Over the last year, I’ve been binging Survivor. I still have about two seasons left to watch – and it has become very taxing to decline hanging out with my friends to watch an old television show – but not too long ago, I finished Ghost Island. This season in particular features a duo that basically stomps through everyone else on the way to one of the closest races to win the game. Naturally, this had me thinking about another duo that’s dominated another friendship-killing hobby of mine in Melee.
Like the two people that ruled Ghost Island, Cody Schwab and Zain have effectively been atop the scene for the last nine months. Zooming out a bit further, you could argue that they’ve, more or less, defined Melee for the last two years. If you want to see the numbers on where Cody and Zain finish in the pantheon of all-time rivalries, I have another column for you. But today, I specifically want to go for something similar, yet different enough to warrant a separate breakdown.
In similar fashion to how Idoled Out made a video about dynamic duos in Survivor history, I’ll be breaking down four of the greatest dynamic duos of modern Melee. And as we go down the list, you’re going to realize quite a few shenanigans at play. For starters, I’ve tried my best to keep things simple when it comes to defining majors (AKA whatever Liquipedia says). I’ve also attempted to keep the broad “1” and “2” of each respective period as close to whatever recorded rankings exist for the time.
Cody Schwab and Zain (Smash Summit 12 to Now)
In 2023, Cody Schwab and Zain ended up winning the vast majority of majors. Out of the 12 in total for that year, Cody and Zain won 8 of them. At 9 majors with the two of them in attendance, they won a combined six majors.. Combined with results this year, as well as results from 2022 and Smash Summit 12, one of these two have won 14 out of the last 21 majors featuring both of them.
Funnily enough, in the first four months of last year, it wasn’t Zain who looked like Cody’s chief rival – it was Jmook. He won two consecutive majors, only to fall off pretty hard after that. Outside of Jmook’s successes, two aMSa wins (The Big House 10 and Apex 2022), and stray major wins from each of Leffen (LACS 5), Hungrybox (GOML 2022), and Mango (Smash Summit 14) are the other brief reprieves we’ve had from Cody and Zain at anything they’ve entered together.
Heading into this year, I wasn’t sure how big I’d consider the gap between Cody/Zain and everyone else. But coming off two events in which they won yet again, it does seem fairly significant, and like it’s nowhere near closing. Jmook still looks like he’s the closest one to breaking the figurative wheel, and Zain still beat him twice yesterday. After him, you have a trio of players who are either limited by distance or not in practice (Leffen, Plup and aMSa), and four other people who don’t look ready yet (Wizzrobe, Mango, moky, and Hungrybox).
Mango and Zain (LACS 2 to LACS 4)
Because of the heavily unusual circumstances around Melee and the pandemic during this time, we’re going to treat “The Online Era” as basically its own thing combined with the PreGR period and use BlurRank as a basis for assessing results in this given period of time. This will start from the advent of rollback to LACS 4 (January 2022).
NOTE: Due to the unusual nature of the Summit Champions League events, I will be treating each “season” as one cumulative online major. I think this is the most fair way to treat them, due to the single-elimination and division-based structure of the series.
In all seven “online major” series featuring both of them, Zain or Mango won. Along with those wins, they proved their rollback dominance was for real at Smash Summit 11 for an eighth combined victory. The only times in which they ever looked “vulnerable” to the possibility of someone winning an event over them were an individual week of SCL that Wizzrobe won or the “end” of these two’s reign of terror at Smash Summit 12, which Cody won. Although it didn’t come in too many events, it’s pretty crazy that for seventeen straight months (July 2020 to December 2021), nobody else could break through.
Zain wins a national and ignores all my dms
This is my joker moment
— 🐐 🐐 🐐 🐐 🐐 🐐 🐐 (@C9Mang0) February 26, 2024
On one hand, there are clearly unusual circumstances. With Leffen relegated to Europe, he was basically out of the picture. Plup, Wizzrobe, S2J, and n0ne had flashes of brilliance in this time span, yet there was, more often than not, a huge dropoff between them and Mango/Zain. Cody ended up being the unofficial No. 3 of this period, more or less, yet he found himself in the strange position of being the punching bag of Mango/Zain while beating many of the people who could give them trouble.
On the other hand, having lived through this period, it really did seem like the two were just better than everyone else. Not only that; they were straight up improving at a faster rate than the competition too. An interesting note about this rivalry was the fact that Zain was the far more dominant player, but Mango ended up leaving this era with the most important victory in Smash Summit 11. You could argue that it would be better to treat “The Online Era” of rollback events and the PreGR timespan as separate periods to evaluate. However, strictly as it pertains to these two’s dominance, I consider it one era.
Armada and Hungrybox (Evo 2015 to Smash Summit 5)
When we think of dynamic duos for sustained periods of time (save for two exceptions), you can’t get much more dominant than Hungrybox and Armada. For about two and a half years Hungrybox and Armada attended 23 majors together, with Armada winning eleven of them and Hungrybox winning eight. One particularly convincing stat is the fact the two were in grand finals a combined eleven times, which is just under half of the majors they attended together.
Occasionally, you had contenders to these two. For example, Mango had flashes of brilliance vs. them, with his wins at WTFox 2, The Big House 6 and Royal Flush. Similarly, Leffen’s GOML 2016 win also showed brief hope. At the same time, however, there was no doubt who the two best players in the world were. By the time Plup won Genesis 5 and Mew2King won Smash Summit 6, it was already at the tail end of Armada’s career.
This entire period was so utterly dominant for them on the whole. It’s also worth noting that Armada and Hungrybox were basically impervious to upsets. If they lost, it was usually to each other, or, on occasion, to Mango and Leffen. To be clear, Hungrybox was a little more vulnerable, as Plup, Mew2King, Wizzrobe, and SFAT started taking the occasional set. At the same time, he was still extremely difficult to defeat, and combined with Armada essentially only dropping sets to Hungrybox, Leffen, Mango, and Mew2King on a rare occasion, these two were unquestionably better than everyone else.
Mango and Armada (Genesis to The Big House 4)
Based on the criteria I set up in this column, it should be no surprise that I have these two for my final epic ‘dynamic’ duo atop the scene. In this stretch of about five and a half years, these two went to about 15 majors together, survived multiple initial “retirements” and yet won a combined 12 of those. Now, the total number of majors during this time span is significantly fewer than the number of majors I have for stretches of time for the previous dynamic duos – but that’s because the scene had fewer tournaments. As a result, this “era” is basically elongated over five years.
Looking at it with a bit more of a keen eye, it really does just feel like the Era of Mango and Armada. PPMD was the only person to ever semi-consistently challenge both Mango and Armada at the same time, and it was only much later when Leffen and Hungrybox had become established threats. Take a look at the following bullet points for exceptions to Mango and Armada’s stretch of dominance in this time span:
- Hungrybox winning Apex 2010, a tourney where Mango sandbagged
- PPMD winning Pound V, another tourney where Mango sandbagged
- PPMD winning SKTAR 3, Armada’s first return to the States
At any given event with the two present where one of them didn’t win, there were circumstances that warranted a slight asterisk on the accomplishment. For five years, any time that these two cared about Melee, they were leaps and bounds above everyone else, even as they proactively took breaks from seriously practicing or competing. Contrary to popular belief, this era was not about five people who only defeated and lost to each other. It was about two guys that ruled the scene, and three people who could occasionally challenge them, but typically just one who could beat both at the same time. In other words, not too dissimilar to today.