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Season 6 of the Rivals Championship Series kicked off last September with an expansion of our Australian region to include all of Oceania. As New Zealanders officially joined the fray, players battled over four events themed after our upcoming characters, followed by a high stakes finals event that concluded this weekend. It didn’t disappoint as the Oceanic RCS saw one of its most fierce battles to date, featuring titans from events across the season.

Special thanks to @LichgoFGC for running the finals stream.

A Look Back at the Season

RCS Hot Springs
The season opener saw last year’s Champion, SNC, tear out the gates to secure his win in the biggest event of the year. A grand finals reset over OSU left Jet and Gabe smelling blood in the water at 3rd and 4th place respectively.

RCS Melody
After finding his way back to grand finals from winners side, SNC fell to Jet twice to award the legendary Wrastor his first of two victories in Season 6.

Some of the final standings for season 6.

RCS Fireworks
A return to form for Australian giant, Gabe, as he secured a flawless victory over both SNC and Jet. Gabe’s crown marked the third unique winner in three months, with one tournament to go before the RCS Finals in January.

RCS Crystal
After three events, the Oceanic region finally sees its first repeat champion. Gabe fell to Xenix in winners semis, setting up a losers run where he would eventually double eliminate Jet to take home the victory in the last regular season event of the year. Now with the finals on the horizon, Gabe managed to secure two RCS victories while sticking to the Elemental theme of each event.

The Season 6 OCE Champion

The RCS Finals
With the regular season out of the way, Jet had earned his spot at the top of the RCS leader-board, while Gabe remained the only player in the region to secure multiple championships.

The stage was set for an epic finale between the two players, with Jet and his teammate, Random7Flame striking an early blow with a victory in doubles on day 1. Day 2 did not disappoint, because this time it was Jet’s turn to get upset in winners semis, allowing for a losers run of his own. Jet managed to drive home back to back set wins over Gabe to top off his RCS mastery of Season 6.

Our OCE Champion – Jet!

After the dust settled, we reached out to our champion for a brief interview regarding his journey:

SBS: How did you first hear about Rivals and get into the scene as a competitor?

Jet: Before Rivals, I had given a few different games a go as a competitor, Battlefield 3, Dota 2, and Rocket League, with varied success. So when I learnt about Rivals of Aether from a youtube video back in 2015, I thought it would be a great game to try my hand at competitively. Played around with all 8 characters at the time, and found Wrastor to be my favourite to play,

Stuck with it ever since.

SBS: How long have you been playing Rivals for? How long did you play the game before entering brackets?

Jet: Just over 6 years now, having started playing Rivals around late 2015/start of 2016. I believe the first bracket I played was Dreadful Duels XII, which was hosted January 14th, so around 3 weeks of playing before I entered my first bracket…

A blast from the past…

SBS: This season was hard fought from beginning to end, with tournaments won by three separate competitors. What was your most difficult hurdle on your climb to the top?

Jet: Physical health has been my biggest hurdle. Like many others I have dealt with my fair share of hand and arm injury, a product mostly from practicing guitar as much as I do. It is a struggle to play some tournaments when your arms and hands are aching, so in the lead up to RCS finals I took a break from playing guitar and went to the physio to get myself fixed up. Of course I ended up getting covid a half a week before the RCS finals. But it wasn’t enough to hold me back..

SBS: One of your toughest hurdles this season looked like the return of former Australian champion, Gabe. His first active season since Season 3 came with a fourth and two first place finishes during the regular season, before ultimately leading to a grand finals clash with you in the RCS Finals. What was your approach to overthrowing him with the championship on the line?

Jet: Most of my friendlies have been played against Gabe this season, we have adapted a lot to each other’s playstyle and pushed to improve our gameplay. With so many games, there comes a lot of mental notes on how they play. So I went into Grands feeling confident that I would have the answer to his overall gameplan, and that clearly showed in the Grand Final Set.

