| abstract
| - After putting up a percentage that is typically only seen by high midcarders and near-elites, Altair was looking GOLDEN for this Round 2 throwdown, and the Oracle predictions show it. Duke was also looking great to advance, as Marth had beat him by an unconvincing margin and Lucario, pathetic as he is, was definitely going to hold him back. But we soon saw that Lucario nearly getting upset by Isaac was no fluke, and Altair's 43%+ didn't mean as much as it first appeared when stacked up against characters that actually have a fanbase. It also couldn't hurt that Duke drew all the picture in the match pic and him winning was starting to be embraced as a fad by half the board, but if Duke ever put up those kind of numbers we'd be suspect from the get-go. What ensued what was in retrospect a pretty close match, although not recognizing the potential of Altair's day vote at first made it deceptive. The board did its darndest to keep Marth over Duke in the initial surge, but the power of Lucario-lovers was too much and he was immediately dragged down to earth. Altair was apparently bombing though, so it seemed he was safe to advance. And that thinking lasted all of one update, as Marth just fell off the face of the earth and Altair surged ahead, taking the lead and just not letting go. Duke had a killer night vote on the lot of them, though, and by morning had built himself a practically insurmountable lead. Altair had a go of it, however, and ended less than 1000 votes away from Duke by the end. That retrospective closeness would only underscore the most important thing - Duke had somehow yet again pulled an extraordinary upset and beaten a big favorite for the win. Considering this is the guy who was getting put up as a 16 seed milk carton against Cloud and was thought to have left these contests for good, that's really saying something. For the board's part, we could at least exhale - this weird ass half-division was finally done, and neither of the competitors had put up the numbers to give confidence in beating Zack. We were sort of ignoring the fact that Duke and Altair escaping gave most of us ZERO points in our brackets but, eh, details. Lastly, I'll save one last cringe for Marth. How do you let the equivalent of Isaac get 40% on you? Marth's strength is either much more suspect than I thought, or he somehow let Lucario rSFF him. And if the latter case is true, that means that somehow one of the elite top tier characters of SSBM, fan-favorite in both games, is somehow lower on the totem pole than a Brawl-only nobody. Neither reflects well on the pantsless one.
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![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)