(3)Yoshi vs (7)Pikachu 2018

Ulti's Analysis
This one just warms my heart, because there is something special for me whenever the original eight Smash Bros link up in a contest match. These two have always been pretty close in the stats, with Pikachu being slightly ahead outside of his early days of flopping. It was really, really cool to finally see them in a match together. Pikachu has been around since 2002, Yoshi since 2003, and somehow they never once fought.

Unfortunately for Yoshi, Pikachu was the favorite and he was the one Pokemon that bothered showing up in this contest. If this was Charizard, or more hilariously if it was Mewtwo, Yoshi probably wins in epic Al Michaels "HE DID WHAT?" fashion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQmyLLxRNcA

In fact if you stick Yoshi in Pikachu's spot in 2008, I'm willing to bet Yoshi makes it just as far as Pikachu did. But Yoshi is juuuuust weak enough and juuuuust unlucky enough with bracket placement to have never won a division, while being strong enough to get to round 2 or 3 every year. This one kind of blows me away, because he's the fan favorite in the Mario games and some will tell you Yoshi's Island is the best platformer ever.

Come match time, it was never really close after the first five minutes. Yoshi kept it tied until the freeze, and then got buried by Pikachu. Even had Yoshi tried coming back, the Detective Pikachu trailer launched on the day of this match. Yeah, November 12th. Detective Pikachu trailer and Pikachu gets a contest match. That's just silly and it's frankly a miracle Yoshi finished above 45% here. If GameFAQs was still alive and people cared about these contests, Pikachu probably goes above 60% on the strength of that trailer alone. I honestly wonder if Pikachu would have fallen as much as the other Pokemon had he not gotten a Ryan Reynolds movie plus meme treatment mid contest, but those are the breaks! Sometimes you just get them, not that Pikachu would have lost anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1roy4o4tqQM

One last point about this match that made it really cool. We got some more confirmation on the Nintendo hierarchy because of it, plus some stuff that happened later. More on that when the time comes.