Celestial Tournament: Eighth Round Pairings Released

The pairings for the eighth and final round (for me, anyway) of the Celestial Tournament aren't up on the official site yet but you will find them here. There's the ubiquitous thread over at TGH but it just points to the PnH site so I'll skip the middleman. Also check out the note at the bottom which leads to a wiki-fied consolidation of the tournament's rules and addendum by my OoX guildie Zeurst aka Mr. Pepe.

Good on him but on to the matches:

Reign of Xen [XoO] 2-5, 6 points (Region: America) challenges Society of the Dragon [?] 2-5, 6 points (Region: America)

The official standings have yet to be updated but I'll be using them anyway. RoX and the Society are pretty close in them – 162 and 170 through 7 rounds respectively. Since they both lost last round, that shouldn't be much changed. So, this might actually be a pretty fair match. If it's actually played. You see, I finally figured out why I hadn't been hearing much about RoX on the XoO grapevine; turns out they've been having problems getting even 6 people on in order to compete. We'll have to see but I hope they can pull it together for one more game.

Xen of Onslaught [XoO] 4-3, 12 points (Region: America) challenges Thrill of Victory [tV] 4-3, 12 points (Region: Europe)

Ouch. The Mothership pulls yet another high ranked opponent. [tV] oscillates between the low 100s to high 200s on the ladder and they currently sit at 126th with 1121 rating – averaging nearly a point per game – which looks to be around their true ranking. They lost last round but before that they were in the 70s in the official standings with a 4-2 record. So, a pretty good team. XoO is going to have their hands full. They won last round through judicious use of Default Spike and since this is a European opponent, it might happen this time around too but you never know.

However, such a strong opponent does open the door for OoX to take the XoO tournament crown. It's going to be a bit lame what with the 3 forfeits and all but, actually, the Mothership's had just as many no shows as we have, they just haven't gotten as many points out of them. So, does OoX's opponent give us a decent shot at a win?

Onslaught of Xen [XoO] 4-3, 12 points (Region: America) challenges I Chosen I [FeW] 4-3, 12 points (Region: Europe)

Oh fuck yes.

The Chosen [FeW] (And, yeah, I have to give them some props for the name) have been hovering around the 500~600 rank mark on the ladder and currently have 1025 rating. They won their last round and before that were 125th in the official standings (just one in front of XoO Main and four in front of OoX). They haven't played nearly as many games as OoX, though, with only 130 or so to our 200 (Main, by the way, has played nearly 500.). As I've said before OoX wavers between the 500 and 1000 rank, 1000~1020 rating mark ourselves. We're currently trending upwards and based on the strength of our tournament statistics and our last win, I'd say this is a fairly even fight. And, you know, I haven't seen much of I Chosen I yet but I like our chances.

The fallback is 2GMT on the 28th or Tuesday night our time. Not exactly the best time but the quick turnaround with these pairings means we might be able to schedule things and avoid another round of ClockWay ftw. I'm psyched for this one – we actually have a chance to finish above .500 and in the top half of the tournament bracket which would be a pretty good accomplishment for my group.

Elsewhere in the tournament, there's going to be some interesting matches, too. [QQ], for one, is in real danger of not making the final 16 even if, depending on how the tie-breakers shake out, they win this round. Their fight against Save the Dolyaks might be one to keep an eye on. And [iPod] seems to be a rising up and comer and they're going to square off against [iQ]. And [EW]/[MH] is going to be a throwdown. Even better, it's going to determine which team takes the #1 overall seed in the elimination rounds. At the very least, we're sure to get a good match report out of it. The real drama is going to be in the 15 point team games, as those are the ones fighting to get into the round of 16 and it's probably going to come down to the tie-breakers. Fan-freaking-tastic.