Since Riptide, Melee hasn’t really had a major. Last weekend, however, we had a few interesting regionals happen in Indiana’s Kill Roy: Volume 9, Ireland’s Teaghlach, and upstate New York’s Frame 17. In fact, I haven’t even brought up Luminosity Makes Moves Miami 2025 or its very scuffed one-day Arcadian side event. Is LMMM a major? Should Walmart Shoes and DayDream both battle for the title of “true Arcadian” champion? They couldn’t last weekend because they were in different continents.
For a while, I sat on what to write about for this week’s Monday Morning Marth. Where I landed was that sometimes the best things to write about are the most obvious. In today’s piece, I’m just going to talk about the results I found most interesting across a quiet, yet definitely jam-packed weekend of Melee events.
Teaghlach
Long-time readers of this column know I have a soft spot for Europe. In a North America-dominated scene, it’s always great to see a spotlight shined on any other continent scene. With our neighbors across the Atlantic in particular, there’s always been a ton of history in European Melee as well. Naturally speaking, I was very thrilled to see Ireland have such a big event.
I want to begin by talking about the regional crew battles here. Although the “Rest of the World” crew (Joshman, Soonsay, Jadde, DonB, and IuDKing) ended up taking home the gold medal in this format as expected, it wasn’t without a fight from their opponents. England upsetting them in the winners bracket was particularly surprising, and the USA came just two stocks short of beating the Rest of the World too. Funnily enough, my favorite crew battle of the tournament was the USA barely holding off Ireland by two stocks.
Moving to doubles, I loved the underdog run achieved by the UK’s very own HoorayForJay/R23. The two entered this event as the five seed and went on to finish in second, beating Kevbot/Fout NL, and the two top seeds in Joshman/SluG and Soonsay/DonB. Granted, Joshman/SluG ended up winning the tournament anyway, but this was still cool to see. Although the doubles ball-knowers have hyped up HoorayForJay/R23 for a while, it’s a significant step up to go from being recognized as really good within the continental scene to actually beating two internationally renowned top players.
Obviously though, I was most excited by the singles bracket. In general, any field that features a decent favorite (like Joshman, a Top 5 player), a couple competitors not that far behind them (Soonsay and SluG), and then a bunch of high octane regional talent makes for more interesting brackets. Ultimately, it was Soonsay who ended up winning the event, beating Joshman in winners finals and holding off a ferocious SluG in the second set of grand finals. Soonsay’s at a caliber of results where the next step forward is entering major contention, but for what it’s worth, this is probably the biggest tournament win of his career. Not everyone who’s been ranked in the bottom half of Top 10 or has hovered around it can casually win an event over a Top 5 player.
Outside of Soonsay, there was plenty to celebrate for Europe though. After being fairly quiet for most of the year, Frenzy had a great fourth-place performance in which he beat Kevbot. For home region players, each of Frogchip and maXy did great too, with Frogchip beating DayDream and maXy, and maXy beating HPR. The two both represent different eras of strong Irish players too, with Frogchip’s come-up being more recent and maXy’s happening near the end of the 2010s. Lastly, though I wasn’t surprised by him finishing in seventh place, I’m always thrilled to see the Swedish Sheik and hidden boss Jadde at a big event. It’s a rare event, and he unfortunately DQ’d out of Let’s Drink The Pool, but he also beat Quang earlier this year at Valhalla. I believe he will be attending DreamHack Stockholm, so there may be more Jadde in the year to look forward to.
Kill Roy: Volume 9
Kill Roy’s been happening for quite some time, but in addition to the double-digit number of Top 100 talent present, another noteworthy bit of news for this year’s edition had to be the reemergence of Syrox. Remember that guy, the rising Fox star of the late 2010s who suddenly disappeared? He’s back! Syrox recently won a smaller event over Dova in Hawaii, but to my knowledge, Kill Roy was his first notable regional appearance since Low Tier City 6.
Before talking about Syrox and singles bracket though, I am going to briefly shout out a great doubles storyline: Indiana’s Blue/coffee holding down the fort and defending the state from the invaders. After being sent to the losers bracket early by Balloon Day/Bodunga of the Pooplands, these two went on a big run. Among others, they defeated top seed voorhese/Reeve, Seven/Holiday, fellow Indiana team Fraggin&Laggin/IMDRR, and then beat Ohio’s Drephen/Boyd twice to win the event. This was the main story of doubles, although it’s worth noting that voorhese/Reeve were the ones to initially send Seven/Holiday to the losers bracket too.
There’s a ton to jump into singles. Medz entered as the top seed and ended up winning as expected, but the real star of the show was Grab. Along with spoiling Syrox’s winners bracket, he proceeded to defeat Seven and coffee en route to third place. In the spirit of honoring Grab’s notoriously blunt way of articulating his feelings on tournaments, I will state that at his prior three events, his results have sucked. This was a much celebrated return to form for someone whom I believe is much better than his recent major performances. As far as Syrox goes, he ended up finishing in ninth place, slightly above where he was seeded (13th). I wasn’t really sure how he’d perform heading into this event, but because I knew had been doing well against Dova in Hawaii, so my guess was that he would be in contention for top eight, but either get upset early or take down a big name. Beating Holiday seemed to confirm that Syrox is still capable of beating Top 50 talent, which is exciting. While he ended up losing to Grab and coffee for ninth place, I’d love to see more of Syrox at big events in the future.
