The work behind this year's WCA was so massive... on the Thursday we had to attend a captains meeting with the King of Malaysia?
On Friday, we decided to get to the field early to scout teams. In hindsight, this may have not been the greatest idea because we had the first round bye in the afternoon pool. So, we got to the field at 10am, and didn't play our first game till 5pm. It put us on edge and we weren't really fresh for our first game against the Reapers from South Africa, who were playing great. They beat us convincingly. It made us a bit angry at each other, but we were able to use it to figure out a better game plan and play with more intensity.
We were able to win our remaining preliminary games with no team scoring more than a point against us. This put us into the top 12.
\We had to face SWAT, Xtioneers and Datis in the top 12 to make it through to top 8. We started against SWAT. They are a strong team, but it just felt as though their paint wasn't in the right places, and we were able to keep control and contain them. We beat them 4 - 1.
Next up we had Datis. We couldn't figure out an answer to their snake side until it was too late, and they beat us pretty convincingly.
This left us to face Xtioneer to safely progress to the top 8. Xtioneer had Markus Nielsen from USA on their team. The first point came to a 1 on 1, but after that I felt we'd adapted to their game and we were able to beat them 4 - 0.
This secured our spot in the top 8. We had to face off against Nemesis from Malaysia to get through to top 4. Nemesis is a good team, I had seen them play in MPOC earlier in the year. Our game plan was working and we were shooting the right lanes... we beat them also 4 - 1.
Same as last year, we had to verse Datis to make it to the playoff for 1st and 2nd. They came out strong and got to 3 - 0 against us. We adjusted our game plan and started coming at them, and we were able to bring the score to 2 - 3. We went into the next point with 50 seconds on the clock to tie it up at 3 - 3. We pushed as hard as we could, it it was looking good with Luke on their side of the field, but we just didn't have enough time and went down to Datis.
This left us to playoff for 3rd and 4th against Infernal from Thailand. Infernal gave us a beating earlier in the year in Thailand, so we wanted to get it back from that. I think that counteracted being a little deflated with not playing off for the championship. So we were able to win 4 - 1.
That left us with 3rd for WCA again, and 2nd place for the PALS series.
We had so much support from our sponsor Dye at this event. All our gear was on point! And WASP gave us so much help.
We also placed 4th in the Intercontinental Cup; TonTon's won, then Ironmen, Datis, then us.
