Last week, I previewed each of the top eight seeds for Battle of BC 6 and simulated the event 1000 times in order to make a prediction. But it turns out, I didn’t actually need to do all that work. Instead, I could have just looked at last year. In somehow even more impressive fashion, Cody Schwab overcame an early loss in the winners bracket to Soonsay through a monstrous losers run in which he took down practically the entire gauntlet of top level talent to win the tournament.
cody with a mango-esque losers' run not only in the quality and quality of the wins, but also in that most of the sets devolve into heinous beatings
he's played skerzo, axe, leffen, joshman, mango, jmook, zain so far and has had more 3 or 4 stocks today (5) than games lost (3)
— chrome (real) (@chromeohnine) March 31, 2024
At a surface level, it may be tempting to discount Cody’s victory as inevitable. The reality, however, is that Cody effectively cemented himself as one of the greatest loser’s bracket players of all-time through this run. Furthermore are the historic stakes behind this run: with it, he leapfrogged ahead of Mew2King for all-time major victories, putting himself at 7th of all-time.
Cody’s ascendance, Zain’s presence as his chief rival in the game, and on a broader level, the gap between those two and everyone else has continued to define Melee this year. But we’ve also seen a plethora of other interesting storylines throughout the first quarter of 2024. In today’s Monday Morning Marth, I’m going to recap a few of these.
The Rise of Regionals
On an anecdotal level, we can already see this manifesting in the sudden presence of major contenders at smaller-scale tournaments. Although the nature of their attendance at these events may not always be the most serious, it is, nonetheless, a benefit to have top players integrating with regional and local scenes, particularly when their stream channels are being used for the tournaments themselves. Perhaps most notably has been the sudden resurgence of Mango at locals, as well as the integration of Jmook into the SoCal local community.
Beyond top player representation, regionals are in a good spot. Although it’s difficult (read: very time consuming to look at every single weekend event across every single region in the world, I examined the five biggest “non-majors” of 2024, and then compared their Melee attendance to the five biggest “non-majors” for each of 2023’s and 2024’s first few months. Using this as a proxy for examining the general category of “regional attendance,” we can safely say, at the very least, that “non-majors” are doing quite well.
| Year | 5 Biggest Non-Majors Included | Average Attendance |
| 2024 | Full Bloom 2024 Altitude Sickness Valhalla IV NYC Melee Arcadian Eggdog Scramble 2 |
202.2 |
| 2023 | BODIED: A War Over Washtenaw Kill Roy: Volume 6 Sweet Spot 7 M Series #8 Daddy’s Den X Supreme |
107.6 |
| 2022 | Smash Camp 2022 Warehouse War Minnesota Monthly Melee 1 The Town Throwdown: Episode 1 Myth 2 |
120.8 |
NOTE: I am going to catch some flak for counting Full Bloom 2024 as “not a major.” Direct your ire at Liquipedia if you are upset about this; not me. Even if you didn’t count it as a regional; the factoid below should point to a similar point anyhow.
If you want a particularly convincing number or fact to remember: we’ve actually more-than-doubled the amount of triple-digit non-majors at this point of the calendar from two years ago. In 2022, we had only four events that crossed triple digits by April (although this was during the pandemic). Last year, we had six. This year: nine.
Mango’s Rocky Arc
The “return” of the greatest player of all-time (although, did he ever really leave?) has been one of the most compelling arcs of 2024. And in all honesty, if you’re a Mango fan, this is exactly what you want to see: Mango coming back in full force to competing, not instantly seeing success, taking hits on the chin, even from “worse” players, and yet getting up each time and coming back to compete at another event. As I mentioned before, he’s even doing this at locals now, which was previously unthinkable.
Now, some Mango fans might be annoyed about me saying that him losing is actually a good thing. But that would be because they are stupid. This is actually the best case scenario, as well as the exact story you could want as a Melee fan. If Mango just came back and thwacked all the Foxes, beat Zain, and won majors, it would genuinely be worse for the game. It’s a better story too – to see the returning champion re-learn what it takes to compete at the highest level and claw his way back, tourney by tourney, to winning a major.
Played so fucking awful and every fucking single game was winnable
Progress is all I have
Getting black out drunk see everyone Tuesday
— 🐐 🐐 🐐 🐐 🐐 🐐 🐐 (@C9Mang0) March 31, 2024
One quick side note: I think this arc has indirectly given a boost to Mango as a content creator. For starters, his journey to re-assert himself within the top echelon has been a large part of what he discusses on both of his new podcasts. It’s also played a role in shaping his stream’s success over this year. Using Sullygnome’s watch time hours as a measure for how he’s performed as a Twitch streamer, he’s had 640,076 watch hours, over 100,000 from the first three months of last year (531,093). I also examined his Social Blade numbers for YouTube views within the same time span: he’s had an increase of about a million views in this medium as well (3.2 million to 2.2 million last year). Out of curiosity, I checked how this translated to 2022, in that time span, he had 1.3 million views. This could, admittedly, be just natural growth for his channel, but at the very least, I think his “return” is part of his core brand and story now.
Where’s Twitch Viewership At?
I talked about viewership for Mango, so it’s worth talking about where this factor of “community health” stands right now for all of Melee. Truthfully, I wouldn’t necessarily celebrate it right now, but I am cautiously optimistic. Last February, as I described before, Melee broke a year-long slump or so of not hitting one million watch time hours in a month thanks to a great month of Genesis and Full Bloom. Although the official March numbers aren’t technically available on Sullygnome, as of when I wrote this, we do have 30 days of the month to evaluate accordingly. Any further change wouldn’t be by too much.
There’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that our viewership metrics are still unambiguously shit. The good news is that we’ve seen worse numbers, and that all things considered, we have a pretty packed major schedule coming up between the following events: each of which could reasonably become majors:
- April: Pat’s House 4
- May: Get On My Level 2024
- June: Tipped Off & CEO
- July: Phantom & Warehouse War
- September: Riptide
- November: Don’t Park on the Grass 2024
NOTE: This does not take into account the possibility of Super Smash Con or The Big House returning, both which seem likely until further notice. It also doesn’t account for any potential events run by Ludwig or Eggdog Esports.
Between these events, as well as maybe one extra tournament the public (and myself) likely don’t know about yet, and the probable returns of The Big House and Super Smash Con, we could have anywhere from 11 more majors for the rest of the year. If we were to stick with our first quarter trend, we’re on pace to break 8 million watch time hours for the year, which would be higher than last year (but lower than anything else in recorded history).