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.
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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.