subs, helpers, and cheerleaders first:
Henry: one of my favorite people on smogon. the number of fucks you give is the perfect number of fucks to give. crazy part is you can spend a month in wineland getting your fake ID rejected, then come back and build donsquads that don’t lose. I hope people continue to sleep on and insult you so that I can continue to figuratively fellate you. OLT has “won by henry” written all over it.
Nails: suuuuper underrated thinker and tester. some people shit on sub players who “get carried to a trophy” but you fuckin went in, probably tested the most with the orasers out of anybody. WQ will think I’m just saying this to say it, but I genuinely think that’s true.
@Pokeaim: shame things turned out the way they did for you re: the smogon community, but I’m glad you stuck around the bit you did. you were always very helpful when you were here. Definitely don’t deserve the hate you catch
CTC: I remember when blunder was talking about how you didn’t even wanna play because of how ass you thought the team was, and that hurt a bit. glad we were able to turn it around. Spain are lucky the series didn’t go to tiebreak because there was no way they were beating our secret weapon.
AM: whenever you were active in the IRC channel and Skype, you always had thoughtful and useful things to say. wish I saw more of that.
yondie: loved interacting with you, it was like a reminder that not everybody on smogon is a geed. very refreshing deviation from all the discussion of the latest episode of boku no piko. PMO
Stone_Cold: I’m gutted that you can’t celebrate with us today. hope everything’s alright and thanks a billion times over for giving me a chance. There were 1 or 2 moments when we were at odds with each other but they passed over quickly. I said in some wcop thread last year that you’re the best manager a pokemon team has ever seen. While I don’t claim to know anything about being a pokemon manager, I still think that’s true.
New Breed: in my heart you were always a member of this team. watching your classic cup runs and rooting for you was one of my fondest memories of the first half of the tournament
uragg: BR slayer uragg makes a return. I was supposed to be doing cool coding projects with you but I blew u off to play pokemon. haha classic
Peachy: still your #1 fan, wish you played with us tho!!
Lamppost: eat logs, eastlogs! drunk lamppost has produced some of the best logs I’ve ever read
now for the people I interacted with the most:
Tobes: I perhaps didn’t get to know you as well as I should have, but I had a ton of fun watching your games and play testing with you. It’s a shame the teams we had for finals will never get to see the light of day, but it was a great time building and testing them anyway. You’ve instilled a new love of RBY in me, and I think I’m going to start maining this tier now that wcop is over.
idiotfrommars: Probably the best new friend I made during my time here, it’s been a blast being on a team with you man. I’m really glad to have met you. As a player and playtester, you were always super involved too, especially in the preparation for oldgens. Your SPL+WCOP record speaks for itself about your playing skill, too bad you’ll never beat GSC Don Omfuga. At least you can make the appropriate big dick plays when the situation calls for it, and too bad nobody will listen to you and use dragmag; I think there were 3 or 4 times when it actually just won the games u wanted us to bring it. Can’t wait to kick it with u at worlds!!
BKC: one of the two MVPs of the team in my eyes. You were of course completely responsible for our ADV preparation and had no second set of eyes to tell you that using Claydol was a Bad Idea. You were enormously helpful with GSC and DPP. The counter style you built for Go10 was a work of art and in my eyes was a great example of your value to the team. I don’t think we’d have done as well in those tiers without you, even though you weren’t the one making the plays. Beyond that, you had your hand in the cookie jar for every tier, contributing team ideas for everything. In that sense, you were probably worth more than one win per week as a teammate. As a dude, I think you’re a total dingus and I’m glad you’re willing to laugh at your own jokes because honestly nobody else thinks they’re funny. PS I take back what I said about you being MVP, nice 3-2 record assclown.
august: Glad to finally be teaming with you in a wcop after you shattered my dreams of going undefeated all those years ago. You were the pilot of BKC’s mad ideas in DPP, and you executed them very well most of the time. You think you’re getting worse over time, and you’re probably right but even in your shit form, you were good enough to defeat Rocka, Go10, and Pokebasket as well as giving
Philip7086, a guy who looked completely untouchable in this tournament, a great game. So chin up and slow down the rate at which you worsen because we’ll need you again next year.
