2000 vs 1996

Ulti's Analysis
This was the first of four or five matches where people blamed the picture for the result, and frankly people really have a point here. I've avoided talking about the picture nonsense until now since it hasn't mattered, but when we finally started getting good matches in this contest, almost all of them were ruined by picture fuckery. Black Turtle or Yoblazer should be our contest winner, and instead they got screwed by Allen's insane picture policy in this contest. Every contest, Yoblazer makes an incredible upset pick that pays off. In this contest, this was the match. People kind of assumed 1996 would win this match easily; Yoblazer saw it differently, like he's done so many times in the past. And if you replace Deus Ex with Pokemon GSC in 2000's match picture, he would have been right. In a contest like this where no one really cares about years, pictures make a huge difference. Luster brought up 1995 as the ultimate example, but let's not kid ourselves. 1995 is not a strong year. 2000 is a strong year, but it wasn't given its best chance to prove it. 1996 however was given Mario 64, Mario RPG, Resident Evil, and Crash Bandicoot. That's the best possible picture 1996 could get, outside of maybe replacing Crash with Diablo 1.

All that said, there was still the actual match, and most people didn't know going in that it would be so close. Pictures weren't blamed until we were into the match, but it became obvious quickly what was going on. 2000 actually won the board vote despite being the underdog in the match, but 1996 was able to recover by the freeze. Alright, sure. It happens. But then an odd thing happened on the way to the forum, and '96 was never actually able to build up a lead overnight. It stayed virtually deadlocked with '96 having a slight lead all night long, with 2000 finally evening things up as we were heading into the morning vote.

It stayed tied all the way until 8 AM EST, and at this point the Pokemon/Zelda tag team day vote should have taken over and just steamrolled the Mario/Mario RPG combo. Except Pokemon wasn't in the freaking match picture. It didn't take long for 1996 to win the day vote and start pulling away, and even though it would only win by 424 votes, the match wasn't really that close once the morning vote hit. There was no threat whatsoever that 2000 would win this match, and when people realized this was likely entirely due to Pokemon not being in the 2000 match picture, they got really upset. Hell I'm upset just writing about this and I had 1996 winning. I like being right, but I like fairness a lot more than that and this was in no way a fair fight. It's like my Warriors winning the NBA finals in 2015 with Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving injured. Sure we technically won the title, but did we really? It wasn't a fair fight. That's where this match leaves us, and this would not be the first time where we could legitimately blame a match picture for costing an entrant a match. It leaves a bitter taste when the few good matches in a terrible contest are tainted by picture fuckery. 2000 got screwed.