Author: FaultProofBen

Gm!

I’ve mentioned a few times over the past week that WASD was hosting its first-ever tournament: 🏆 The WASD Cup 🏆

Yesterday, this much-anticipated event finally took place, as eight legendary participants battled it out in Sky Strife to win a 1/1 NFT trophy (pictured above) designed by Bushi.

Today, in a continuation of what I’m retroactively deeming “Sky Strife Week,” I’ll discuss my experience hosting and participating in the tournament.

I’ll also give a run-through of our epic finals match, which was the greatest match of Sky Strife that I’ve ever seen.

To commemorate the event, I put together a short highlight reel of the best kills from the finals and tokenized it as a free, open-edition on Zora.

If you’re interested, you can mint it below right here in this piece!

👇👇

As always, the following is my interpretation of a series of transactions.

It may or may not be correct, you’ll have to check the chain to see for yourself ;)

(Before we start, I’d recommend reading either The Bull Case for Sky Strife, The Rise of Onchain Lore, or Onchain Lore II: The Redemption of FaultProofBen if you are unfamiliar with Sky Strife and its gameplay mechanics.)

The Tournament Itself: A TLDR

Before we get into the matches, here’s some background on the logistics of the tournament.

There are four players in a Sky Strife match, and we had eight sign-up by the eve of the event.

This meant everything worked out perfectly from a tournament math perspective, as we were able to hold 🏆 The WASD Cup 🏆 in two rounds:

1. The Semi-finals, where the eight participants would compete across two simultaneous matches.

2. The Finals, where first and second place from each semi’s match would play to win the trophy.

The bracket shook out as follows:

Coordinating three total matches of a video game sounds simple enough…but you’d be surprised!

This is because of course, in typical me fashion, I ran into some logistical challenges.

For starters, I did not include a deadline for sign-ups, so we had a few people express interest the morning of who were unable to participate.

(I apologize to you all and will be sure to get you into the next WASD tournament!)

I felt bad, but learnt a valuable lesson that I figured I’d share with all the aspiring tournament organizooors who may be reading this:

INCLUDE A DEADLINE FOR SIGN-UPS.

I also planned to stream the entire event on our YouTube channel, but I’ve never streamed anything in my life before and couldn’t figure out how to get it set up the morning of.

So, any aspirations I had of making my streaming debut were rugged.

Aside from those hiccups, despite my stress beforehand, things were relatively smooth.

There were thankfully no major issues, so when the Cup began at 11:00 AM PST, everyone hopped in the voice chat in the WASD Republic Discord, and we were off!

The Semifinals

I was in the first semi-finals match…and I got rekt.

Perhaps I was distracted due to hosting the tournament, (I’ll blame it on that instead of my lack of skill) but things did not go my way from the start.

I spawned in the lower right quadrant of the map, where I began capturing mines and building up my unit armada.

I thought the match would begin with a typical “Arms Race,” or a period where everyone refrains from attacking each other while stockpiling units.

But I was dead wrong.

Shortly into the match, I was put on the defensive by Tamagucci, who had spawned above me in the upper right quadrant.

Tamagucci employed what he called a “Pillager Rush” strategy, as he sent multiple Pillagers, the unit type that can move the furthest per turn, to attack my fledgling forces.

I was completely caught off guard, and mounted a desperate counterattack.

This wound up being in vain, as within minutes my forces were overrun, and my primary settlement was destroyed.

I was the first player to lose their primary settlement, meaning that I would automatically come in last and was therefore eliminated from my own tournament.

GG.

Although I could not win, I still had some units, gold, and a secondary settlement that in hindsight, I moronically wasted resources on trying to capture.

I didn’t just want to do nothing for the rest of the match, so I used my remaining gold to spawn Pillagers and try to play spoiler by “backdooring.”

Backdooring refers to a strategy in Sky Strife where players try to sneak behind enemy lines and destroy another player’s primary settlement while they are preoccupied with fighting someone else.

