Since the end of Battle of BC 6, we’ve had a slew of notable regionals over the last month. Just last weekend, Krudo won Ohan’s Birthday Bash and Salt won House of Paign 24. In the weekend before that, you had Nicki taking home the gold at Melee im Kornspeicher, as well as Cohenski winning the latest SoCal Arcadian, and then to start the month, you had another edition of Krudo winning a regional (CT GamerCon 7). It’s like this guy magically appears every Saturday when there isn’t a major and wins whatever tournament he’s at.
The bad news is that Krudo won’t be at Pat’s House 4 this upcoming weekend. But the good news is that we get to see another major in Pat’s House 4. This one looks pretty juicy too – briefly looking through the attendance list, we have about 33 players who either made the Top 100 or the Top 100 ballot last year. Top 32 is almost certainly going to be a mix of rising West Coast regional talents vs. the best of the best, and potential matches between multiple Top 50 players.
Now, for the sake of time, I’m not going to dive into every player’s potential path. However, I want to talk about the best five players here, how their brackets could stack up, where they are trending, and what’s on the line for them at Pat’s House 4. Consider this column a detailed look into each of Cody Schwab, Zain, moky, Jmook, and Mango as they each head into the event.
Mango
This is an interesting time in Mango’s career. By all means, he has fully dedicated himself to Melee again, as he streams himself playing, makes high-effort content about the game, and seems fully invested in competing. At the same time, recent results don’t exactly showcase him as a top echelon threat – he’s lost to each one of his fellow top five seeds in their most recent matchups and has been a combined 5-13 vs. them since the start of last year. It’s undeniably true that of the five best players here, he’s had the worst resume of the last year and a half, and he has performed the worst out of them even upon him trying his hardest.
While this may paint a grim picture, this tends to follow a pattern that’s basically defined Mango’s whole career: he dominates a short period of time, he takes a step back, he gradually gets back into competitive form, takes hits on the chin, and then he wins before the cycle repeats itself. In fact, you don’t have to actually look too far to notice times when this happened. Just look at 2022, when he went from “not Top 10” to winning Super Smash Con immediately after he finished at a spot that even the ranking panelists did not think accurately portrayed Mango’s skill at the game (though even Mango conceded it was fair for his results).
Now, with that said, Mango’s current stretch sits at 11 majors, from Scuffed World Tour, so it’s a little different. Truthfully though, he’s seen a worse period of time. After he won Super Smash Con 2017, he attended 17 consecutive majors in a row until GOML 2019, which marked his grand return. Smashers who were around back then might recognize this time-span as when Mango finished in second place to Hungrybox at seemingly every other tournament. All of this is to say that you shouldn’t sleep on Mango, but that this event in particular might not be the one where he wins, especially not with a potential showdown against Jmook in winners quarters. Speaking of which…
Jmook
From Genesis 8 to Collision 2023, Jmook’s calling card was how impervious he looked to upsets. To put it succinctly, he attended 14 “big events” (including each of the 2022 iterations of Wavedash and Riptide) and had two “notable upsets” (SluG and Axe). Meanwhile, from Battle of BC 5 to Battle of BC 6, Jmook went to 15 events, which have ranked from majors to “almost majors” (like CEO 2023, Arcamelee #4, Full Bloom 2024, and, to a lesser extent, The Function 3), and suffered approximately 12 “upsets.” Even if you reasonably filtered out the moky losses and Wizzrobe loss, the fact of the matter is that Jmook basically went from one of the most reliable to most shaky top players against the field.
Jmook’s trends against the top echelon have their own share of concerns too. While I don’t see a reason to not view him as the favorite against each of Mango or moky, they still aren’t free victories. Assuming he gets by the field and beats one of them (likely Mango) in winners quarters, Jmook will probably have to beat Cody, whose 8-2 record vs. Jmook in their last ten sets speaks for itself. Add in the fact that Zain has turned around a once-losing head-to-head (5-1 in their last six sets), and it becomes very clear that Jmook has his work cut out for him at Pat’s House.
I edited this reel for the @jakedirado YouTube channel. He is "j" too good! pic.twitter.com/1XKTxkGKqk
— wusstunes🔜combobreaker! (@wusstunes) April 15, 2024
With that said, a step back in results does not always mean that it will last forever. After all, it was only a year ago when Jmook was winning multiple majors. His latest struggles actually reminded me of another Sheik main who went from winning his first two majors (although not in consecutive fashion): Plup. Following his Genesis 5 win, Plup proceeded to not win a major for over three years, eventually winning one at Smash World Tour Championships. It’s worth noting that much of this period of time got inflated by the pandemic effectively halting offline events; Plup’s brief flirtation with Smash Ultimate certainly shifted his attention away as well. I don’t think Jmook’s latest stretch coincides with nearly as many negative factors toward tournament performance. A victory for him is still possible and will probably happen sooner rather than later.
moky
We’re still waiting for moky’s “Genesis 5” moment. I thought it would happen at Battle of BC 5 and then I predicted it to happen at Collision 2024, and we saw how that went. At the same time though, moky’s made tremendous progress as of late, even if the tournament placements don’t necessarily show it. There’s no reason to feel anything other than optimism in the long-run, especially when you consider the fact that he’s now finally beaten Jmook and Mango, two of his three biggest demons.