On that note, another big storyline of this event came from how Indiana players performed in singles. Following being sent to the losers bracket by Namzerra (FKA Nanami), coffee went on a run, beating dz, Just, Syrox, Blue and Boyd before finishing in fourth place. In addition to the volume of strong players he defeated, there’s something cool about the nature of whom he beat; it feels like a potpourri of rising Top 100 ballot talent from 2018 to now. Meanwhile, Blue beat fellow Midwest star Ober in one of the most entertaining sets of the tournament before then beating Pleeba on the way to seventh place. Butterdonkey, whom I’ve talked about in this column before as an enigmatic hidden boss, had a strong run to seventh place where he beat Balloon Day, M1sf1re, and Namzerra. Also, IMDRR defeated Reeve for 25th place and Majersk won sets over each of Dova and Ober before falling to Seven for ninth place.
Frame 17
We then get to upstate New York, where the 17th edition of the Frame series happened. I believe this is the first one since Jmook’s return to the region, so there are quite a few storylines to get into. I’ll begin with an obscure one in doubles (shocker), where MOOSE/Wills ended up winning over BING/lumor in a bit of a pleasant surprise. Zanya/ayeGiohh were the strong favorites to win, but Zanya was late, so ayeGiohh ended up teaming with Arstar, a local player, in her place; they ended up bowing out to Nicky/Jboss and Chris/Swaghetti for seventeenth place.
For singles, the first thing that comes to mind is Zanya taking her first set from Jmook. This is a big deal; before it, she had lost seven straight sets. Although Jmook ended up winning the event through losers bracket anyway, I believe that this is the first serious set he’s lost against an upstate player in quite some time. Discounting a bar local earlier this year where Jmook and lumor randomly went toe-to-toe for fifteen games (and apparently involved some Zelda shenanigans), the closest thing I can find to a last time where an upstate player beat Jmook in-region was when 2saint beat him at See Me On LAN 4. But I also don’t know if 2saint was in that region or in New Jersey or New York City around that time.
I was pretty impressed by Maher’s third place run, where he most notably defeated BING in losers semifinals. Though they’ve had close sets before, BING’s typically had his number and had one of the most shocking breakout years in 2024, so this is a great addition to Maher’s year, in which he began it by beating SFAT at Genesis. On another note, lumor had a neat losers bracket run where after losing a tight set with Jango in winners, he ended up making it all the way back to losers quarterfinals where he barely lost to Maher.
Luminosity Makes Moves 2025
I’ll conclude with a weekend-long event that’s smaller than each of the ones I talked about, but had more top player draw. Starting with the Arcadian side event, the clear storyline of Friday was Kola – yes, the Ultimate player – coming close to winning the event and just finishing in second place. The winner of the Arcadian was South Florida’s very own Walmart Shoes, a Mr. Game & Watch player that’s beaten multiple Top 100 players before. I wonder if this is the biggest event that a Mr. Game & Watch main has won; the only other one that comes to mind is a Mass Madness last year that glock in my toyota won. Unfortunately, Walmart Shoes ended up going 2-2 in the actual bracket and drowning in pools. Man; the life of a low tier player.
I thought Hungrybox and moky’s new adventure as a doubles team would have ended after Collision, but apparently these guys are committed. In the wake of Cody Schwab/Jmook apparently getting bored with doubles, Hungrybox/moky have taken their place as the main team to beat. This time, they didn’t even drop a set, once again winning a big doubles tournament over Krudo/Panda. The next doubles major that happens, I hope these two get a shot at Cody/Jmook because it’s been so long since anyone has seriously challenged them. No; I am not putting a bounty on Cody/Jmook.
One of the main storylines of the singles bracket here was how DontTestMe would perform. He ended up finishing in 17th place, scoring a win over Zasa (who upset Chem in the winners bracket). But more interesting than Zain’s Roy was JChu’s run to fifth place here. Following a loss to Aklo, he went beast mode in the losers bracket, beating prof, Gahtzu, Krudo, and Magi. For another breakout Florida player, Wevans beat Chem and Spark to finish in ninth place. Then again, Wevans didn’t really break out here when you think about it – earlier in 2025 he beat lloD, so maybe it’s more accurate to say he’s just cracked.
I was initially uninterested in the top brass of this event, but I have to admit that the grand finals ended up being a heater. We got fifteen games of Hungrybox and moky going toe-to-toe, with wild swings throughout their sets. For Hungrybox, this was his third big event win of the year after Genesis and CEO. For moky, who hasn’t really had his heart in competition for much of this year per his own words, I thought it was his strongest performance since Full House. I’m interested to see how he and Hungrybox each perform come the next legit major; maybe these two can stop the reign of Zain (and perhaps beat Cody on the way as well).