This is a weird time to talk about Melee. Technically speaking, we have already seen three majors in five months: not that many in the grand scheme of our ecosystem, but enough to draw some definitive conclusions. Conclusions as to what, you ask? Your answer is as good as mine. It could be doubles, it could be rankings, it could be the future of Melee tournaments, the metagame; really, anything you want it to be.
I wasn’t sure about what to dedicate time toward for this week’s column. For today’s edition of Monday Morning Marth, treat it as my stream of consciousness; a somewhat informal overview of what’s been on my mind lately as a fan of the game. This is a short, fairly disorganized column, and it does not represent the totality of everything I’ve been thinking about, but this is what’s most been on my mind.
The Ice Age
Nintendude once said that the Ice Climbers often follow a standard cycle in Melee; they appear, they do well, and they stop doing well and disappear – right before emerging from the shadows once again. Nowadays, it seems like we’re in the reemerging stage. Before I share my thoughts on Ice Climbers, however, I want to talk about the people leading the charge.
A couple weeks ago, Nicki proved that his Don’t Park on the Grass 2024 breakout was no fluke, as he stormed his way to winners finals at Nouns Bowl, defeating Junebug and Mang0. Far from the only Ice Climbers to do well at that very tournament, he was accompanied indirectly by MOF, a rising star of the last couple years who made it to fourth place herself in a run where she beat Krudo, Magi, Aklo, and Jmook on the way to becoming the highest placing woman at a major ever (which, by the way, is kind of wild, and it’s crazy that nobody is really talking about it).
Make no mistake: these two are just the most prominent examples of top-level Ice Climbers. It’s the mid-level, however, where I feel most bullish about the prospect of more Ice Climbers receiving national recognition. My dear friend DarkGenex, whom I’ve talked about as a competitor before, had his own breakout at Nouns Bowl, where he finished in 17th place with wins over JoJo and the surprisingly present SluG, a former Top 10 player whose results haven’t really been up to his typical level, but whose activity level has been surprisingly higher than you might think.
Elsewhere, we’ve seen Frostbyte – a longtime top MDVA Ice Climbers – continue to put up respectable regional results, with Khryke’s Ice Climbers slowly becoming a serious threat there too. And then you have emergent stars like BluePiñata in British Columbia and the return of Boyd within the Midwest. I feel obligated to mention Bekvin’s win over Jmook at Smash Camp too, even if, by no means, this was a serious set with real competitive stakes. Why? Because it’s Bekvin, and he rules.
From 2022 to 2024, the Ice Climbers had three to four representatives each year on the Top 100. This year though, it seems likely that the number will increase. What happens after that is anyone’s guess – maybe Nicki even wins a major and becomes the first Ice Climbers main since ChuDat to win a major in eighteen years. Either way, the potential of a new Ice Age happening in Melee before our very eyes warrants brief mention.
Notes on Melee Doubles
For those of you reading this who are rolling your eyes, hold on for a second. I’m not going to waste too much of your time here; I’m not putting up another bounty; it’s just a part of our game that I’ve noticed a few interesting developments in. I’m only briefly bringing up four storylines in doubles that I currently find interesting in 2025.
I’ll begin with an unfortunate one, not because I think it’s a “cool” development, but because it is notable. That would be the decline of Krudo/Panda: a team that I dubbed top five in the world, as well as the last team to defeat Cody Schwab/Jmook (more on this later). Unfortunately since their heartbreaking second place finish at LMMM 2024, they’ve fallen off hard, having missed top eight at the latest Genesis and finishing in fifth place at Nouns Bowl. Because they’ve only attended two events and Panda hasn’t been traveling too much, it seems just like a bit of unfortunate timing. I wouldn’t be surprised if they returned to form at Tipped Off, but we’ll see.
