LogFAQs > #947936890

Division 4 Round 1: L-Block, Meta Knight, Ryu, and the Duck Hunt Dog

L-Block - 44325 [31.81%]
Meta Knight - 31510 [22.61%]
Ryu - 43990 [31.57%]
The Dog - 19519 [14.01%]
Total Votes - 139344

If you look in the wayback machine, you'll think most people wanted L-Block to come out in 2008 and get destroyed. This is simply not the case. It was a mixed reception, with a lot of people fully on the joke train that year. A lot of people were rooting against the repeat, but a lot of others either wouldn't have minded a repeat or were only rooting against the block because they wanted something else -- the Duck Hunt dog, the Weighted Companion Cube, the Sandbag from Smash Bros, CATS, Hogger, your sister's ass, the pony express, et al -- to take the bandwagon title.

This was a <i>heavily</i> debated match pre-contest, with almost all of the arguing revolving around the defending champ. It was early in joke trend world, but Board 8 was wise to it early. We all knew that L-Block would fall off a bit (though nothing like what we'd see in the future with Draven), plus this poll also featured another joke all-star with the Duck Hunt dog. So L-Block had two huge things working against it; the novelty wearing off, and a basset hound potentially syphoning off a bunch of votes right in the first match. Jokes winning require the bandwagon effect, and for those rooting against L-Block, the potential existed for him to lose early in this contest.

The issue, of course, was whether or not Ryu and Meta Knight were tough enough to pull it off. As someone who both picked against L-Block and would have loved to see him win the contest again, I can explain the logic here well enough. I thought L-Block would have the typical joke trend fallout the following year, and didn't think there was a chance he'd come back with any strength. Ryu has a very consistent contest guy over the years, which is why we all picked him to get first place.

The wild card was Meta Knight. Kirby games have never been strong on here, but they also aren't why Kirby himself has contest strength. You can thank character design and Smash Bros for that, which thanks to BrawlFEAR Meta Knight had in spades. He actually made the contest in 2007 pre-Brawl, and though he finished a <i>distant</i> second, he did advance into round 2. With Brawl at his back, with L-Block anti-bandwagon at his back, with the Nova Scotia bloodhound dalmation beagle basset duck tolling short haired pointer retriever stealing joke votes, I truly thought we would see Ryu > Meta Knight > L-Block (close third place) > goodest boy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_asNhzXq72w

Yeah we screwed that one up pretty bad, folks. In fairness, most people thought this was going to be Ryu > L-Block, but even those folks dropped the ball. That's because L-Block, at least early on in this contest, showed no signs whatsoever of slowing down from its 2007 pace. When this poll started, Ryu and L-Block not only left Meta Knight and the dog in the dust, but L-Block showed off its joke trends all over again. It <i>dominated</i> the early voting of this poll even in the face of an anti-bandwagon, and this led to a lot of chicken little junk all over Board 8. There's nothing we can do, L-Block is going to steamroll all over again, and blah blah blah. You guys know I love my rallies and joke trends, so I was loving every second of the early going.

Seeing L-Block going nuts for the second year in a row... that. That puts a smile on my face. It sucked seeing Meta Knight and one good boy getting sacrificed for it, but it was a small price to pay for salvation. It looked early on as if we would get a simple L-Block > Ryu result, but then joke trends took over and L-Block started falling off. We ended up having a very good fight for first place here that would have been the stuff of legends were it an actual 1v1 match in a legitimately formatted contest. Can you imagine if L-Block was defending its title in a 1v1 match and Ryu gave it the duel we saw here?

This is why I don't like 4way formats. We had this epic fight for first, and it meant dick. L-Block and Ryu would both advance anyway, so outside of point order and bragging rights, the actual result meant nothing. It's why it took me 12 years to bother writing this, because when epic fights for second place mean more than epic fights for first, your format sucks. That said, this was a hell of a match to watch, and the explosion on the forums was amazing. There was <i>so much whining</i> about L-Block, and it was great.

As for the match, Ryu chopped off a 550 vote lead overnight, and then did his best impersonation of rubberband AI for 16 hours. You know how when you're playing Mario Kart or Madden and the AI gets more difficult as you get more ahead of it? That was Ryu in this match. The more L-Block pulled ahead, the tougher Ryu got. But then he would catch up, and just.... die. Then L-Block would pull ahead and it would start all over again. He came back from a 550 vote deficit overnight, died, and fell behind by 620. Then the ASV hit, Ryu won it, he came back, died again, and fell behind by 450. Ryu started coming back <i>again</i> when the second night vote hit, but then the poll ended.

If this format wasn't garbage, we'd be talking about a great duel, L-Block outlasting Ryu, and what L-Block's odds were against Crono in round 2. As-is, L-Block and Ryu basically touched gloves at match's end with a gentlemen's agreement to see each other again soon. I hate it. Shadow vs Zidane and Isaac vs Lucario for distant second place should not mean more than the match we just watched. It just shouldn't, and I feel like Allen realized this after the 2009 games contest. It's just not the same as the finality of one and done. But more on that when we conclude all this up.

Meta Knight basically crapped the bed here, though one wonders if the dog being here actually hurt Meta Knight as much as it did L-Block, the latter of which got first place even <i>with</i> some factors working against him. Focus quickly turned to round 2, where we would see Crono, Amaterasu, L-Block, and Ryu all in a poll together. For those rooting against the block to repeat, they soon realized that L-Block beat Ryu with a bunch of albatrosses hanging on him. In round 2, there would be nothing to slow him down, and it led to more arguing on the board about whether or not L-Block style contestants were good for contests. People were extrapolating this huge path forward and assuming L-Block would win again, and people were also going nuts extrapolating these crazy paths for characters not yet seen in polls.

And Pikachu was just sitting there this whole time like https://static.magiquiz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Surprised-Pikachu.png

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