Fall is always a fun time to be in New England. For starters, I’m convinced the weather here during this time of year is better than anywhere else at any other time. But then you get into sports season here, with both the Patriots and Celtics regular seasons being underway. If this were a non-Melee column, I’d be more than thrilled to talk about these two things (although less so on the Celtics). Hell, I’d love to even talk about Halloween (even if it’s over) or horror movies.
Then again, this is Monday Morning Marth, not Monday Morning Maye or Monday Morning Movies. In the slice of the world that connects you, the reader, to me, the writer, last weekend was a pretty notable weekend for members of New England Melee. Not only did VacationLAN happen all the way in Maine, but it featured some notable performances from fellow members of New England Melee – and the same could be said for two other tournaments that happened: Somnio Noctem in the Netherlands and the New York City Arcadian.
New England, New England. Where would I be without you? In today’s column, I’m going to recap these events and more from the perspective of the most notable New England Melee players attending them, as well as contextualize their performances in the broader time span of the year. For fun, I’m going to give each of them a really stupid horror-themed name.
EduPorp goes hamburgers at VacationLAN
EduPorp has long been a rising mid-level Captain Falcon player. I believe he’s originally from upstate New York, but his rise to prominence came a little bit after the pandemic when he saw big improvement within Maine, which is where he goes to school. Although I’ve always thought he was pretty good, I did not anticipate EduPorp to fully evolve into his new form this year (EDITOR’S NOTE: his Maine/New York relationship is actually the other way around).
Most notably, EduPorp made history at Mass Madness 51. Here, he won his first ever edition in an insane run where he beat kuro, Greenstach, bonfire10, Electroman, Kalvar, and Nairial. Around this time, I genuinely thought he was playing like the best player in New England. Right now, he might legitimately be top five in the region.
This brings us to last weekend. At VacationLAN, he once again beat bonfire10, also double eliminating Loadspiller and eliminating ChuDat from the tournament in fairly convincing form. Now, I’m not going to lie – I literally have no idea how good a ChuDat win is in the big 25, but my selfish request for the big 26 is that every New England and upstate New York player run a community fund to get EduPorp out to out-of-region majors. ALL FEAR THE MONSTER OF MAINE!
Lati makes top eight at the NYC Arcadian
Does Connecticut count as Tristate or is it New England? This debate will never be settled. For now though, for the purpose of a narrative, I am going to count it as New England, because this state has another rising Captain Falcon that I’ve enjoyed seeing come to the regional spotlight this year. That player is Lati, who finished as an honorable mention on the most recent Connecticut PR in July.
Since then, Lati has really impressed me. Earlier this year, I made a brief note of her victory over Squid at Collision, and she’s one of the most consistent performers at locals, where she usually makes top eight and goes toe-to-toe with most of the PR. She’s a very safe pick to make it in the next edition for that matter. With that said, she’s also taken local and regional sets over GabeGlitches, Golden, and FutureShock, so she might be the Captain Falcon ditto master.
As far as her Arcadian performance goes, she had a strong run to fifth place as the eleven seed, going on a big losers run to fifth place, where she only lost to fellow Connecticut standout Conflict (whom I would also write about, but he was seeded highly anyway to place well at this event, and I decided to just pick one player per tourney this column). Among her other wins, she defeated Jango, the fifth seed of the event, in a top eight qualifier match. Honestly, I thought Lati was slightly underseeded at this event, but it happens; an Arcadian in a very stacked region could have the seeding determined at the margins. Anyway – for her performance, I will now dub her THE CREATURE FROM CONNECTICUT!
regEx takes on Europe at Somnio
I rarely play Melee any more, but earlier this fall, I was playing a Marth on unranked that was moving incredibly fast and fooling around going for flashy combos and incredibly aggressive options. Infuriatingly, he was also hard to hit. I have to confess that I legitimately thought it was Ossify and went to check the connect code, only to notice that it referenced Zelda. It was then that it hit me that this was just regEx (a notorious Zelda-lover).
Like I’ve done with other regional stars, I’ve talked about regEx before multiple times – most notably when I mentioned him as someone to look out for at Unranked. Since then though, he’s been pretty quiet on the national stage. Although regEx had strong local performances, he hasn’t really had a breakthrough in terms of bigger results, usually placing at or just around his seed. Then he went to Somnio Noctem in the Netherlands. Initially, I thought regEx had a really tough bracket, as his round-of-sixteen draw was a nine-vs-eight seed draw of Jadde, a Swedish Sheik that has literally defeated Pipsqueak before and is the walking embodiment of a “Top 100 by vibes” European hidden boss. But after Jadde sent him to losers bracket, apparently it did not deter him at all – regEx went on to take down a bunch of top European talent: Raptori, Psylo, astar, irfan, and Jadde in the runback before falling to Jamie for fourth place.
While I am not sure that regEx has a Top 100 ballot-worthy resume for this whole year, he’s certainly trending in that direction for the future. I don’t know what his plans are with the game, but I hope he travels to more events and keeps his activity trajectory going upward for 2026. That, my friends, will be the year where the world truly sees the final form of…THE BEAST OF BOSTON!