Bad Ass: You are actually one of the most cerebral fighters I’ve met. I don’t know where all this was when we were on US South, but goddamn you turned it on this year even after insisting that you wouldn’t play. You were, along with Nails, the most helpful non-ORAS guy to the ORAS team. Thanks to you we stopped using passive shit and I think that influence gave us quite a few key games. You’re absolutely ruthless even in test games and honestly I don’t know how you do that but mad props because I think I actually improved a good bit as a player from being forced to play hard against you in tests. As far as the actual playing you did, you exploited Lightchu’s sand balance builds perfectly with that team, and though you lost your win con in Lando-T, the incredible innovation of salac chomp with dual chop specifically for zam worked EXACTLY the way you envisioned it and clutched out a win. I was so impressed with that man, especially in a tier that is considered by many to be “stale.” Also, congrats on having the most enviable and aesthetic trophy set on smogon, you bastard.
steelphoenix: Cutest user on smogon, probably. First things first, I still fully expect to see a finals track and a victory track at some point. I’ll wait. I see you as an up-and-comer in the tournament scene. After a really awesome showing in ubers, you took to BW with the voracity that only a new tour player can have. You definitely have the work ethic to become an all time great soon, and I expect that you will show it over the course of the next year should you decide to continue playing. I’m glad you were able to show up the doubters in that Mcmeghan game. If you keep on your current trajectory, you will soon become a name to be feared, and I look forward to watching you develop in the meantime.
TheEnder: I first put my eye on you when you beat me in frontier almost a year ago, but god damn have you developed into a monster this year. You had a really strong cast of opponents, and despite that you really brought it to them each time (with the exception of Tesung RIP). You’re a really quiet and humble guy for how much you worked for the team, building for everybody. TDK calls you 1 of the 2 R1 MVPs (the other being PDC) and I’m inclined to agree. Your teams brought us a lot of wins in those early weeks (a few losses too RIP bro fist) and for that you were essential. After you beat Reymedy, I thought we were going to have to take shit about you living in Norway but thankfully that died down as we continued to win.
TDK: The other MVP of the team in my eyes, in addition to BKC, though your contribution was probably even greater. There are a lot of things I could say but I’ll try to be brief. The old guard of this community hates oras and complains that it’s all matchup. In this tournament you’ve shown that to not be true. You actually built hundreds of teams all by yourself this world cup, that’s some hugo shit. All that hard work showed itself in our ORAS playoffs record which i believe was 11-1 (could be remembering wrong) against some of the best players smogon has to offer. You don’t simply get lucky with matchup that many times in a row. That’s a result of some phenomenal fucking team building. Yeah, our guys played really well and sometimes got lucky, but that kind of success wouldn’t be possible without a guy pumping out great team after great team. You should have seen PDC and me yesterday, we were like chickens without a head until you woke up, got in the IRC channel and calmed us down, and gave us some bomb ass squads that ended up both having great matchups as always. You actually became so ridiculously good at building in such a short time it’s ridiculous. Fucking don AF. PS why the fuck aren’t you coming to worlds
bro fist: Probably the battler I look up to the most. I’m so glad you came out of retirement to play this year. Having you on the team was awesome and in some ways was everything i’d hoped for in SPL, as I got to watch you think and analyze your games and your approach to the game in general. The record you had this year doesn’t really tell the story. I know half of the things I said had you thinking ‘oh god I hope he’s trolling’ but i guess that’s what happens when you’re a grandpa. thanks for watching over us :D
PDC: Congrats on having the best SPL+WCOP record of 2015! you’ve grown into a dominant force as evidenced by your awesome team tour and smogon tour runs this year. I’m really happy to have been on the same team as you this time. I’m glad you finally got over your penchant for alakazam and your crippling volc weakness. you shaped up just in time for finals. By virtue of going 3-0 in round 1 you pretty much saved our asses so fucking mad props especially in that game against the french guy, I’d have killed myself and timed out for sure in that kind of battle.