(8)Marvel vs. Capcom 2 vs (9)New Super Mario Bros. Wii 2010

Ulti's Analysis
This was one of the first round's most entertaining matches, and it featured one of the biggest (at least publicly) rallies of the entire contest.

Though the brackets and battle were evenly split here, Board 8's love for Nintendo caused the experts to massively favor Mario. And why not? IT'S FREAKING MARIO.

And early on, the theory was doing just fine. The match was of the decently close 52-48 variety, but Mario was winning comfortably and the idea of Mario winning a close day match was impossible. But after about an hour, Mario had a 300 vote lead and MvC2 sliced 100 off of it in 10 minutes. Mario would eventually recover and keep building its lead at a fairly steady pace, but that was just a random blip, right? Surely a tournament-favored 2D fighter wouldn't make noise against a Mario game in a day match, right?

That's, as Chris Berman would say, why they play the games.

Mario's lead peaked around 400, but then the ASV hit and the weirdest thing happened. MvC2 started stalling, if not cutting votes little by little. It stayed like this for hours, right through the early ASV much to everyone's surprise.

Then SRK started rallying for Marvel, and you know what happened from there. I won't link to the graph since it'll be in a picture on the wiki, but the SRK rally made all the difference in this match. 2000 vote swings don't happen often in 12 hour matches, and other than Zelda late it was the most effective rally all contest. Even more impressive was this rally was effective against FREAKING MARIO. I know Mario always wins the close matches late, but this may be the closest thing we get to Mario's clutch not kicking in.

This match was murder for battle brackets, as many many people had long streaks end on this match, and it also wrecked the guru. But that's what happens when you doubt OUT the DAT TOP OPTION. More relevantly, this match shows you how little respect the Wii brand is worth on GameFAQs these days.