I first tried to employ this sneak attack on ProofOfJake, who was in the lower left quadrant. However, he only had one unit remaining, so despite a little cat and mouse, he was able to focus his attention on me and snuff out my attack.

Eventually, towards the end of the nearly 20-minute match, I had my chance at redemption.

While 9STX (the player in the upper left quadrant) and Tamagucci’s forces clashed, I was able to strike.

I moved my Pillager up to 9STX’s territory and began to attack. 9STX soon realized this, and spawned a Pillager of their own to counter.

But they were too late.

I managed to destroy 9STX’s primary settlement mere seconds before they killed my unit, denying their ability to win the match and eliminating them from the tournament.

This meant that Tamagucci would advance to the finals along with ProofOfJake who, despite having only one unit for most of the match, had managed to win due to his primary settlement remaining largely untouched.

The Finals

Our finals match consisted of these four players positioned as follows:

• ProofOfJake in the upper left quadrant

• Tamagucci in the upper right quadrant

• IPFS (Who finished first in the other semi’s match) in the bottom left quadrant

• Lalasong (Who finished second in the other semi’s match) in the bottom right quadrant

The match saw some action early on, as ProofOfJake led a two-Pikeman assault on IPFS, who able to repel the attack.

In hindsight, this was a mistake on Jake’s part, as Tamagucci simultaneously attacked him, forcing a fight on two fronts.

Tamagucci managed to win that skirmish, destroying Jake’s base and leaving him (again) with only one unit.

Meanwhile, in the southern half of the map, IPFS and Lalasong built up their army of units and began what turned into an epic, 20-MINUTE long standoff.

The US-Soviet Cold War of the 20th century was balmy by comparison, as the two players continuously moved their forces in and out of each other territories, attempting to bait the other into making an attack.

We even saw some interesting sleight of hand employed by IPFS during this period.

At one point, Lalasong had a 9-4 unit advantage and began to move their forces towards IPFS’ primary settlement.

However, as Lalasong drew closer, IPFS spawned two units out of the blue, forcing his retreat.

Eventually, Lalasong and Tamaguci broke the ice by agreeing to a pact where the former would leave their primary settlement undefended and attack IPFS, in exchange for the latter promising not to do the same to them.

After this agreement was struck, an epic battle ensued, with IPFS and Lalasong’s forces clashing in ferocious, melee combat.

Despite having a two-unit advantage, in an epic display of skill, IPFS managed to emerge victorious, defeating Lalasong’s troops with one unit remaining.

At this point, Tamagucci abandoned the agreement and destroyed Lalasong’s primary settlement.

By the time the dust settled, Tamagucci had five units to IPFS’s one, and looked to be the favorite to win.

However, there was a wildcard in the mix: ProofOfJake and his lone unit.

In a heroic act, ProofOfJake began to attack Tamagucci’s primary settlement in the hopes of playing spoiler himself and delivering a victory to IPFS.

By now, Tamagucci had raced across the lower half of the map in an attempt to destroy IPFS’s domain, but the damage had been done.

ProofOfJake landed the kill shot, eliminating Tamagucci and leaving IPFS as the winner of 🏆 The WASD Cup! 🏆

Congrats to IPFS on their victory!

It was a legendary performance in what is now an all-time classic, more than 30 minute long, Sky Strife match.

We Like The Games

Despite some logistical challenges on my end, 🏆 The WASD Cup 🏆 was a ton of fun.

We had some incredible matches, I want to thank everyone who participated.

I had a blast playing and hanging with you all :)

I sometimes try to have a moral to my stories, but for today, I would just say that events like these show why games are awesome.

Games don’t only provide entertainment, but bring together people from all over the world.

Furthermore, with fully onchain games like Sky Strife in particular, there will always be a record of the tournament that everyone who participated in it can reference back to.

That may not be the sexiest attribute of onchain games, but as a player, it’s cool and adds more a lot more meaning to the event.

All in all, it’s nice (and bullish for the industry) that through onchain games, we can now have fun experiences like this in crypto.

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