i thought it'd be fun to do a quick lookback at my initial predictions of the teams from w1 and see how close to the truth i got. i'll be doing flamenco shoutouts in another post so dont look for them here.
also please note all that aside from a few statistical amendments, everything below was written prior to the flamencos' elimination.
the teams
sakuras
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50% success ratio on this one. the SS core that i doubted oh so much ended up being the only successful part of tuthur's draft. i admittedly underestimated louna, and, no disrespect to the team's achievement intended, i also overestimated the rest of the ss pool.
what i did get right, albeit perhaps by luck, was placing this team at the bottom of my pr. in fact, by reaching -12 differential they have become statistically the worst zupl team of all time, joint with the tcb basculins from the first ever zupl.
was it a lack of support that caused this? poor piloting? truthfully i can't tell, their sm was underwhelming in large part due to predictably subpar builds that come with bad support but the bulk of their disappointing results came from oras and below. i won't pretend my experience building and testing these slots in this zupl has resulted in more than a very basic understanding of the tiers... though it is incredibly funny to me that such a staunch bw supporter (tuthur) ended up with a 0-7 slot.
stunkys
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im trying to be less antagonistic so i'll just leave it at this: i hate everything about this philosophy. it's the opposite of everything a team tour should represent.
...with that out of the way, i once again nailed this prediction. my one oopsie was thinking ho3n would not contribute teams at all, as i recall was the case when he drafted me in a prior team tour.
from w1 through to w6 the stunkys went 5-3 or 3-5. in weeks where their carry slots pulled through, they won the week, and in weeks where they didn't, the team took a harsh loss. the team has now narrowly eked into playoffs almost entirely due to ho3n's impressive 8-0 record.
"ho3n forgot you need to win 5 games a week and spent all of his money on 4 players,"
cut me some slack and make it 5 players - i forgot roxiee, probably because it's bw.
"[ho3n] in my experience has 0 presence in team chats"
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yep.
to his credit, ho3n is supplying 3 SS teams every week and building for himself, which is a lot of work. on the other hand, i'm informed that the server is quiet as a fart in space, possibly by design.
as stated above, this team only made it to playoffs on the back of ho3n's 8-0 record and i personally believe it'd be way more successful if the team chat was active, but it's impossible to say beyond gut instinct.
his managing style does not work for me at all, nor others i have talked to in the past - but it clearly works for others, and the person who supplied the above screenshot has gone on record saying they consider ho3n a good manager.
trevenants
"i like the trevs a lot; strong pilots, good builders across the board as long as fruits can stay motivated, and some underdog potential i expect to see brought out as the tour goes on."
"while they may have above average players in every slot i dont think they have the near-guaranteed winning slot that i think the other top 4 teams do."
i was way higher on the trevs than seemingly everyone else heading in but even i didnt expect a +16, with nearly every slot somehow going positive. this is statistically the strongest zupl team of all time, breaking the +12 differential record previously set by the first iteration of the fiery flamencos in the first ever zupl. to be honest i have no idea how they've been so consistent. it's pretty likely they'll be facing butterfrees in the finals - they already lost to them in w7 but i understand this was with a 'b team' roster. could go either way!
i also like a lot of the people on this team so i wont pretend im not biased when i say i hope it's them winning.
only thing i got wrong is beauts; they are historically put on awful teams and this one ended up being good enough that they didnt have to drop 20k lines in the discord and carry the whole team. props!
shiinotics
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LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
yeah aside from that detail i got this one extremely wrong. the shiinotics put in work. for some reason i missed mz in the lineup entirely but yeah of course he'd pop off with lpy support and completely ruin my prediction post. it's not remotely surprising in retrospect, so that's my bad. as for the rest of the prediction, i didn't recognise enough of the oldgen pool at the time but they've overall been decent. the roster is just as boring to me as it was when i first made my prediction so i don't really have much else to say except i was wrong. at least i was right about their ss.
butterfrees
"in my mind the success of [the butterfrees] hinges on how well drud understands the current ss zu meta, and on how much jett truly cares about this tour after hanging on the cusp of burnout for what seems like years at this point. most of the team appears to be self sufficient"
another great prediction from me. old gen slots were self sufficient and collectively have gone very positive, while ss took up a modest but still respectable 10-11 which i bet is in no small part thanks to jett.
beheyeems
"[beheeyems] may just be the easiest team to predict in the tour, with an array of consistently ok builders and consistently ok players"
"i don't think there will be any huge losing streaks in this team, but i also don't expect any of these players to pop off. i hope they can prove me wrong."
another 50% success rate in my eyes. overall the team was below average, with a -10 overall and only one player grabbing more than 3 wins across 7 weeks, but wow ninja popped off in ss so props to him i for sure got proven wrong on that one.
sm vs bw
100% accurate prediction from me. hahahaha what a relief we didn't do 2 bw slots.
the expansion
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this is going to be a controversial one so i saved it for the end. too late to back out now, fool.
there was a lot of external pressure to move zupl to 8 teams - some people like lily argued it was a good time for zu to capitalise on the "new blood" gained from the bw money tour and from the heightened interest that naturally comes from offering a custom avatar as a prize. many more people arguing in favour of 8 teams did not necessarily believe it was viable but were instead just wanted btboy to get an admittedly overdue managing position and weren't subtle about it.
we're now nearing playoffs, and i feel confident in saying "hee hee hoo hoo, told you so". diplomatically of course.
the current generation is as always, and perhaps incorrectly, assumed to be easiest for new players to slot into. many players who would not have been drafted under the 6 team system were put into ss slot 2 and or 3.
breakers in ss zu are universally crap at breaking through on their own due to poor matchup into extremely common defensive pokemon (sawk into palossand, exeggutor into articuno, etc.), so instead a lot of teams are being built to use toxic, sludge bomb, or knock off as their primary form of progress; rapidash, klinklang, thwackey, tangela, skuntank being a few notable examples.
without naming names it is very evident to me that a chunk of the ss pool is not familiar with this style of play and as a result the quality of the games was overall a huge dive compared to last year (im speaking purely from memory tbf maybe it was just as bad).
even outside of these semi-stall games, i saw players from
multiple teams load up HO or cheese with a 6-0 matchup only to inexplicably fumble the bag in the worst ways imaginable. some of these games were glorified coinflips and only served to muddy the results of an otherwise reasonable zu tour, and as a result i don't believe that we were successful in raising the stock of zupl to that of other team tours.
feel free to argue with each other as much as you'd like over this one. i decided to try and gauge the public opinion and it was extremely unhelpful because everyone had different opinions, ranging wildly from an unnamed manager's "it was very manageable in the end" to an unnamed top builder and player's "it was even worse than i expected".
the future
Cursed Trevenants vs Lucky Stunkys
To Pimp A Butterfree vs Shiiny Shiinotics
Cursed Trevenants vs
To Pimp A Butterfree