When the Melee community thought that the competitive year was over, Red Bull surprised C9|Mang0 with a tournament in Toronto, Canada to celebrate his birthday! With the announcement only a month prior to the event, top players and friends still managed to travel to Canada to compete. The tournament was surprisingly stacked, making it a last minute major. HugS and Lucky were amongst the competitors and they're giving their view on their brackets and the tournament as a whole.

Mang0’s Birthday Bash was a success! With a stacked roster, incredible venue and a reasonably timed bracket, it’s been praised across the board. Did you enjoy the tournament and what were the highlights for you?

Lucky: The venue was great, Toronto is a great place to go to. It's always a good time, no matter what. Whenever you throw a tournament there and you have great TO's running it, it's usually going to be a good time. Inside the tournament and outside the tournament.

HugS: Toronto is one of my favourite cities, so I was really looking forward to being there, especially to celebrate a good's friend's birthday. It reminded me of Genesis but smaller, so it was easier to hang out with all the homies, without losing track of them. Genesis has all the homies that show up but the event is so big, we end up splitting up but at this, because it was small enough, everyone ended up doing the same thing every night.





Lucky, you placed just outside of top 8 at 9th place. There was some great wins in your run, including Shroomed and fellow Dignitas partner, HugS. Can you talk us through your matches with Shroomed and HugS and what you feel went well in these matches?

Lucky: When I think about the Shroomed set, it was pretty funny, since for the most part, I was mostly scared of playing his Sheik. I've been playing the Marth matchup a lot recently so I really wasn't worried about his Marth at all. He also doesn't play an 'up to date' Marth style. Playing against his Marth was just really familiar as I've grown up playing against that style. Against HugS, it was kind of like uhhhh...



HugS: You bodied me *laughs*

Lucky: *laughs* I don't want to say easy but I've been playing a lot against Prince Abu and KZhu. I've actually been doing off stream practice for the first time in my entire life and I've been doing that every other night. I think I've been getting a lot more patience and a lot more of a confident play style, to be close enough to whiff punish stuff but far enough to be able to force floaties to approach me. I'm pretty excited to play any floaties player at the moment.





You eventually fell to Hax$, who pulled a huge upset on Hungrybox, and Norwalk friend, S2J. Can you talk us through the matches that you had with Hax$ and S2J and what you feel went well and why you ultimately feel you couldn’t jump over the final hurdle to clinch the sets?

Lucky: I swear to god, this happens to me every time, and I need a babysitter since I don't pay attention to bracket stuff enough. I finished my pool and I asked the pool TO when my bracket matches were going to start and they told me '3pm'. I had a call from the head TO at 2:30pm telling me that I was about to be DQ'd and they were holding up for me as long as they could. I was literally heading to the venue at 2:30pm to start warming up but then I had to jump straight on stage, and once I beat them, I had to get offstage and they gave me five minutes. I had only five minutes before I had to play Hax. I had borderline no warmup for Hax.

Really unfortunate, I think I still I played great but it wasn't the ideal circumstances that I wanted to play that guy so I can't really say much about it, other than I'm looking forward to play him again. With S2J, I think we play a lot, and we used to be really good training buddies so we have a good idea of each other's styles. We tend to make more hard reads against each other and so, since I recently had a big win on Wizzy, I made bad choices against S2J, in terms of how I thought he would play. He did a 180 on me, changed some stuff up and it really caught me off guard. Which sucks because it was still a close set so I feel like if I went into it, just open minded more so than thinking 'this is what Johnny should do', I probably would have had a better time. Unfortunate because of how close it was. I'm not too worried about it I'm excited to play him again and I have to hold the loss for now.





HugS, you placed 17th, beating Sevan and Inky in your losers’ run in Phase 2. Can you talk us through these matches and why you feel they went well for you?

HugS: Not to be disrespectful, but I don't think they were on my level. I think I just outclassed them in general. I don't feel like they were close. They were good enough to get there, for sure. They weren't going to deal with that I was doing.





You fell to up-and-comer Soonsay and fellow Dignitas partner Lucky. Can you talk us through these matches and why you feel that you couldn’t quite seize the win?

HugS: With Soonsay, I think he's a really good up-and-comer. Usually, when I play a Fox from Canada that's never played a Samus, or I don't 'think' they have good Samus practice, it's usually pretty free. They go in too much. Moky is a good example, obviously he's good but he doesn't have his Samus game down. I thought Soonsay was going to be the same, who I viewed as a Canadian Fox who wasn't going to be on Moky's level, but he played way more defensively. He had a solid punish game and he was willing to drag it out.

It was a two out of three, so I didn't have the opportunity to catch onto his style as much as I would like. With the first game gone, I have to deal with his counterpick on the third so it becomes hard to bring it back after going down that way. He's very good so I think he earned it, straight up. With Lucky, a little bit more of the same. He's been practising and getting better. I've just been through another move and I haven't had a setup to practice on. Dealing with the move in general and trying to keep my stream up in the middle of all this madness. My stuff still hasn't been shipped to me, so I'm not able to do my job in many different ways.



Lucky: In other words, he was outclassed. *Laughs*





What was your favourite sets to play, and why?

HugS: For me, it was Soonsay. I thought Soonsay was a lot of fun to play and it's really cool to play a new Fox who doesn't just run in. I also don't know their style too, so I get to figure out their playstyle too. It was just a really fun match against a really good Fox.

Lucky: I think my favourite set was against S2J. I know I said that there was a lot of hard reads that are made against each other, but that's part of the fun for me. Since he knows me so well, he does the same things. It's a multi layered mind game going on throughout the whole match, as opposed to a single moment. It's always a lot of fun to play that guy, especially when we're both playing good, and we were both playing good. Even though he's a weiner, and he said that he wasn't playing good immediately after on Twitter. He was playing fantastic, I was just pushing him to the limit.





What were your favourite sets to watch, and why?

HugS: For me, once again, it's Mang0 vs Zain. I always say their sets are my favourite but it's because Zain is such a threat to spacies. Whenever Mang0 doesn't get washed, I'm not necessarily saying he needs to win, but whenever he doesn't get washed, those two have really sick game five sets. It's really a battle of styles. Zain is really disciplined and his punish game is exactly the same most of the time and Mang0 is just a ball of fire and doing a bunch of innovative stuff during the whole match to deal with Zain's efficiency. It's a really cool battle to watch; both because they're really good and because the styles just match really well.

Lucky: I'm not really sure what my favourite set was but as a Marth main in progress and in work, that was easily my least favourite set of Zain's, when he played against Mang0. I've never seen Zain drop so many things in my life. He looked like Marth. It's funny because all of my friends, the Mang0 Nation and the homies, they're all in the crowd screaming their mouths off and I was thinking 'this is tight' but I was really pissed at the Marth play. I was furious, I saw him drop so many things. It was fantastic seeing Mang0 play great, I can agree on that. It was the opposite. You usually see Mang0 play off and Zain absolutely washes him, but Zain actually played off and Mang0 destroyed. It was cool to see the other side of the spectrum. I can't really say I had a favourite set though.





You can follow Lucky's Melee career, daily updates and stream schedule on his Twitter and Twitch. You can also follow HugS' current day-to-day life, Melee career, and stream schedule on Twitch and Twitter too!