Now that the Alliance Tournament is over, I wanted to take a step back and look at the teams that competed, and how everything came through.  I really want to do a long-term stat breakdown to better analyze the teams (it is my sport of choice after all), but in the meantime, this will just be my impressions and my picks for this year.

If you haven’t watched the finals yet, I am going to spoil some things – you have been warned.

In the first weekend, I mentioned how good L A Z E R H A W K S looked and they did not disappoint, making it to the undefeated bracket finals before being knocked down by VYDRA RELOLDED.  They were really fun to watch, and had a surprisingly strong grasp of the late-tournament metagame – their execution of the tinker vs octodad was almost good enough, and I think a lot of people took note of that.

HYDRA RELOADED, of course, was my favored team, and they spent the entire tournament in the elimination bracket.  Interestingly enough, they played two games fewer than the maximum number of games in the tournament because they were knocked down on the first weekend and made it all the way to the grand finals.  The two games they “missed” were only because they swept their two best-of-three matches (against L A Z E R H A W K S and Northern Coalition.)  Even with the number of matches that they played, they continued to play the meta and out-execute almost everyone they came up against, which was super-cool; they were always fun to watch.

Finally, while HYDRA RELOADED was wrecking the elimination bracket, VYDRA RELOLDED was blasting through the undefeated bracket.  They were another execution-based team, and it was good to see them roll through.  Their particular execution of octodad was really cool, and their Drake/Navy Drake take was really cool (if only because it came out of nowhere), and reminded me of the Vargur comps of HUN RELOADED from ATX and the Golems of Asine Hatama’s Team from the New Eden Open.  While I admit to not predicting them in the Grand Finals against HYDRA RELOADED, they performed quite well, and, of course, took the championship.

Overall, I really liked the octodad setup and it was neat to see the variations on that theme throughout the last weekend.  While I was routing pretty hard for L A Z E R H A W K S and HYDRA RELOADED, it’s cool to see a new face at the top end, so congrats again to VYDRA RELOLDED.