I'd like to highlight one of the Doubles matches this week:
marilli vs Ezrael
This is a really exciting match between the two 4-0s in the DOU pool right now, made all the more exciting by the fact that this is the first tournament where DOU has had two 4-0s. I don't think Jon's accomplishments need any introduction after his dominant Snake, and I think few people are very surprised to see him with such a good record. Jon's boisterous, friendly, and a bit weak on tact so he doesn't need anybody else to help sing his praises anyway.
I think most people are surprised to see marilli at 4-0, which totally matches his style. We all know he's "pretty good" but when
bunnyy compiled stats on tournament win rates among long-time players, behind a predictable top 4 (emforbes, Stax, SMB, myself), marilli came in fifth, which also surprised everyone. He doesn't talk much in public except to post stupid emojis and complain—he's currently banned from the DOU discord for being too mean about the HypnoGrav situation—and doesn't talk himself up at all, but he's a top threat.
Both players' teams so far have basically been following the meta. We see a lot of sand core, arcanine, draga, basically the good shit. Jon excels at taking inspiration from other players and modifying it slightly to suit his play, which you can see in his reuse of HypnoGrav week 2 and LapTop in week 4. On the other hand, despite marilli's teams all looking pretty much the same, I'm pretty confident he and KyleCole actually built a brand new team each week from scratch. Speaking of which, it's very surprising to see marilli's use of bulky balance so far this SPL since his building partner was famous in his heyday for ridiculous setup bullshit, but I imagine this trend will continue. I don't expect big innovation from either players, but I do expect them to show up with microoptimizations to standard pokemon hoping to counter each other's builds. Though there's a chance that one player tries something pretty crazy here and if I had to guess I'd say Jon's more likely to do it. This is going to be a great match and I hope everyone tunes in, though marilli might get mad at me for driving up expectations on this one.
Predicting marilli to take it in a game where nobody is ever ahead by more than 1 Pokemon, but we'll see.