Hey everyone, this is Leontes from the Fantasy Strike team.
In case you missed it, August 22nd was our big major at AnimEVOnline. Normally an in-person event held in Las Vegas during EVO proper, AnimEVO (and presumably many other FGC events) are making their way online due to the ongoing pandemic. We signed Fantasy Strike up for the event back in June (before we launched the free-to-play version of Fantasy Strike) and we weren’t really sure what the reception was going to be like.
We figured we’d get maybe 60 entrants (as usual for our larger online tournaments) so we structured the tournament as we usually do; international signups (due to our great netcode), one big pool, double-elimination best-of-1 Team Battle, etc. The original plan was for me to be the TO for the tournament, with ThyPirateKing, safety_man and MrMKL supporting on two streams; one on ThyPirateKing’s channel (weekly team battle tournaments) and another on safety_man’s TorontoTopTiers2 channel (home of Stun City Cyber standard weeklies). Figured it’d be a short 3-hour journey to Grand Finals with little incident.
Well…
After our free-to-play launch on July 25th (approx. one month before the scheduled tournament), we realized our “mistake”; signups kept rising daily until we finally capped them at 208 (!!!) one week before the event! We checked Smash.gg’s statistics for what regions were represented in the event, and here’s the list:
United States, Canada, Philippines, Spain, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, United Kingdom, Kuwait, Barbados, Sweden, Austria, Russia, Venezuela, Norway, Puerto Rico, France, Indonesia, India, Israel, Denmark! Truly an international event.
Usually with that many countries represented, it’s best to split into multiple tournaments (for multiple regions, as other games at AnimEVO did). However, since our signups were already so intertwined with international players, we figured it’d be best to just have one giant bracket and see how it shakes out instead.
In a mad scramble just one week before the event, we split the bracket into four pools and recruited lots of help from the community to report matches, handle disputes, and ultimately save the tournament. Huge shoutouts to Tidazi, monorail, NitaiRaj, Duckie, Frostilyte, Remy77077 and nickyFGC for coming through to help us run pools and commentate for both of our streams; we really couldn’t have done it without you all! The Fantasy Strike community managed to generate a $2000 pot bonus as well.
As for the participants, we had many killers dispersed between the four pools; CWheezy was the tournament favorite, having won every major FS tournament he’s entered, including our in-person major at FrostyFaustings in January 2020. 2nd seed went to therookhugger due to his 2nd place showing at Frosty Faustings and dominance of online weeklies, and 3rd seed went to Organous for their repeated high placings in the Stun City Cyber weeklies (carried by their incredible Rook play). Rounding out the top 8 seeds were EMP | rogueyoshi, .bM | Aphotix, StaccatoSemibreve (known ingame as Janet), TheZipBon and CrispyCthulhu.
Here are some links to each pool/bracket (along with the top 4 seeds in each pool) so you can see how thinks shook out towards Top 32.
Pool HD1 (CWheezy, Sir, Emisocks, fireblur)
Pool HD2 (therookhugger, TheZipBon, CrispyCthulhu, SirHandsome)
Pool HD3 (Organous, Janet, squible, aeronico7)
Pool HD4 (rogueyoshi, Aphotix, Arnei, fee bee)
Here are links to the tournament vods, hosted by ThyPirateKing and safety_man on their respective YouTube channels:
ThyPirateKing main stream (over six hours!)
TorontoTopTiers2 secondary stream (nearly four hours!)
You can skip straight to Top 32 on TPK’s stream by using the timestamps on the video. safety_man’s top 32 starts around the 2 hour mark and primarily streams loser’s bracket matches.
Here’s the top 32 bracket.
Top 8 was streamed in its entirety on the TPK stream.
Now, for some spoilers! Avert your eyes if you want to watch the Top 8 yourself!
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
After all was said and done, here’s your top 8:
The breakout story of the tournament was undoubtedly CChavez, who only lost to CWheezy on his climb to top 8. Props to him for making it so far, he really surprised us all and we hope to see more of him in future tournaments.
The first top 8 match was one of the most exciting battles of the event; CWheezy vs. Aphotix. Sparring partners outside of tournaments, I believe this is the first time they’ve played in a high stakes match against each other, and it was definitely a sight to see. To get here, Aphotix had to defeat 4th seed rogueyoshi to make it into Winner’s side, though CWheezy had enjoyed a comfortable ride to the top as usual. Who will move on to winner’s semis?
In a stunning 3-0 victory, Aphotix moves on. Incredible stuff! Could this be the end of CWheezy’s reign of terror?
Next we had therookhugger vs. aeronico7. Could we have another upset on our hands?
The answer of course, is yes. aeronico moves on with a 3-1 victory over 2nd seed rookhugger! Two massive upsets in the biggest tournament of the year; could not ask for a more exciting top 8!
Though there were lots of hype moments throughout top 8 (be sure to watch TPK’s video to see the whole thing!) I want to give an honorable mention goes to rogueyoshi’s Quince, who to my knowledge didn’t lose a single match against anyone, top 8 or otherwise. It definitely didn’t happen on-stream, but I’d imagine in the lower portion of the bracket he continued to dominate on Quince. Here’s timestamps to his Quince matches in top 8, if you want to see how it’s done against the best:
Despite ultimately losing the set against CWheezy overall, rogueyoshi definitely proved his Quince prowess in the tournament, and we all look forward to seeing him push the character even further in the future.
The rest of the top 8 story is that CWheezy was able to claw his way back up to face Aphotix in Grand Finals, and here is the conclusion to AnimEVOnline 2020:
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Final Results:
1) Aphotix
2) CWheezy
3) aeronico7
4) rogueyoshi
5) therookhugger
5) TheZipBon
7) Mitarashi Dango
7) CChavez
Once again, shoutouts to all of the AnimEVO staff who helped make this possible, our wonderful community members for donating to our tournament with their money AND their time to make this a memorable event, and to all the players (208!) who signed up all across the world to compete at the highest level of Fantasy Strike.
We look forward to running more awesome events with you all in the future. Thanks for your support.
-Leontes