Three years ago, I wrote a column assessing Zain’s legacy. At the end of it, I wrote, “I eagerly await writing a follow-up to this column in two years.” I might be a little late, but hey – good things eventually come to those who wait. Given that Zain has won his fifth major of the year (sixth big event if you count Full Bloom), and has effectively locked up the number one spot on SSBMRank, it seems as appropriate of a time as ever to revisit the topic of Zain’s legacy.
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Happy big Monday and a huge grats to both @ZainNaghmi *and* @Light_S21 who made Wavelength a very Moist affair 💦
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— Moist Esports 💦 (@MoistEsports) October 7, 2024
In this column, I’m going to break down the numbers behind Zain’s legacy. While including comparison points in the context of his career, I’m going to be essentially breaking down where he stands in terms of major top eights, major wins, supermajor wins, and how his longevity shapes up in comparison to his peers. I’ll conclude the piece by talking about where I would rank Zain as of right now and then make some predictions for how his legacy could shape up in another two years. Although with how long it took for me to write this piece, you can expect my assessment to come a little late.
NOTE: As with most of my columns on this topic, I’m using Liquipedia as my source for what qualities as a major or supermajor.
Zain’s Current Pace
To get a fairly obvious thing out of the way here, Zain’s been playing for about ten years. Four years from when he started, he won his first major, six years from when he started, he won his first supermajor (premier), and though the pandemic threw a wrench in his initial ascent, Zain officially finished number one in the world for the first time in 2022. As I mentioned before, he’s on pace to do that again this year.
I’ll put it this way: in pure longevity, Mang0 and Hungrybox have a near-unreachable advantage. Those two have, more or less, had about two decades’ worth of seriously competing in Melee. In terms of longevity, it’s not even a question of who has the advantage in this category vs. Zain – it’s clearly them. However, what we can certainly measure is who has the advantage in terms of pace. Where were those two in terms of their first ten years of competing?
For Mang0, he started roughly around 2004, per his own words. By the end of 2014, he had effectively wrapped up a second consecutive year at No. 1 in Melee’s official rankings. Although the scene lacked truly prestigious rankings in the Brawl Era, it would be safe to assume that Mang0 was roughly the best player for at least a year and a half of that era, if the scuffed RetroSSBMRank assessments give us anything to work from. Whether or not you agree whether Mang0 should have been number one in 2008 or 2010 is beside the argument; for now, we’re using it as a rough measuring stick. If you don’t want to acknowledge those statistics at all, the long story short is that he won 15 majors in 10 years. There were fewer majors, so it’s not necessarily a great one-to-one comparison point, but it does give us something to work with.
Looking at Hungrybox, who started in 2007, his journey was a bit different. Similar to Mang0, he had an initial ascent to the top echelon of play and Hungrybox also won his first major in fairly quick fashion. After that initial rise though – and a somewhat shaky claim for number one in 2010 – Hungrybox settled into a gatekeeper role for the top level until the last few years of his first decade. He’d obviously end 2017 with one of the most dominating tourney streaks of all-time and win his first official number one. With 20 major wins in his career at the end of that period, he technically was on a better decade-long pace than Zain is right now, although the vast majority of such wins came in the final few years. It was hardly as steady of a climb to the top as Zain’s respective path.
You’ll notice that I conspicuously have not mentioned Armada yet. That’s because it’s been six years since Armada’s retirement, and unlike Hungrybox or Mang0, he’s not active. His legacy, in a sense, is less about longevity at this point (although it is still amazing) and more about how consistently dominant he was during his era. Fr whatever it’s worth, Armada began playing in 2005 – entering his first event coincidentally on the same day that Mew2King entered his first event . By the end of 2015, he had wrapped up his first ever official number one ranking, although in similar fashion to Mang0, he had years during the Brawl Era where he won the biggest respective events of each year and could be argued as number one. In total, he won 11 majors, which, in similar fashion, doesn’t entirely reflect his legacy, but is something to consider.
Major Top 8s
As a disclaimer: I do not think that the number of major top eights by themselves will make or break Zain’s career. Winning majors – particularly supermajors – is the only thing that will significantly move the needle for him in any upward direction. Simply making a top eight is clearly not going to suddenly turn him into the GOAT. At the same time though, it is interesting, so I’m going to share how Zain stacks up purely within this category.
To return to Armada for a moment, a common statistic that you’ll often see cited in all-time Smash discussions is the fact that Armada never missed a major top eight. This is technically not true, as Armada DQ’d midway into EGLX 2016 (and also DQ’d from DreamHack Austin 2017 before the tournament), but at the same time, that’s me being a pedant. In terms of the criteria being “at events where he did not DQ or sandbag,” the sentiment behind this statement is undeniable. And it’s absolutely worth noting: at all 55 majors that Armada entered and didn’t DQ from, he made the top eight. It’s an exceptional accomplishment and something that he boasts in nine years of top-level activity.
I mention this because the last time that Zain missed a major top eight was Genesis 6, which may as well have happened during the Middle Ages. Since then, Zain has made 46 consecutive major top eights, and with Wavelength, he technically passed Armada in volume. Again; this streak itself is just one stand-in benchmark for consistency – Hungrybox had this for a decade and nobody would have called him more consistent than Armada – but Zain is slowly, yet surely, heading into Armada-levels of reliability vs. the field.
