Tuesday Morning Mythra 1/30: The End
jvgrid. i’ll be still updating this! will do a pretty big database update for the lr!
Damn, it’s been a bit since I’ve been here. So what happened?
This screenshot was taken during Neo vs. Yaura at Kowloon. Neo proceeded to get reverse 3–0'd. It was particularly tough to watch.
In all seriousness, you might note that I stopped writing for a bit. What happened?
The answer kind of boils down to: I got out of the swing of it when I was home over the holidays, and I couldn’t figure out how to get back into it during the immediate LumiRank rush.
Ultimately, writing these took a fair few hours out of my day on Monday; the fact that these even were on Tuesday was because it simply wasn’t sustainable for me to write these the weekend before, whereas I had a lot of downtime on Mondays during the day at my campus job.
Besides, I was kind of running out of ideas near the end. There’s always stuff going on, sure, but I ultimately felt pretty creatively bankrupt.
Furthermore, a lot of it felt redundant with the stuff I’m doing with Luminosity and the LumiRank, so I figured that it would be maximally efficient to fold it all in and just focus my energy there.
With that said, let me end the column off with a bang: a deep dive into the LumiRank this past month, since obviously that’s on the front of everyone’s mind.
HMs + 150–101
So let’s talk about the HMs. In particular, I’m honing in on ProtoBanham, who definitely would have qualified for the rankings had he attended Watch The Throne, as originally intended. LumiRank Japan puts him at #18 in Japan, between MASA and Jagaimo. This puts him at #38.5 in the world, which sounds kinda weird! It’s weird to imagine PB at a point where his existing results keep him that low. His season, defined by the Tweek/Riddles wins at Summit, doesn’t have much though past those head-to-heads. From there, it’s two Hurt wins at a regional, and Kameme at Kagaribi in losers, but ultimately, the win profile is pretty empty. Still, it feels weird to visualize one of the goats that way…
150–101 feels like it was ultimately the most controversial section of the ranking? I feel like people got the most mad about WebbJP and quiK. Ultimately, I think that it’s just an assessment of seasons, not of actual player quality. I know Webb will start sealing out those game 5s soon, it’s just a matter of time, and I believe in him to crack Top 50 this year as far as someone whose trajectory looks so optimistic right now.
Carmelo, of course, is someone who will probably be important to watch for next year. For…obvious reasons.
100–51:
We got complained at for a few players in this range: Kiyarash (#88), Jakal (#84), and AlanDiss (#58). People seemed to not really understand how the algo handled low entry players; and truthfully, neither did I (lmao) — fortunately enough, Stuart wrote a great writeup to handle it.
I think overall people really underestimate how hard consistency is. My entire read on it is that entering a bracket is an inherent risk! You have no way of knowing how well you’ll do on a given day, and there’s a lot of variance there, especially when it comes to competing in this game. To be consistent, even if you enter very little, is pretty commendable, especially if those few events see you taking great wins like both AlanDiss and Kiyarash’s did.
With that said, I want to point out that fielding the most inconsistent complaints this past ranking season was fucking killing me. I refuse to believe the narrative was split, by the same complainers, that “Japan has a major every week just go and farm good wins and you get a million chances” and “Kiyarash/AlanDiss went to so little and they just got ranked so high man what if I went to Genesis and beat Zomba then stopped going to things?” The first one isn’t LumiRank’s fault, and the second one is, again, a much harder feat than you expect. I think I know the clear-cut actual cause of both of these complaints (you think North American players that you like are too low) but I think it’s not our responsibility to distort who’s actually good or not based on public perception of people in the West.
I vocalized my frustrations early in the season with a pretty succinct thread, I think.
51–11:
I think I got most of my writing out of the way in the actual blurbs with these ones. Normally, I like to take a big chunk of blurbs to do, but this time around, I knew that the video would set me up to get a lot done, so I called dibs on Dabuz and Neo, then offered to fill whoever didn’t get taken.
I want to shout out all of the blurb writers from this year: they’re all incredibly talented community members with a great pulse on the scene. In particular, I definitely want to highlight the two new writers for this season, Rosebloom and SelfDestructGambit; both of them have such a great work ethic and have done some amazing work. Obviously, if you’re reading this column, you know who Rosebloom is, but SDG has been doing some crazy work in terms of graphics and just always goes above and beyond with the scene, and I hope he gets his flowers. I’m stealing his valor for this year and tweeting Smashigamis though.
Most of how the rankings shook out for this region made a lot of sense. I will say, I got to feel really smug watching people talk about Raflow vs. Jagaimo be3fore it was revealed that he was literally one spot above, same for Bloom. In hindsight, how did both of those happen?
I can’t believe we got the Europeans to calm down.
The Top 10 + Closing Thoughts:
So, editing the video. The first thing that I had to do was think through the music choices: I wanted to hone in on using video game music from each franchise in their most modern iteration. That includes music from Pikmin 4, Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze, Tekken 7, WarioWare: Move It!, and Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Some characters left me no choice: after all, you get two Flat Zones to choose from for G&W.
Clips were sometimes really easy and sometimes really hard. There were a few obvious ones I knew I had to include (Shuton winning Kowloon, Miya’s Incineroar, the Yoshidora egg clip, Sonix’s win at Claro Gaming, Light’s Fortnite dance) but I truthfully found myself struggling most for good Sparg0 and Acola clips besides a few highlight reels for the year. For the former, I got lucky, since most of the commentator calls were pretty hype for him, but the latter, it was, uh, kind of hard. I mean, he won the biggest tournament of the year, and the commentators acted like someone died. Then a foghorn went off in the venue and that uh, definitely didn’t help the vibe of the clip.
Still, I definitely could have done a better job there. It’s a bit of a regret of mine.
I went out of my way to include foreign language commentary for each of the players on there. It definitely helps that Japanese, French, commentators do love to yell at tournament wins.
Still, I’m overall very proud of my work for the video. I think we had some really cool stuff going, and I’m happy to be able to have highlighted everyone’s seasons.
Now, onto the top 10. Let’s talk about the biggest hot take from the Top 10: Sonix > Miya. First, let’s unpack why:
Still, I don’t know how I feel about Miya under Sonix. I mean, the logic all stands, but on an eye test, I’m impressed by the major wins maybe more-so. I think the diminishing returns of the Asimo wins also definitely caught up to him; most of these majors had him take Asimo as said best win.
EDIT: I got nerd emoji’d on this. out of his ten major wins this year, three found him beating acola as a peak win, two found him beating shuton, one found him beating riddles, one found him beating glutonny, and two were asimo. also he won one beating only rizeasu? what?
I don’t fully agree with it in my heart, but I understand it to be true for the year. Ultimately, that’s how the record books will look.
So yeah, that’s TMM for now. I might write some one-off pieces if anyuthing similar to Tempaman comes up, but that’s all for the weekly updates. Thank you all for reading over the year+ ❤
Take care, y’all, and if you want games of Granblue or Under Night, I’ll be there!
Best wishes,
Trade War
