March Madness is coming our way – as in what most people think of when it comes to March Madness. As a graduate of the University of Connecticut, this has always been a special time of year for me. I met my spouse and partner of 12 years shortly before our college won the national basketball championships. While I can’t claim to really care very much about collegiate sports (it’s just not my focus), I do have a special fondness for this type of thing.
On a topic that you guys care about though, last Friday was the initial launch of Melee Stats March Madness, an annual series we’ve semi-regularly used to recap cool moments in Melee history. What we’re doing this year is trying to determine the greatest sets of the 2020s. In fact, if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already seen it somewhere. If you haven’t, here’s the bracket.
There’s a lot of really great sets to recap. And Today, I’m going to take some time to detail some of the superficial numbers behind these sets, and some interesting patterns involved in them. Although they may ultimately illustrate more about my preferences than anything else, I think this can point us in a semi-meaningful direction for describing what we as Melee fans tend to find existing. Or at least just myself and my friends.
Before I get into this though, I want to briefly describe the process here. Together, I and a bunch of my friends in Melee Stats came up with about 100 sets between ourselves that we thought would be realistic contenders within a Top 64 bracket or pass the smell test. The key here was making sure that ‘enough’ of our picks were representative of big Melee storylines this decade. As a result, we tried to pick sets that represented different qualities that we found illustrative of where Melee’s headed since 2020, and we also tried to prioritize major top eight or top 12 sets. Simultaneously, we wanted to highlight lesser-known sets that maybe you might have forgotten about. It wouldn’t be ‘fun’ if every included set was just a different variant of five rivalries.
Will there be sets in here that you might wonder if they should be replaced by something else you think of that we might have forgotten? Perhaps. But also, would it realistically make a difference? In all honesty, while Melee has a lot of great sets, we feel like there is a pretty stark dropoff after our top five seeds. As a result, I don’t feel too bad about any ‘missed’ sets,’ as long as we didn’t miss any all-timers.
One last thing to note: I know the term “set” gets a ton of people typically thinking about one set, as in a best-of-five. But for the purpose of simplifying this process and not thinking about it too deeply, if people play more than one set at a tournament, we’re just treating it as one entry into the list. If you really hate this, then just pick one of them and move on. Or don’t.
Most Common Characters Involved
Nothing here should be too surprising. Also, for what it’s worth, I counted any involvement of a character in a set as an instance, though only five sets had any presence of three or more characters.
| Character | Count |
| Fox | 33 |
| Marth | 24 |
| Sheik | 17 |
| Jigglypuff | 16 |
| Falco | 9 |
| Captain Falcon | 7 |
| Peach | 6 |
| Ice Climbers | 5 |
| Yoshi | 4 |
| Roy | 2 |
| Link | 2 |
| Pikachu | 2 |
| Falcon | 1 |
| Donkey Kong | 1 |
| Young Link | 1 |
| Samus | 1 |
| Luigi | 1 |
| Mario | 1 |
There is quite a few interesting things here. Of the 33 times Fox showed up, it involved six people (Mang0, Cody, moky, Aklo, Leffen, and SFOP, surprisingly). Meanwhile,the vast majority of Falco appearances came from Mang0, though Ginger and Frenzy are present too. Marth had a pretty funny spread of players; where else would you see Zain, KoDoRiN, Mew2King, Asidyx, and The Crimson Blur in the same group? In more expected fashion, Jmook represented the vast majority of Sheik sets, though Leffen, Spark, and Krudo were present also. After that, Jigglypuff had Hungrybox and SDJ. Peach had Polish, Trif, and Aura. Captain Falcon had Wizzrobe and Slime. The Ice Climbers had Nicki, SluG, and ChuDat, and then everyone after had that had sole representatives as follows:
- Link: Aklo
- Luigi: Ben
- Roy: “DontTestMe”
- Young Link: Axe
- Samus: TheSWOOPER
- Mario: ChuDat
Most Common Matchups
Given what we found out for characters, I examined the most common matchups within our Top 64. I went through each possible combination of characters, making sure to account for sets involving counterpicks or character changes. Because there were so few of them (only five), I included them as rare instances. Here are all the matchups that showed up multiple times.
| Matchup (any order) | Count |
| Fox vs. Marth | 9 |
| Fox vs. Sheik | 5 |
| Marth vs. Sheik | 5 |
| Falco vs. Fox | 5 |
| Jigglypuff vs. Fox | 3 |
| Fox vs. Fox | 3 |
| Marth vs. Link | 2 |
| Sheik vs. Jigglypuff | 2 |
| Ice Climbers vs. Marth | 2 |
| Peach vs. Fox | 2 |
| Marth vs. Jigglypuff | 2 |
| Captain Falcon vs. Marth | 2 |
| Jigglypuff vs. Captain Falcon | 2 |
| Yoshi vs. Fox | 2 |
| Jigglypuff vs. Peach | 2 |
If our taste is any indication of what great Melee looks like right now, it’s very clearly the Marth/Fox/Sheik arms race. Granted, this is overwhelmingly between Zain, Cody, and Jmook, but there’s also quite a bit of depth behind them too. Another really funny pattern I noticed was that every instance of Falco/Fox or Fox/Falco involved Mang0, and each time involved a Mang0 victory. This is probably my bias showing; for whatever reason, it just feels wrong when Mang0 loses to a Fox (or apparently when he loses to Hungrybox too). Zooming out a bit though, I do think that this list could look very different by the end of the decade. In fact, if the the mid/low-tier revolution is any indication, the second half of this decade is slowly, but surely, bringing Melee its most diverse era yet. If Junebug ends up winning a major – or something like that – we could see the spread of characters at matchups at the top level take this type of list to unprecedented territory.
