I ended up doing really badly at WGF. I lost to Lucky in winners and Bizzarro Flame in losers. Lucky is by no means a bad loss (he ended up winning the tourney in spite of fierce competition and half a year of inactivity), but I lost really badly, which is not acceptable. Losing to Bizz in losers was weird and frustrating. Bizz is very good, but I still don't feel like ICs vs. Ganon is a match-up I should be losing provided I'm playing well. Like Peach, it's a match-up you can't afford to screw up in, and I made a few crucial tech errors and stratetic blunders that cost me severely. I think I already understand the match-up pretty well; I just need to keep my tech skill on point and my mind sharp.
As for the set against Lucky, I felt like my mind wasn't in a terrible place; I've had clearer days before, but I didn't feel like I wasn't processing information well (although my memory might be fooling me). I just made consistently bad judgment calls; I kept feeling like certain things should work (I went for lots of bad dash attacks, for example), yet they didn't. This isn't an issue with keeping my head straight, which as noted, I think it was, but just a display of poor strategic decision making, which I am disappointed about since I think I'm usually good at choosing an option that makes sense when I'm focused.
Instead of wallowing in self-pity, I'm going to reflect on the positives:
My overall consistency over the past couple years has improved dramatically. This tourney is the first time since around late 2010 at which I felt that I didn't uniformly live up to my usual standards. I think it's reasonable to assume that I'll continue to do fine overall and that whatever caused me to do poorly (in retrospect, probably ridiculous sleep deprivation) is very uncommon. Here's hoping for better future performances.
This game is so hard to theorize about its hard to have too much high level discussion, especially since there aren't really *that* many people who play. Hopefully the guide has a good mix of stuff for all skill levels =D maybe with vid examples? Which reminds me we need a video thread.
The target audience for the guide is people who are at least somewhat well-acquainted with competitive Melee, but want to learn how to play ICs and are unsure of how to approach the character. I wouldn't describe it as being aimed at any particular skill class. Some of the information might still be nice even for people who have been playing the character for a while, although appealing to them isn't the goal since I think they can generally think for themselves and their issues probably revolve around lots of little situational data, mindset, and other very particular things, which is not the sort of thing this guide is intended to lay out (although there still will be lots of examples to drive points home).
I initially planned on the guide being strictly text since that is how I roll, but I might include some video examples. It might be hard to find clips of players displaying the sort of things I intend to discuss, especially since I don't watch videos very often, but including a few would be nice since precisely describing scenarios via text can be a pain.