LogFAQs > #914497819

15.



I bet it's hard for people who weren't here to understand just what the big deal was with this match. A character was overrated -- so what?

First of all, the pre-contest portion of 2005 basically discussed two things and only two things: Mario/Samus and the Devil Division. Between Vincent, Squall and Magus, there was a ton to fight over. There were also those who had Terra, Dante, Kerrigan, etc but we'll ignore those for this writeup. Most people didn't really trust anyone here, but probably 70% of the brackets had Magus winning the division.

Magus had an incredible amount of hype going into the 2003 contest, his debut. Some people thought he was better than Crono. Some thought he could give Link a fight. He basically did as expected on Link, but he did beat Ganondorf. Not by a lot, though, and people thought he would walk all over Ganon. Magus probably overperformed because of his status as the next elite character and he put up a pretty decent number on Link. There are only a dozen or so guys who could legit hold Link under a doubling, maybe less. Magus was basically Vincent before Vincent. That was his rep.

Except, he had these cracks in his resume. If you ask me what I know about Luca Blight, I'll say that he didn't put up a big enough number on Magus and that's about it. The same goes for Sam Fisher. I don't even know what their performance was at this point but I heard it so much during 2005 that it's etched into my memory. People thought he was overrated as in, he might lose to Squall. But nobody thought he could fall to freaking Knuckles.

This match started and Magus was ahead and looked okay.. 58% at the freeze was underwhelming, but he'd survive. Then the :10 update came and everyone went nuts. He dropped another percent, and another percent, and soon he was under 55 with the whole day to go. Everyone knew what was about to happen and the board just ripped at the seams. Magus stopped gaining by 2am, lost the lead by morning and ended up down by almost 2500 votes. He ended up getting it under 2000 by the end. 100% of the Gurus picked Magus in this match. 100% in the oracle too. A ton of people felt vindicated, but they picked Magus too. Everyone had Magus winning this. Everyone.

So what happened? Well, Magus was overrated in 2003. But the bigger problem was 2004. He was fed to Crono in 04. He also got frozen out of the villain contest in 2005, where he likely would have gotten exposed by Ganondorf or Bowser, or even some of the earlier round guys who weren't going to beat him but would have cast some doubt on him. We just didn't have enough data on Magus. Everyone assumed he was great, but CT fell off in 05 and he dipped just enough for Knuckles to pull it off.

As for Knuckles, he had a huge bandwagon form behind him and overperformed on Squall. Even to this day, whenever I think of Knuckles I have to think about Magus. This one rattled one of our best contests and is remembered with clarity a decade plus later. It also shook people's confidence in the stats which is a whole other topic that we'll get to.
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xyzzy