Major Wins
With Zain’s Wavelength win, he tied Ken for fourth-most number of major victories in SSBM history. This places Zain six beneath Armada, 17 below Mang0, and 21 behind Hungrybox for all-time major wins. However, we know that not every major is the same. If we looked purely at supermajors, by Liquipedia’s criteria, do we have any perspective on how the numbers could shape up differently?
Premier Wins
The truth: yes, but also not really for Zain. In fact, this discussion opens itself to a ton of questions surrounding the criteria for what qualifies as a supermajor. Several Smash Summits are not included here, and Liquipedia’s volunteer team has understandably not yet reviewed a ton of older events during the MLG Era. I still think that this is a somewhat useful metric by proxy to examine for Zain, but it is certainly up for debate in terms of what’s most valuable. It’s also worth noting that I did not include the most fundamentally open question in terms of assessing Zain’s legacy.
The Specter of Online
Clearly, the online period is the big asterisk or question mark that will define how you see Zain’s legacy. Because we played a different format of Melee – and even a different game, in a sense – we essentially had a two-year period where Zain was informally recognized as the best player in a version of the game that we knew was a temporary fix until in-person events returned.
Further complicated is the fact that Zain effectively saw declines in performances and outright activity (due to distance) from several of his toughest peers. Not to discredit his achievements, but it’s not a coincidence that a large contributing factor to his success was the disappearance of Leffen and aMSa from his tournament brackets. You could additionally note that the declines in performances from each of Hungrybox, Plup, and Axe helped create favorable conditions for Zain to take off. At the same time, and while nobody would argue that online is the exact same thing as offline Melee, it was the primary way in which the community could play Melee for about 18 months or so.
It feels like a mistake to totally discount this period, but it seems naive to count it as one-to-one in the record books for all-time major statistics. This is a period that will always have an asterisk behind it – and I’d also add that Zain’s “major” win count during it is furthermore inflated by the unusual single-elimination format of Summit Champions League, which technically gives him five “majors.” To me, it does “count” in terms of his legacy, but it exists in a strange area of competitive achievements. It probably gives Zain an additional edge above people we’d already consider him well above on a Melee pantheon (like, say, Leffen or, in my opinion, Ken, for whom a nonzero portion of competitive success came before the existence of anything resembling the modern ruleset). However, I’m putting a hard stop on the idea that Zain’s online dominance brings him into the same territory as Armada.
Zain’s Future
All in all, Zain is practically guaranteed to finish No. 1 on an official ranking period for the second time in his career and he is currently tied fourth for most major victories of all-time. I think the numbers point to a safe conclusion that Zain is the fourth greatest Melee player ever. Maybe – maybe if you truly view online as utterly worthless and think his time at the top isn’t anywhere as dominant as Ken or Armada at their best – you could place him fifth.
I personally don’t buy it, but I could see someone making this argument, and it’s not too unconvincing. Ken and Armada also never had people who consistently thwarted them to the extent that a player like aMSa right now is thwarting Zain. This isn’t to say Zain hasn’t earned his victories; he’s just been clearly very lucky in some of them as well. Although at the same time, this is more convincing for Armada because of the unusual nature of Armada’s head-to-head greatness, which Ken doesn’t have in the same capacity. Then again, Ken won more big events at a higher rate than basically anyone else in the history of the game. It’s hard to say how that stacks up vs. players of a modern period.
I did promise another prediction for two years from now, so here goes nothing: by this point in time for 2026, the topic of Zain vs. Ken won’t even be a real discussion. It will be so painstakingly obvious that Zain will have him beat by the major win count and another number one year would add more fuel to the fire. The more interesting shift in legacy, however, will be the chance of Zain outright passing Hungrybox on an all-time list. The circumstances required for this to happen would be Zain maintaining enough of his current dominance vs. Hungrybox in the head-to-head to hold a significant advantage relative to the field in winning the biggest events. If Zain won, say, three more supermajors in two years, while Hungrybox only won smaller events, he’d be suddenly ahead in the most important category of all-time players: supermajor victories. Would Hungrybox’s longevity and status as having the most major wins be enough to keep him ahead of a player with more prestigious wins in fewer years at the top?
I think that’s the furthest Zain goes in two years though. There may be a few people who point to the online period as the difference-maker for Zain vs. Armada or Mang0, but it won’t be convincing enough without multiple number ones or a frankly unprecedented supermajor-winning streak from Zain. It’s possible, but I don’t buy it. As a point of reference, it took Zain a little over two years to win his most recent four premiers, from Genesis 8 to GOML X. Meanwhile, Armada won three in a row from Evo 2015 to Genesis 3, in roughly half-of-a-year. Mang0, on the other hand, seems like he will always be in supermajor contention, which could make the gap between him and Zain more difficult to close. All in all though, it is potentially a conversation we could be having in our community. That speaks to how timelessly amazing Melee remains after so many years, and it’s a testament to our great competitors that so many of them remain as active as ever.