How do you guys feel about Ness btw? I've heard him called bottom tier a whole lot, but there were so many amazing Nesses in this tourney. Was really cool to see.
IMO, the top 5 Nesses are Stereo, Boiko, Akhi, Tetra, and myself. You can leave me or keep me on the list--i don't care.
At this tournament and at BL, we had 3/5 of those Nesses in attendance, as well as Mr. Grin and Reyn Time who are pretty respectable at Paragon and BL. The Nesses that succeeded both played exceptionally AND were to some extent bracket blessed. I don't mean bracket blessed in the sense that they had free brackets--I don't think there is a free bracket for Ness. But they both mostly played semi fast fallers, fast fallers, or heavy regular fallers which all run the gamete of characters Ness has stuff against.
IMO, Ness v Lucario, Ness v Fox, and Ness v Diddy are all somewhere between 55-45 and 60-40s against Ness, which honestly isn't that bad in comparison to matchups he has against disjointed characters, swordies, floaties. These are also the types of matchups where a lack of character knowledge gets you boned.
WHen you get a chance, I recommend watching SK v IPK. StereoKidd in that first set was winning neutral A LOT. Honestly, way more than in high level Ness v anyone should ever play out. And SK, being a god, made IPK really eat **** for it. I don't know what happened, but somewhere in set 2, Pooch told IPK "dude, just camp in shield when he jumps" and suddenly nothing SK was doing was working in neutral. He still ahd the punish game to make a statement, and if he had better edgeguarding, he might have taken a game or two or the set. But in general, we saw rapid adaption.
It's to be expected when you have 3/5 top Nesses at an event, good stuff is going to happen. But your brackets matter a lot as well. Luckily for boiko and SK, they were both playing in peak shape AND they had doable matchups. In SK's case, he was assisted by a bit of matchup unfamiliarity against IPK and he severely outplayed him.
But IMO StereoKIDD still way outplayed his competition, and if Ness was balanced, he'd be unequivocally considered a top 5-10 player in the world.