Huge congratulations to @Batarax_Jet for securing 1st place in the OCE regional RCS finals! Stay tuned next week for more coverage to wrap up the OCE season. pic.twitter.com/QoceuNW4O1

— Rivals of Aether (@RivalsOfAether) January 22, 2022

SBS: Now that you have won your first RCS Finals event on top of owning the regular season leader-board for a second consecutive year, what are your competitive goals moving forward?

Jet: I have had my sights set on EU & USA for a little while now, I really believe I would put up a great fight overseas, and learn a lot from different playstyles and metas. But most likely won’t be able to visit for a few years due to funding. So in the meantime I think I’ll just keep winning here in Australia..

——–

Stay safe and thanks for playing! Keep an eye out for more 2022 official season news this spring.

CakeAssault is pretty much a household name for the Rivals community at this point. His dominance at LAN events can be traced all the way back to Genesis 5, where his legendary Game 10 set with a seemingly untouchable FullStream went down to the wire and is widely considered to be the best set in Rivals history. CakeAssault seemed to lie dormant during our exclusively online RCS Season 5, appearing in Top 8s but ultimately losing his 1st place ranking on the annual Top 50 list.

A new wave of Rivals players were born during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many people, including CakeAssault himself, were questioning what the first offline RCS event in a over a year and a half would bring us. What we received did not disappoint. Riptide, our largest LAN event to date, saw Cakeassault and long time adversary, Penguin, play 14 intense games over the course of Winners Finals and Grand Finals, where CakeAssault finally regained his footing as champion (Check out the famous video of CakeAssault’s celebration by turndownforwalt).

We recently reached out to CakeAssault to learn more about him and his history as a Rivals competitor.

CakeAssault at Riptide 2021. Photo by Jules.

How did you first hear about Rivals and get into the scene as a competitor?

CakeAssault: When I was like 11 or 12, way back when I would come home from middle school to boot up Brawl and play Kirby against Meta Knight CPUs, I found this really cool and shitty game called Super Smash Land, a de-make of Super Smash Bros made to play like it was for the Game-boy. I bought a Bluetooth adapter for my equally shitty laptop that would run Minecraft at 22 fps, and connected 2 Wii remotes to my computer and played Megaman vs Mario with my friend in this absolutely horrendous platform fighter. Then, maybe 2 or 3 years later, I reminisced on the fun times I had playing Super Smash Land, and went back to the website. I found that the same developer was releasing a new game, Rivals of Aether, and I followed the development pretty closely. When it finally released, I played it as soon as I got home from school, and started beating up CPUs with Wrastor just like I used to when playing Brawl. Pretty soon after I started playing, I found tournaments being posted to the subreddit, joined the steam group for tournaments at the time, and started asking my mom to use up some of our data (internet was hard to come by) so I could enter the tournaments once a week.

How long have you been competing in events? What is your typical warm-up regimen going into a major?

CakeAssault: According to challonge, my first tournament was October 30th, 2015, just a month after the game’s release. I remember playing this at my friend Jason’s house, accidentally leaving my controller at my house, and scrambling to get his Xbox controller working on my laptop before conceding and trying to figure out how to use a keyboard to play. But that kind of “competing” is very different from something like my first real major, Super Smash Con 2016, where I take the tournament a lot more seriously. When warming up at a major, I’ll spend however long it takes before my sets just playing against level 7 CPUs with 8 stocks until I feel that my execution is exactly where it needs to be, swapping around my controllers if I feel that they might be the issue. Whenever I finally feel that my execution is there, I’ll play against whoever is around and good enough to practice against until my set is ready, listening to music the whole time to stay focused.

How often do you practice the game and what do you focus on in a standard practice session?

CakeAssault: When I wasn’t swamped with school, I would play anything from 2-6 hours per day, especially when there were offline majors to prepare for. My playtime takes a steep decline whenever college picks up, but the things I focus on when practicing are always the same. The #1 thing I focus on is my execution when practicing, because if I’m flubbing inputs that I should be hitting all the time then I can’t really be improving. When I’m consistently practicing, this isn’t much of an issue, but is more of something that I need to focus on for 10-20 minutes when I start each session. When I’m out of practice, it becomes a real problem that I need to fix before anything else. Past that, I focus on innovating wherever I can with my game-play and experimenting with things that I would otherwise not do in bracket. The best way to stay on top is to keep finding new things to add to my game-play.

