I started playing Brawl for the fun of it when the game first came out. But at the time, I was too involved with college, baseball, and writing for it to matter. It was during the spring that I was officially diagnosed with a left shoulder labrum tear, which made me ineligible to play on the club team at KU. Having dedicated most of my life to the sport, I was really at a loss of what to do from there.
I actually tried to pick up playing Counterstrike 1.6 competitively again, but most of my connections were on the West Coast, so getting a good team of people I was comfortable playing with was difficult since Kansas is kind of the middle of nowhere. So I started drinking and partying and such. Living the normal college life seemed awesome, but after a while it grew boring.
I was actually hammered one night when a bunch of my friends in the dorm decided they wanted to randomly play some Super Smash Bros. I played around with Olimar and Ness at the time and had next to no knowledge of the game outside of playing N64 nonstop as a kid. But since I knew how to abuse meteor smashes, I was easily the best player. So we just started playing regularly, and it sort of built into a mini community where I was easily the best. Around that time, KU held a gift card tournament where I pretty much flattened everyone that was there. I thought I was good.
Then I watched a video of Hylian playing. This was around April of 2010. I saw this was and was instantly inspired. If you haven't noticed, up until like last week, I would always make the argument that Hylian is the best in the country. I was slightly biased though because he inspired me to take up the character. I started practicing to hopefully one day be like Hylian. But I remember reading how people were so scared to play ICs. I wanted to play into that fear and use it to my advantage.
In early June of 2010 I met Stealth Raptor, who recruited me to play with the KC area people. I had him over and I was blown away because I had never seen a Pikachu move like that before. The first time he came over, I figured that I would get my *** kicked and I would just learn from it. This mentality would serve me well for the next 6 months because I had a lot of getting my *** kicked to work through before I was even competent with the character. I met Fino and MJG in late June of 2010. This is before the time MJG was MJG the IC slayer. Again I was blown away by how they played. Out of like the 40 sets that we played, I won only a single set against Fino. They invited me to go to a tournament in July in Wichita (I suspect they wanted me to help potfill for them, but I went anyways to learn).
I played Steeler and Cook my first tournament and lost on July 10. I dropped so many grabs that tournament that it took me weeks to forgive myself. This was especially bad because at the time, the only thing I knew how to do was practice CGing with ICs. I thoroughly wanted to get better, so I started talking to some of the notable IC members on the board. Enda and Guest were especially helpful to me early on. Then I met Nathaniel (or E_Alert as you know him), and this changed absolutely everything. If ANY of you learns from anything I do from this character, it can be traced back to him. I had so many technical questions, and he always seemed to have the answer.
In August, I went to my second tourney in Denver. I met a guy named Albert there. He coached me through the tournament more or less, and since then I've always felt a level of debt towards him so I've helped whenever I could with new technical stuff. It was at this time, I kind of tricked myself into feeling that my practice had been paying off. I played Havok in pools, and took him to last hit last stock every set. At that point I thought I was starting to get good even though I was like the first man out in pools because of a tie breaker scenario in my pool. Despite not making it out of pools, I felt I was on the way to becoming great.
I wrote up a thread on IC's sliding mechanics out of shield and how to abuse that. This thread singlehandedly got me into the Smash Lab. Joining the Smash Lab more or less gave me the tools I needed to understand what I wanted about the character. At the same time, the more I learned, the worse I ended up playing. Sometimes I feel like there are two ways to be successful with this character, playing from basic knowledge or playing from full knowledge. Anywhere in between isn't going to cut it.
I thought about quitting the character when that realization hit me. Like I could play decently and even beat good people that didn't know the matchup. But I felt like we were too limited to be great, which was the opposite of how I felt when I first saw those Hylian videos so long ago. I was also frustrated because I felt like none of the ICs were trying to push the character forward. They were content to work with the limited tools we had.
After some character searching, I came back. Only when I came back, I came back with a little trick I dubbed the Lux Desync. That option single handedly pushed me from being bad to slightly above average. Around that time, Fino really took me under his wing in terms of mentoring me for competitive play. But my skill increases have primarily come out of my technical skill, and it hasn't been until recently (probably the last three months) that I'm starting to mature as a player.
I still get frustrated from time to time. I find a lot of stuff for the boards, but then nobody really implements it into their game play because it's different or worse because it's too hard. However, I met a bunch of IC mains at Pound 5 (including the IC heroes Hylian and lain) and they were all asking ME what I thought and to teach them stuff. That was probably the most reaffirming moment I've had playing Brawl where my inspirations were looking to me for inspiration themselves.
At this point, I honestly dislike playing ICs. They are so much stress and I beat myself up over all the technical mistakes along with the decisions mistakes most people worry about. I thoroughly enjoy playing Lucas so much more than I do ICs atm. But I now know how much the community looks up to my knowledge (my skype gets blown up so much when I'm afk that it's hilarious sometimes), so I play to keep advancing you guys as well as myself.
The day people stop listening to what I have to say is the day that I leave the IC boards and start working on another character for myself.
I main ICs for you guys