The French Sisters made waves at their North American debut about a year ago, but all things considered, they didn’t even make the top eight at Genesis X. This year, however, they’ve straight up become dark horse contenders to potentially win a major very soon. Starting with their win at Let’s Start The Fire over Nuckels/Fuzzyness, i4/Fecfec went on to defeat both Zuppy/Mot$ and Polish/Free Palestine at Fight Pitt 10, two top ten active teams in the world. Showcasing that this wasn’t a fluke, they then went onto defeat Joshman/Soonsay and Krudo/Panda, their best win yet.
But what about the specter of double Fox communism? Is it really ruining Melee doubles? By the results, no, not really. At the few majors we’ve seen this year, it’s been one duo that already won LMMM last year (Soonsay/Preeminent) and one player (Zuppy) with a history of success with this team composition. While I did take note of Zuppy and Artan’s second place run at Nouns Bowl, where they beat Krudo/Panda, the French Sisters and Zain/moky, I’m not convinced double Fox is ban-worthy, both by the eye test and the results (though they are clearly very good). From what I can tell of it, it’s not overly present or centralizing in the metagame. Although I do think there’s a greater discussion to be had about how necessary Fox is for top-level doubles, I don’t think he’s necessarily testing skills that we don’t value in doubles competition. Maybe I’m wrong.
Anyway, onto bigger things. Since falling to Krudo/Panda at Supernova 2024, Cody/Jmook have won Riptide 2024, Don’t Park On The Grass, Platfight 2024, Genesis X2, Altitude Sickness 2, Battle of BC 7, and Nouns Bowl. It’s not like they’ve dodged strong teams either, they’re just that much better than everyone else right now. No, I’m not putting a thousand dollar bounty on them, and I will say that they still have a long way to go to reach serious GOAT contention. As of right now, they have 13 major wins, fourth of all-time behind Armada/Mew2King (17), Ken/Isai (18), and SFAT/PewPewU (22).
What the hell would the Top 10 look like right now?
I want to be clear: this is literally just for fun; I obviously do not think that three major events and a select few regionals are enough to make a serious Top 10. However, the way that notable results this year have shaped out have currently made for a fairly insane field to make sense of. Without calling this a “Top 10” in any real substance, I’m going to attempt to make a, well, Top 10, purely based on results within this year and with no bias on how good I think players will actually perform in the future. Since Summer SSBMRank was announced, now’s as good of a time as ever to do this. Even if it obviously is going to look very strange (for example, no Aklo or aMSa) and quite bad in the long-run, it’s more for fun than it is serious.
NOTE: I am excluding players who have only attended one notable tournament since the start o fthe year, which means no Nicki.
The top three seems pretty straight forward: pick the three people who have won majors. That would be Hungrybox, Zain, and Cody. In Hungrybox’s case, he won the biggest event of the three, in Zain’s case, he kind of has the number one spot by default based on last year’s ranking, and in Cody’s case, he’s by far been the most present player. If I were to order them today, I would honestly give the nod to Cody for number one because of his head-to-heads and activity. I’d then pick Hungrybox for number two because of the prestige of winning a supermajor, and go with Zain for number three even if his long-term trajectory is probably a bit more stable than the other two. I don’t feel that strongly about the actual order though. If you went with Hungrybox number one because of the prestige factor behind the Genesis win or Zain at number one because his only losses came at a single tournament, that’s fine too. Again, I don’t think this holds any actual meaning; no matter how you look at it, the few people who have actually won major tournaments should be the ones in the lead above everyone else.
And now we get into the fun part: what the hell does the rest of the Top 10 look like? In order to determine what it “could” be, I looked at everyone who’s beaten Cody, Hungrybox, and Zain.
| Players outside the Top 3 who beat Cody | Players outside the Top 3 who beat Hungrybox | Players outside the Top 3 who beat Zain |
| Aura Mang0 Jmook Joshman |
Wizzrobe | Junebug |
Is this really our 4 to 9 range? I am not super convinced that it will end up being that for summer rank, but let’s pretend it is for a moment, because it’s very funny. If this is truly our four to nine range right now, I think I have to give the number four spot to the guy that just came a game short of winning his first major in Joshman. With a win over Cody, two sets over a peer in Jmook, and even a win with his Captain Falcon over Aura, Joshman has clearly had the best year of everyone in this group, as strange as that is to put into writing after only three big tournaments. He is not immune to upsets, but he usually just blows through them anyway to do well.
