Viscant is my Marvel tournament hero. To be honest, i haven’t even gotten the chance to watch all of his top 8 matches, but i’m certainly happy with the results. He was definitely ahead of the curve with Phoenix, picking her up before she started dominating indiscriminately.
players: Filipino Champ (Dormammu/Magneto/Phoenix) vs Viscant (Wesker/Iron Man/Phoenix)
observations:
The grand finals set begins at around the 53-minute mark. At this point, the strangest thing about MvC3 is how much of an equalizer Phoenix can be. It seems like no matter how far ahead one player gets, the game always ends with Phoenix vs Phoenix sans assists. My favorite moment happens at 1:03:07, when Wesker manages to convert the midscreen air bullet into a full combo against Magneto’s tag. That probably decided the final match.
game: Marvel vs Capcom 3 (Console)
venue: ReveLAtions – Grand Finals
recorded on June 12th, 2011
Congrats to Viscant! I know lots of us have been rooting for you for a while. :)
I saw this tournament streamed and these were excellent matches, very tense and heart pounding, the deciding Wesker is my favorite moment as well from the Grand Finals in particular! But at the same time I grumble at Phoenix’s centralization on the scene right now: you either have to come with an anti-Phoenix strategy to win consistently, or just use her yourself. She equalizes, but I wonder if it’s perhaps a little too well.
It’s interesting to watch “the Phoenix effect” unfold, but i agree that equalizing so dramatically is frustrating for players. I don’t think it’s good to have everything boil down to five seconds of Phoenix vs Phoenix – with the only earned advantage being one character activating X-Factor slightly later or having slightly more meter or whatever.
Phoenix is actually the #1 thing keeping me from playing right now. I’m tight on free time, and allocate my SF time to AE right now. I watched the entire vid when you posted it; after a few non-Phoenix matches, I was thinking, “this actually looks kind of interesting and fun, maybe I’ll play around with it.” By the end of the Phoenix matches, I was thinking, “I will enjoy that precisely zero. It’s just not worth it.” It’s not just the fact that it’s equalizing, but that the equalization seems random. But even if you assume the Phoenix v. Phoenix (or whoever) is pure skill and not at all random, it seems to reduce the entire 3v3 game to the Pheonix game. That just doesn’t seem fun to me.