Check Out the Mario Tennis Aces North American Open July 2020

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - This game always deserved more!

Between December 2018 when Mario callously murdered the innocent Petey Piranha, and July 2020 with my article about how great Bowser Statues are and how they should be all over the United States of America, I haven't touched Mario Tennis Aces. There have been several balance patches and character additions since (including fellow KoopaTV staffer Kamek, a tricky Koopa with very curvy top-spins), but I haven't gone and experienced them for myself. Getting good at Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, to this day, continues to take up a lot of my online multiplayer attention.

However, Nintendo wants to adjust that. Adding Mario Tennis Aces to their list of “Nintendo Versus” games to keep players occupied over the summer months (along with Mario Kart 8, Splatoon 2, and...so far, suspiciously absent of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate), they are teaming up with eSports tournament platform Battlefy for the Mario Tennis Aces North American Open July 2020! It's happening this Saturday (July 25, 2020) at 1:00 PM Eastern. 

Register HERE!

I got the image of the tournament logo WITHOUT Mario's hideous figure in it.

And since I'm writing an article about it, you can bet I'm going to personally participate. The top eight players, though I don't expect myself to be among them, get 2500 My Nintendo Gold Points! (Or the equivalent of $25 in eShop credit that expires.) Here are the rules:

The big things to note for the ruleset is that the Play Time is set to Quick Play (first player to win 7 points (rallies) wins the match) with one of four Marina Stadium courts (Night, Hard, Clay, Grass—different properties on speed and ball bounciness) randomly picked. (Marina Stadium wants to be Yes (All))
The tournament ruleset has you play a best-of-3 of those Quick Plays.
To play a specific person in Mario Tennis Aces, you need to send them a Nintendo Switch friend request first.

The Battlefy tournament will likely break the registrants into eight different brackets. The winner of each bracket gets the credit. You'll need to be attentive and check into your matches, and friend request the person you're assigned to fight. Go to Free Play, Online Play, Solo, and then Create Room (or join their's). After it's all done, you report back on Battlefy.com who won, and keep going until the tournament ends. Or until you lose. It's single-elimination, after all. And with randomised seeding, you might get matched up against a super-competitive player.

I would assume that everyone who still plays Mario Tennis Aces after all of this time is really good at it. However, this tournament, as of writing, is by far the biggest Mario Tennis Aces tournament (in terms of registrants) in the game's history, with over 600 registrants. It's much bigger than the tournaments (which very rarely can break 100 registrants) that the Mario Tennis Aces community can pull off. That likely means that the tournament will have plenty of lesser-experienced players. Perhaps they only got the game as recently as last month when it went on sale.

(Compare this to the April 2020 ARMS tournament where they literally gave the full game out for free while the tournament was occurring and got only 880 registrants from it.)

The whole tournament will be these kind of tense tiebreaker moments.
By the way, in tennis, when it's at the “first to reach 7 points” mode and you each have 6 points, to then get to 7 you need to win 2–3 rallies in a row.
(6→Adv.→7; your Adv. resets to 6 if the other dude gets a point, though they don't get an Adv.)

Let's ignore that I ended up losing the match to Nad (depicted above). I'm quite rusty in Mario Tennis Aces and I was never that great at it to begin with, so it's quite possible I'll be eliminated in the first round. Still, it's a delightful game and really fun to play.

I have to also at least try to uphold the Koopa tradition of being excellent at tennis, and Mario Tennis Aces has many Koopas to choose from. I'll go with either Lord Bowser, Koopa Troopa, or Paratroopa. I have no idea what the metagame actually looks like, though. Doesn't matter. It'll be fun. Again, register here.


Ludwig plans to write a follow-up article to this next week talking about how his experience with the tournament went. It'll be... short if he loses in the first round. Ludwig doesn't recommend going out and buying Mario Tennis Aces at this point in the game's lifespan, but if you do already have the game, you might as well enter the tournament. And if you're reading this article, you also might as well enter the KoopaTV Loyalty Rewards Program and potentially win a $10 Amazon gift card code by the end of August 2020. You learn more about it over at that hyperlink, but it's even easier to participate in than the Battlefy tournament.


Here is the follow-up article with how the tournament went! Ludwig... didn't lose in the first round?!!?
The next tournament takes place on September 19, 2020!