Sticking with people who have beaten Cody, we get into Jmook, who would probably be my pick for number five despite taking a fair share of hits on the chin throughout the year. For every run like his second place performance at Altitude Sickness or his regional dominance in SoCal, he has a real stinker like Full Bloom 2025 or Genesis X2. But because he’s so active and does well overall, I don’t want to punish him too much for it.
How we order the next four is really anyone’s guess. Mang0 has a couple of major top eights, a Cody win, and a surprising amount of success vs. the field cumulatively, despite some stinkers here and there. Aura, the newcomer to being a full-time Melee player, made his first major top eight at Battle of BC and defeated my current No. 1 pick at Genesis alongside Soonsay, but has not done as well at the couple of big regionals he’s attended. Meanwhile, Wizzrobe started the year off with a bang at Genesis (where he beat Hungrybox, Aura, and Plup) before then proceeding to get smacked back to reality at Full Bloom and Battle of BC alike. Junebug, on the other hand, did beat Zain and Jmook, which makes for an incredibly strange contrast to the fact that Junebug has not made a major top eight this year, and has only lost to last year’s Top 10 (Nicki, Aklo, Hungrybox, and Cody) at majors or notable regionals. What the hell? For now, I’ll go with Mang0 for six, Aura for seven, Junebug for eight, and Wizzrobe for nine, but I feel really stupid about it.
Unfortunately, there’s still one spot left in the top ten, which I did promise. Who goes there? Because we’ve seen so few major results this year, and they have been all over the place, it’s hard to definitively say. But from what I can tell, there seems to be four key contenders for the “2025 only results Top 10 as of May 5, 2025.” Those contenders would be Trif, Salt, Axe, and moky.
Trif’s argument for number ten is quite simple: he nearly won Genesis, basically making it through one of his worst projected bracket paths ever (S2J into Aklo into SDJ into Mang0 into someone he’s finally beaten before in Wizzrobe) only to have victory stolen from him at the very end by the worst opponent he could have faced there in Hungrybox. Although Trif ended up following this performance up with a head-scratcher at Valhalla V, where Rikzz double eliminated him, I honestly think that the caliber and importance of an event like Genesis dwarfs the clear step back at a regional. It might speak greater volumes for Rikzz and possibly Europe, whom we now know has multiple players that could win a major. Beneath those players are a ton of people who could get a Top 100 resume with enough chances, like Solobattle, Pricent, and Rikzz.
On the other hand, a player like Salt has been practically everywhere in 2025. Her volume of big wins is as impressive as it looks, as she’s beaten Joshman, Aura, MOF, and Zamu, making multiple top eights. If I had to pick her worst notable loss of the season, it’s probably Zealot, a guy who not only has been a ‘secret’ Top 50 player forever, but whom she ended up beating in the runback anyway at that same event. Mind you, this was while beating KoDoRiN, Spark, and a whole slew of other players too.
Then we get into Axe, a surprise comeback story (but not really a surprise because he almost always does this after a slump) of 2025. With two major top eights, wins over Soonsay, SDJ, SFAT, Plup, Joshman, Spark, and Krudo, Axe is in the position of both having wins that currently look really great (like Joshman) and wins that look like they could age better over time given what we know about the long-term value of defeating them (like Plup).
moky’s a weird one. I feel like his year has actually been quite bad for his standards, and I originally didn’t mention him at all. But at the same time, he still has a pair of top eights (with losses to Cody), as well as wins over Aura, Aklo, and Axe. He should probably still be in this discussion too.
It’s your call as to which of these three deserve to have the tenth spot. But I’m going to go with Trif. I just think that finishing in second place at Genesis the way Trif did is basically akin to winning a smaller major and obtaining some agelessly great wins in the process too.