birthday weekend. Now that I'm past it, I'm in a bit of a bind as far as what I want to do. I have a tournament on the horizon to prepare in Juu Yon Kakuto Geemu in July, a potential travel destination for MOsh Pit in Missouri, but other than that I think I'm going to chill until September for potentially CEOtaku. I don't have any tournament aspirations except for putting myself in the position to play my best and so things feel a bit hollow. Spitballing it with Gosuda and Vynis last night after mulling it over with myself during the week, I think for the rest of the year I'll be seeking out specific opponents at each of the events that I'm at to play long sets at. I want to take notes and prepare specifically for certain opponents, which is something that I haven't actually done much of since the Yomi days. So, for JYKG, CEOtaku and CoN5, I'll be diligently working on people to play FT10s with. This is the next step for me to keep myself invested, I think. Maybe I'll also approach people for money matches as well.
Anyway, thanks for reading. I recently made a new matchup chart for Akatsuki, but honestly I don't feel like I have things together enough to feel comfortable about it. We'll see what other content I ended up making. I do plan to restream cool stuff and tournaments coming in the future though, so look forward to that. Until next time.
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