I think the biggest leap forward, however, is in moky’s consistency vs. the field. When I saw his projected Genesis X bracket, I immediately winced at moky having to defeat Ossify and Trif – two of the hardest draws at each of their respective stages of the bracket – only to then be impressed by him beating each of them in subsequent fashion. In fact, the last time that moky got upset by anyone outside of the current Top 9 (and Leffen) was when lloD beat him at Riptide last year. From the last Big House to the most recent Battle of BC, he’s beaten Fiction, Salt, Aklo, Ossify, Trif, Medz, Salt (again), Magi, and Spark in a row.
This is one of the most important parts of winning a major and it’s part of why I strongly believe Zain is always in major contention. But unfortunately, if you are not Zain, you basically need to prove that you can beat him, otherwise you will have no chance of winning a major. For moky to go from “major dark horse” (like Hungrybox) to an outright contender (like Cody), this is the next step he has to take. He could finish in seventh place here, but if he beat Zain, this event would still be a net positive. The lifetime head-to-head stands at 14-0 now, with six of them happening since the start of moky’s gradual development to Top 5 player. It took Cody 11 sets to do it (including online); it’s genuinely just a matter of time before moky finally takes one.
Zain
In terms of hardware, Zain is the most successful player of this decade. Along with an official No. 1 in 2022, he finished No. 2 on the annual rankings last year (just a set away from the top spot), has 12 offline major victories, and he completely destroyed everyone online, winning multiple of the biggest events during the rollback era. And as I mentioned before, Zain’s consistency has been the biggest differentiator between himself and his peers. He’s practically a lock for top eight at every major he enters, so if you want to win a major, you almost certainly have to defeat Zain.
The last time Zain missed a major top eight (not counting pre-event DQs) was Genesis 6, where Plup and Axe knocked him out of the tournament at ninth place. Since then, he’s made well over 40 major top eights in a row (though the exact number is difficult to pinpoint given factors of online majors with alternative formats). More or less, what you need know is that it’s been five years since he missed a top eight, and the last players to “significantly” upset Zain’s Marth in any meaningfully serious capacity were either Axe at Apex 2022 or S2J at Riptide 2022.
say what you will about the morality of his journalism, but if i read one more word from him they're gonna have to call me edwin-cumming
— Zain (@ZainNaghmi) April 18, 2024
In fact, the only people to beat him this year are Jmook, aMSa, and Cody. Without aMSa in the picture here, and with winning streaks over each of Jmook, moky, and Mango, Cody is the only person here with anywhere close to a favorable shot vs. Zain.
Cody Schwab
Let’s be clear: there is no reason to view Cody as anything less than the overwhelming favorite to win this tournament. Since his Shine 2023 victory, and ignoring Collision 2024 as a huge outlier, he has practically destroyed everyone in his path to winning whatever major he’s gone to. In the span of around three quarters of a year, Cody’s gone from a No. 1 contender to having more major victories than Mew2King. I would personally consider him the greatest Fox main ever.
He just doesn’t have any losing matchups. To be clear he does lose – we saw this recently happen at the hands of Soonsay, Jmook has taken a set, apparently Hungrybox can double eliminate him, and obviously, there was the Morsecode762 loss – but it’s typically followed up by Cody leaving a wake of destruction in his path. Let’s forget the numbers (although they are quite good) for a second and go by the vibes. When Armada won everything, everyone was more amazed than they were annoyed. When Hungrybox won everything, everyone was more annoyed than they were amazed. When Zain won everything, we either wondered how real it was or we saw him clutch out sets by the skin of his teeth. But when Cody wins now, you’d think a funeral was happening. He is beating people so thoroughly that they aren’t diminishing his achievement nor are they making excuses – they are apologizing to their fans and earnestly admitting that they were hoping to not play him.
The World vs Cody Schwab, BoBC6 Top 24 pic.twitter.com/OABo1LAW9y
— chrome (real) (@chromeohnine) April 2, 2024
If Cody wins Pat’s House 4, consider the following:
- Cody would have three major wins in the first four majors of the year.
- This would be most major wins in the first four major majors of any full SSBMRank period, effectively making Cody the largest favorite for No. 1 this early into a year, ever.
- Cody would sit at 11 major victories, just one below Zain for offline major wins, two below Leffen for all-time wins.
- Combined with victories at each of The Match, Santa Paws, and Arcamelee, Cody will have won eight of the last nine “big events” of his career.
I am not going to discount the possibility of any of his peers winning. But in this current tournament, I can’t pick anyone else. His 23-12 record against the top five seeds of this event (including The Match) is just the cherry on top. I see no reason not to see him as the overwhelming favorite; Cody is my pick to win Pat’s House 4.