Most Common Players
In this section, I detail the most common players who appeared within our Top 64. While this is not representative of every single person, for my readers’ sake, I chose to filter this to just anyone who had three or more sets.
| Player | Total Appearances | Winrate |
| Zain* | 21 | 0.38 |
| Cody Schwab | 14 | 0.43 |
| Hungrybox | 14 | 0.36 |
| Mang0 | 11 | 0.64 |
| Jmook | 7 | 0.71 |
| Wizzrobe | 7 | 0.57 |
| moky | 5 | 0.60 |
| Leffen | 5 | 0.40 |
| aMSa | 4 | 0.75 |
| Plup | 3 | 0.67 |
| Trif | 3 | 0.33 |
| Aklo | 3 | 0.33 |
NOTE: I counted Zain’s two DontTestMe sets as part of his total.
The top names here should be totally unsurprising, although I’m a little surprised at how low the count was for Jmook. In my opinion, this is related to his playstyle; a ton of times, Jmook either destroys the opponent or gets washed himself, which usually doesn’t lead to exciting sets (though it certainly is not impossible, as indicated by his set vs. Cody at Genesis 8).
There are some people missing from this list, as well as our Top 64 that I feel a little bit bad about missing out on. For example, nowhere in our final bracket does Joshman appear; I think the closest set I’d use to include him is either when he beat Jmook for the first time or when Junebug defeated him. In similar fashion, Soonsay doesn’t appear, and neither does Magi, Fiction, S2J, or Morsecode762. It was really close, and maybe I could have replaced some of the lower “novelty” seeds with them, but realistically, they wouldn’t make it that far in the bracket against the higher seeded sets.
Most Common Rivalries
Naturally, after looking at players, I was curious to see how many times certain rivalries appeared. What rivalries are the predominant ones in modern Melee, if our Top 64 bracket is any indication? We ended up with a fairly diverse overall spread; here are the ones that appeared multiple times.
| Rivalry | Times Present |
| Cody Zain | 4 |
| Mang0 Zain | 3 |
| Leffen Zain | 3 |
| Hbox Wizzy | 2 |
| aMSa Mang0 | 2 |
| Jmook Cody | 2 |
| Hbox Cody | 2 |
| Mang0 Hbox | 2 |
| Jmook Zain | 2 |
| Zain Hbox | 2 |
To no surprise, the Cody/Zain rivalry leads the charts. But it’s also not as much as you’d necessarily expect. Behind them is Zain/Mang0, a rivalry which is overwhelmingly terrible for this decade but happens to feature incredible peaks, and Leffen/Zain, which has been a treat to watch in the rare instances of when they happen. After that are honestly mostly rivalries that I would consider not that exciting to watch sans for Jmook/Zain and Mang0/Hungrybox. Instead, they just happened to feature really great highlights. All in all, I would not personally consider this Top 64 to be entirely representative of the era’s best rivalries, but it captures the peaks.
Most Common Commentators
Here’s the fun part: which of the greatest sets of all-time happen to feature well-beloved commentators? This is the part of my breakdown that I was most excited to examine: the relationship between commentary and how we remember the greatest matches of the decade. These are all the commentators with at least three inclusions in our Top 64 bracket.
| Commentator | Appearances |
| Toph | 24 |
| Vish | 13 |
| Walt | 12 |
| HMW | 12 |
| Slime | 10 |
| Scar | 8 |
| Ludwig | 6 |
| Radar | 5 |
| Junebug | 5 |
| Phil | 5 |
| Stude | 3 |
| Webs | 3 |
| Zane | 3 |
| Jorge | 3 |
| Blur | 3 |
| DarkGenex | 3 |
| Joshman | 3 |
I don’t really have takeaways from this one. Toph and Vish near the top of our chart definitely adds up, as do the other names on this list. If I wanted to, I think it would be extremely funny (though potentially mean-spirited) to see the ‘hit rate’ of commentators on whether a match made our Top 64 or not. We could even give a “Bad Luck” award to commentators with many top eight sets but without any inclusions on this list. I’m sure I could break these sets down even further. For instance, seeing the most common series where great sets happen and examining which events tend to be the most exciting. For now though, this is what I wanted to look at. Cheers.