Lustrum LAN & casual tournament

This time we have a 2 for 1 special blog post. We will be covering two separate events that happened closely after each other. These events are the Lustrum LAN smash tournament and the casual 2v2 custom balance tournament.  

Lustrum LAN smash tournament:

The Lustrum LAN was a LAN held at the student sport’s center in Eindhoven and organized by ESEV Zephyr in collaboration with other Dutch esports associations such as DSEA Ignite, TSEA Link and Dorans. During the LAN a lot of competitions with prizes were held varying from beer pong to pub quizes to of course video games. Among the video game competitions, Smash bros. Ultimate could obviously not be missed, and thus our smash player who were attending the LAN (Mattie, DVoid, Tino, AkBob, Vincentg and “I have a snail btw”) entered this tournament. It was an 11-player double-elimination tournament on the 21st of February 2025 with players from a wide variety of places, as the LAN was open to all associations and friends. The odds for a Zephyr win, were very highly likely due to the amount of players, but this would also mean that a team kill would happen quite quickly. In fact, the first team kill took AkBob because he had to face Mattie directly into Tino who both are ranked higher in the current Zephyr internal ranking than AkBob. 

Furthermore, almost all other Zephyr members would eventually sink into loser sides where more team kills occurred. For instance, “I have a snail btw” was eliminated by DVoid and Tino was eliminated by Vincentg. Afterward, both DVoid and Vincentg would be eliminated by theflashylucario, the cloud player and LizardWizard222, the ness player at 5th and 3rd respectively. Nevertheless, one player stayed in winners the whole time and went on to win the entire tournament without losing any set. This person was Mattie taking the win for Zephyr in the end. Both Mattie and Vincentg received prizes as they both were top 3 with 3rd place receiving a medal and Nintendo t-shirt, and 1st receiving the same plus a brand-new copy of Mario & Luigi Brothership. All in all, the tournament was fun, competitive, the prizes were nice (Thank you LAN committee and Nintendo for sponsoring!) and overall ran smoothly despite some hiccups with wireless controllers acting up. 

10/10 would go again next year.

Casual 2v2 custom balance tournament

The smash committee organized a casual smash event with a twist on the 25th of February 2025. This event was the first iteration of the Casual 2v2 custom balance tournament. In this event, Zephyr members would compete in teams of two against other teams and “balance” characters by nerfing or buffing the entire roster. At the start, each team would buff and nerf three characters, taking turns between all teams until all characters had been balanced. Reasons for balancing ranged from, nerfing another team’s main, buffing their own main or just funny reasons such as nerfing all child characters. 

Afterward, the teams would be put in a double-elimination bracket playing 2v2 with the balanced roster, items and randomly selected stages for the rest of the tournament. We had four teams: AnnaAva12 & Mattie, Memvis & DVoid, Berd & Muurverf and Tanglad/Unique/Vincentg (sub out per game). All teams, had different strategies some strategically picked their characters, such as team Memvis & DVoid with their insanely buffed King Dedede and Incineroar. These characters, are normally already very strong but with the buffs, shields were being broken incredibly fast which then would almost always lead into a kill if your teammate could not help you. Other teams would just play characters that were not entirely nerfed into the ground and somewhat easy to pilot, and others just played characters because they like them despite their balancing, such as Rose with Kirby and Berd with Luigi. The sets were chaotic and different for new and experienced players alike, where any team had a good chance of winning. This can be proven as the team consisting of only experienced members did not win the tournament. No no, the winners of the tournament were team Memvis & DVoid who were rewarded with bags of candy. The tournament was luckily well received, and hopefully we will be able to do one again someday.

And with that we conclude another blog post, thank you for reading!