You’ve been the most dominant offline player since your incredible run at Genesis 5 in 2018. What do you see as your X factor in keeping that crown, and how do you stay ahead of some of the relentless newcomers making their mark on the scene?

CakeAssault: Nobody does it like me.

But actually I perform much better than others do when under pressure, especially with a crowd. When I’m playing hot, the adrenaline I get from playing in top 8 fuels my game-play, usually for the better. This is also one of the main things that helps keep me ahead of some of the new players, since most of them are new to competing on stage or in front of crowds at majors. Other than that, it’s a lot of the same stuff I do anyway. Consistently practicing the game, doing VoD review of my opponents, and finding counter-play to anything new they bring to the meta through trial and error.

What has been your proudest moment throughout your career?

CakeAssault: It’s definitely between winning Genesis 5 and Riptide. Genesis 5 was the first major win that started my win streak, and was one of the few wins I’ve made as the underdog going into the tournament. Being able to win a tournament from losers side always feels amazing, and doing it over the #1 player at the time was one of the greatest feelings. As for Riptide, it felt like I was proving that I didn’t fall off over the past year and a half when COVID forced tournaments to come to a halt. After enough 7th and 5th place finishes online, it was hard to convince myself that I was still as good as I used to be. It also reminded me of the feeling that comes with competing in person at a huge tournament like that, and why I love playing this game so much. Nothing feels as good as competing at a tournament like that.

As Season 6 progresses, what goals have you set for yourself to achieve?

CakeAssault: Continue being the best offline player and not catch COVID while doing it.

Do you have any personal hobbies or interests outside of Rivals that you’re focusing on this season?

CakeAssault: I’ve been practicing a lot of melee since Slippi came out and I wanna see how good I can get at Melee without falling off in Rivals. Plus school & actuary exams have been kicking my [butt] lately so those are a huge priority.

Is there anything you would like to say to the Rivals community reading this feature?

CakeAssault:Follow me on twitter

Also I’m a free agent rn hit me up frfr I don’t bite.

Season 6 of the Rivals Championship Series kicked off this year with a brand new event at Riptide! After a long break, the Rivals community was able to gather (masked up) at our largest event yet in Rivals history with 245 entrants. Amazing games, new competition, and a fresh meta look to make this one of the most exciting years yet for competitive Rivals.

VODS

As always we start with the VoDs in case you’ve managed to avoid spoilers so far. Days 1 and 2 of the event were streamed by our friends at GooshiGaming. Highlighted VODs are still being released but you can view the entire unedited stream below, as well as Doubles here and Workshop here. Day 3 of the event was streamed by Beyond The Summit with their full broadcast below as well.

Rivals Singles: Pools -> Top 8

GooshiGaming YouTube >

Rivals Singles Top 8

TOP 8 HIGHLIGHTS

If you’re interested in a quicker watch, check out our official highlight video for the main event. More coverage will be released later this week for Doubles and Workshop, so keep an eye out for our highlights for those events in the next couple days.

THE CHAMP

Congratulations to the Riptide 2021 Champion – CakeAssault! CakeAssault defeated his longtime friend and rival Penguin in a grueling game 10 series to secure his victory.

There we have it! @CakeAssault_ is back on top as your @RiptideSSB champion! Congratulations on the amazing run. pic.twitter.com/BHBwdU3SkU

— Rivals of Aether (@RivalsOfAether) September 12, 2021

SINGLES RESULTS

Full Standings >

WORKSHOP RESULTS

Full Standings >

DOUBLES RESULTS

Full Standings >

We hope you enjoyed the first event of the season! Keep an eye out for more Riptide coverage this week. Make sure to sign up or join us on stream at our next event this weekend as well. It’ll be the first online event of the season with a brand new skin reward: RCS Season 6 Hot Springs.