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Friday's ADV OU tournament was won by tournament mainstay Aqualouis. Aqualous actually came to Smogon to play tournaments, and in fact his first one (Smogon Tour 9) had him wind up in the playoffs. Mainly using offense in ADV, Aqualouis decided to switch things up and use a defensive team for most of his matches. Unlike nowadays, stall and defensive play are actually winning strategies in older generations! As part of a three-way tournament final, Aqualouis was paired up with twash, who used an Explosion team. Aqualouis was packing Gengar as a spinblocker, but failed to capitalize on the (many) free switches into Explosion. The game wound up being very balanced, coming down to a Gengar vs Gengar faceoff where Hypnosis sealed the deal for Aqualouis. Meanwhile, in the other match against Jira, Aqualouis opted for a more offensive playstyle, once again featuring Gengar with a partner in Calm Mind Suicune and other prominent offensive threats. An early Explosion from Aqualouis' Metagross against a Milotic could have clinched the match for a Suicune sweep, but Aqualouis played it safe, using Perish Song + Mean Look Gengar to instead take out five(!) members of Jira's team. Congratulations!
Administrator Bloo is quite well-known in the tournament scene. In fact, he's one of our tournament directors! Inspired by another tournament director (surprise surprise) Earthworm's "amount of success" and his friends, Bloo made his tournament debut as a Frontier Brain (and champion) of the Smogon Frontier in 2011. Putting his directing aside, Bloo entered the Smogon Tour and came up as the victor in Saturday's ADV OU round. Like most players in ADV recently, Bloo's teams for the Tour were focused around Spikes stacking and spinblocking with Gengar. However, unlike most other users, Gengar is actually Bloo's favorite Pokemon, so he's not just using it because it's popular good. After an interesting round, including a controversial calling of the quarterfinals match due to time, Bloo was paired up with current Smogon Tour leader Ojama for a final match. Switching up his team (but still using Gengar, of course), Bloo was facing a heavily physical offensive team made by Ojama. Armed with a precious Milotic, however, Bloo was able to keep Ojama's attackers at bay, but only if he took good care of it. Once Ojama's Snorlax was crippled by a Will-O-Wisp from Bloo's faithful Gengar, Milotic was safe to take on Ojama's team, including a +2 Gyarados that manged to set up. Eventually, the match came down to Ojama's +1 Tyranitar versus Milotic. On the next critical turn, Tyranitar's Rock Slide missed, allowing Milotic to KO it and Ojama's final Pokemon, Aerodactyl. Congratulations!
As the champion of Smogon Tour 14 and a veteran member of the previously SPL-winning Alpha Ruiners, McMeghan certainly has a tournament reputation to uphold. Playing since 2006, McMeghan is known for trying out several styles of battle, as well as new, interesting strategies. For most of Sunday's tournament, McMeghan was using a defensive/stall team with Spikes and Gengar, a very common ADV strategy as you can see from these finals! However, for the final match, McMeghan decided to try something new: he built a team around Articuno. Why is this? Was Articuno chosen due to its abilities to demolish the ADV metagame? Well, actually, Articuno was chosen because "it looks fucking cool", according to McMeghan. All jokes aside, Articuno makes a great phazer to complement a Spikes-stacking team. With Rest, Sleep Talk, Ice Beam, and Roar, Articuno (Crocuno?) was able to clean up most of the opponent's team. With Spikes from Skarmory and Rapid Spin blocked by the always-popular Gengar, McMeghan phazed his way to victory with his team. This final match was also recorded by user Bad Ass, who has uploaded the match to his YouTube channel. In fact, many of the final tournament matches can be found there. At any rate, congratulations to McMeghan!
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