Smasher:Mr. Wizard

Mr. Wizard
Character info
Smash 4 main	Duck Hunt
Team info
Crew(s)	Shoryuken
Personal and other info
Real name	Joey Cuellar
Location	Southern California
Miscellaneous info
Skill	Amateur Template:Banned

Mr. Wizard is a tournament director from Southern California who is mostly known as one of the co-founders of the Evolution Championship Series or simply EVO. He was the main TO for the EVO national tournaments, which are the largest yearly FGC-run and Smash events ever, from its creation up until 2020. In terms of playing, he mains Duck Hunt, and has also played other various fighting games.

On July 2nd, 2020, amidst sexual allegations towards him, EVO dissociated Mr. Wizard from their brand.

Controversies surrounding Smash at EVO

EVO 2013 issues surrounding Melee + Future Approvals

Super Smash Bros. Melee was the fighting game that donated the most money for Breast Cancer Research due to the massive push from the Melee It On Me podcast staff. In July of 2013, Nintendo attempted to block streaming for Melee at EVO 2013 a few days before the tournament was set to begin, as well as shutting down the Melee portion of the event altogether. However, because of extreme community backlash, Nintendo retracted the ban hours later. This retraction allowed Mr. Wizard and EVO to run Melee as planned. However for EVO 2014, Mr. Wizard revealed the initial six games at the tournament while reserving a seventh spot for Melee, while waiting for Nintendo's approval. Nintendo approved of Melee being at EVO 2014 and officially sponsored the event. Nintendo sponsored and allowed Mr. Wizard to run Melee and Smash 4 tourneys for subsequent events from 2015 onward.

Rule decisions

Within the Smash tournaments he has organized, he has made a few controversial decisions:

• Allowing items on at EVO 2008's Brawl tournament
  • This decision is considered to be by far the most controversial decision he made as Super Smash Bros. tournaments generally don't allow items in tournament play. It was also a playing card for CPU's unexpected victory as it allowed him to spam Diffusion Beam very frequently. The aftermath of this decision would result in the relationship between EVO and Brawl being tarnished.
• Allowing Customs at EVO 2015's Super Smash Bros. for Wii U tournament. (due to community feedback, customs are off at EVO 2016)
• Making Lylat Cruise a starter stage at EVO 2016, while making Dream Land 64 a counterpick; which to many is surprising since most Smash 4 tournaments have it vice-versa. This would become a standard in various tournaments following the EVO 2016 ruleset announcement.

Other criticisms

• One of the more recent criticisms comes from the Super Smash Bros. for Wii U community, as their game had the second most entrant numbers at both the 2015 and 2016 editions of EVO, albeit being treated to Saturday finals over Super Smash Bros. Melee as the latter got Sunday finals on both years. Notably in 2016, most players had about a maximum of five hours of sleep going into EVO which put a lot of stress on the players (Top 32 specifically) for the former game due to the poor scheduling. The issues with the Super Smash Bros. for Wii U's performance were fixed for EVO 2017 when it was announced that the staff would place it on the Sunday finals in addition to switching to smash.gg as the tournament bracket.

Tournaments hosted

Tournament	Date	Attendance
EVO 2007	August 24th-26th, 2007	270
EVO 2008	August 8th-10th, 2008	110
EVO 2009	July 17th-19th, 2009	128
EVO 2013	July 12th-14th, 2013	709
EVO 2014	July 11th-13th, 2014	970
EVO 2015	July 17th-19th, 2015	1,926
		1,869
EVO 2016	July 15th-17th, 2016	2,662
		2,372
EVO 2017	July 14th-16th, 2017	1,508
		1,428
EVO 2018	August 3rd-5th, 2018	1,358
		1,353
EVO 2019	August 2nd-4th, 2019	3,534

External links

• Twitter
• EVO website