HoaS Chapter V: New Rivalries

Early 2003 was an extremely exciting time to be a competitive Smasher. Going to a tournament in those days was a thrill: although a few players began to stand out, there was no established hierarchy of skill, and anybody could beat anybody else. Additionally, there was no tier list in place, and many characters were still very underdeveloped, so tournaments seemed wide open for anyone to make waves.

For H2YL, though, we were still humbled by our recent defeats at the hands of DYCE and more recently Chu. Adding Chu to our crew, however, made for even better training, and with no tournaments for the first half of 2003 we did nothing but practice. It was hard to gauge how much we were levelling up since we were only playing against each other, but all we could do was grind and wait for our chance at revenge against DYCE.

As for me personally, I began hitting a plateau in early 2003 with Sheik, and I started to get frustrated with my performance. I was frequently at the bottom of the pack when it came to H2YL practice fests, and I was struggling to find a way to improve. One night I went to Azen’s house on my own and we practiced extensively, and Azen had a suggestion which ended up changing my Smash career forever.

“Why not try a different character?” Azen said after disposing of my Sheik for the 20th time in a row. At first I brushed off the idea, thinking I had already put too much time into Sheik to drop her. I eventually gave it a shot, though, realizing that he had a good point: my skills with Sheik were stagnating, and starting fresh might allow me to break the skill barrier I had encountered.

I messed around with a few different characters, including Young Link and Peach among others, but in the end I settled on Azen’s personal recommendation of Fox. Once I really dedicated myself to playing Fox, I fell in love with the character. His natural speed made up for my shoddy tech skill, and he had many tools which Sheik didn’t. Although he wasn’t yet established as a top tier, I noticed that my improvement with him was incredibly rapid, and I decided to drop Sheik to focus on Fox.

Mild also decided to make a change, as his Falco was falling behind, and ironically he switched to my former main of Sheik. Since he had probably the worst tech skill in our crew, Sheik suited him much better, and he also began to improve after the character switch. Anden and Jtanic stuck to their mains of Jigglypuff and Samus, respectively, and Azen and Chu continued to use several different characters and dominate the rest of our crew. Slowly but surely, however, Azen would pull ahead of Chu and regain his spot as the uncontested best of the crew.

As we continued training, we anxiously awaited an opportunity to face our rivals DYCE again, and finally in July 2003 that opportunity came with an event called the DC area Super Smash, or DCSS. Once we knew another tournament was on the horizon, we amped up our training even more, determined not to let DYCE take us down again.

This time, our training paid off in a big way. To our surprise, the 6 month training period without any tournaments had elevated our games beyond anyone else in the area. I 3 stocked Derrick’s Sheik with my Fox, and the rest of H2YL dominated as well, aside from Jtanic who couldn’t attend. Only Anden faltered, beginning a trend of uncharacteristically bad losses in tourney as he lost to a Marth player a few rounds into the tournament. The rest of us breezed through our brackets, taking out several DYCE members along the way, and the top 4 ended up being all H2YL: Azen, Chu, myself and Mild. I ended up in 3rd place, losing to Chu’s Jigglypuff in a hilarious match on Poke Floats where I fell right through Seel, now a commonly known glitch but a complete shock at the time. Nevertheless, I was thrilled with my best tournament performance to date and so was the rest of the crew. We had demonstrated complete dominance of our region in just one tournament, and we were ecstatic about the outcome.

This continued a month later when Jtanic held another tournament at his house. This time I made a much better bracket, and we implemented double elimination, thankfully avoiding any of the issues that plagued the last tournament we ran. The top 5 was Azen, Anden, Jtanic, Mild and I in that order, out of 40+ entrants, including DYCE. H2YL had basically swept two straight MD/VA tournaments: the rivalry with DYCE was basically over, and H2YL had come out on top.

The community had a strong culture of trash talk at the time, and with our newfound dominance we made no attempts to be humble. We let everyone know we were the best around, and it was up to them to prove otherwise. I recall a newer Roy player by the name of NEO claiming I had a “generic Fox” online. He came to a fest shortly thereafter and once I destroyed him in repeated friendlies, he told me “you don’t have a generic Fox Chillin.” We were starting to get respect from the community, at least locally, as the players to beat.

However, we weren’t the only ones establishing ourselves as a force to be reckoned with. A group of Smashers from New York City were starting to make the case on Smashboards that they were the best players around. Led by Wes’ Samus and Dave’s Falco, they talked plenty of trash online, and we responded with our own trashtalk. We had finally found a new rivalry to replace DYCE: enter Deadly Alliance.