The weekend between The Octagon 2 and GOML Online was a relatively quiet one in terms of results. Unfortunately, ongoing drama between two of Melee’s recognizable players has continued to escalate, mostly in part due to one of the two parties being far more proactive about it.
On Friday, Hax posted a followup to his previous video, “Evidence.Zip 2.” This time, he titled it as a revised cut, with him speaking to the camera directly. The video covers much of the same topics as in his previous video, with much of the extreme presentation edited out, though Hax still makes claims of Leffen being a community totalitarian and pushes for a ban on Leffen.
I wrote about this last week, and, once again, I won’t pretend to be a neutral party. While the presentation of this video was far more organized, it was still laced with unreasonable attacks on Leffen’s character. Most notably, its foundation involved using the most egregious examples of Leffen’s past behavior – most notably, the bullying of a player with hearing aids; something he was banned for – to frame anything Leffen has done in the last seven years in the worst possible light.
It culminates in Hax claiming that Leffen’s outspoken advocacy for victims of sexual misconduct was a ploy for clout. In response, Leffen announced that he would no longer prefer to speak publicly about this situation.
Statement regarding Hax. pic.twitter.com/EicGawAfe3
— TSM FTX Leffen (@TSM_Leffen) June 12, 2021
Although the new video was far more positively received among the public than Hax’s previous one, most prominent Melee figures panned it. If you’re curious to find examples of this, I would check out Toph’s or Slime’s recap. I would prefer to not ever write about this again, so let’s move onto the fun part of the column.
MEGA MAILBAG MONDAY: PATRON QUESTIONS
Me.
In all seriousness, there’s a lot of good options. The first thing that comes to mind is PPMD’s “Educational Unranked.” I enjoy watching these live and their highlights are fun to catch on YouTube. I’m not familiar with Zain or Mew2King’s lessons, so I can’t comment on those, but I am quite familiar with KoDoRiN’s and LSD’s lessons. I’ll briefly talk about them.
I’ve only taken one lesson from KoDoRiN, but I can safely say that his mini-lesson repository – basically where he stores his 10-minute analyses of subscriber videos – is an awesome resource to learn the ins and outs of different matchups. He has an unusually high intuition for knowing what Marth can and can’t do across different positions and matchups. I wish he made more of these public. Having paid $5 a month for them, I think they are a steal.
I have a lot more experience with LSD as a personal teacher and they’ve been quite helpful. Their brutally honest assessment of gameplay is pretty refreshing and I think LSD has a very amusing way of explaining what larger holes exist within each of their student’s ideas of “how Melee works.” In my last lesson with them, they helped me build a much more effective practice routine.
To bring this back to the original question, I’m going to head into a different direction. I strongly implore every Marth player to check out the work of RedBlaze, a top Swedish Marth who makes Savestates for the Marth Savestates Discord. This is an incredible resource, and you can access it for free. I cannot speak highly enough about how much it’s leveled up my gameplay and RedBlaze deserves so much more props for his work here.
Which high tier vs high tier mu do you think has the highest chance of “changing” (as in, the community’s opinion will significantly change) in the next few years? – coffee
I asked Coffee what he meant by high tier, and he really just meant top tier. So with that out of the way, the first one that comes to mind is Sheik vs. Falco. This matchup is currently considered even, but as time goes by and the more I think about it, I don’t see this matchup getting easier for Falco.
Sheik’s whole toolkit seems geared toward making Falco’s life difficult. He tends to struggle with platforms or characters that come at him from an angle – and guess what Sheik is really good at? Moreover, her out-of-shield game is phenomenal, and while she can’t juggle as well as someone like Marth, she edgeguards and tech chases really hard. I predict that come the return of LAN Melee, Mango will go Fox vs. every Sheik he plays against (save for maybe on Final Destination).
What’s the likeliness we thaw Stadium, ban Stadium, or keep Stadium frozen? What are the ramifications on the meta – YamHam