Super Smash Bros: Weekly Wrap-Up - Week 6

Welcome to the sixth edition of GGRecon’s weekly Super Smash Bros. breakdown! Tune in every Friday for a quick-and-dirty recap of all the news worth knowing in the competitive Smash scene.

Glitched out

Last weekend’s main Smash event was Glitch 8, a Smash Ultimate major held in VGBootCamp’s Xanadu venue in Laurel, Maryland. Gavin “Tweek” Dempsey emerged victorious from the weekend-long tournament, winning his third Glitch title using a rotating selection of characters including Wario, Wolf, and Roy.

But Tweek’s victory didn’t come easy: to top the podium at Glitch 8, he had to fight off a fired-up Rasheen “Dark Wizzy” Rose, who obliterated Tweek in a 3-0 grand final reset before the TSM member found his footing in set two. Dark Wizzy’s run to grands also included victories over Samuel “Dabuz” Buzby and Eric “ESAM” Lew.

The most surprising underperformance of the event was that of Enrique “Maister” Hernández Solís. Fresh off of a newly minted top-10 ranking in this year’s Panda Global Rankings Ultimate, the Mexican Mr. Game & Watch main lost to Paris “Light” Ramirez and a Guillermo “Stroder” Martinez for a 17th-place finish.

A brief preview of GENESIS 7 

This weekend’s main event is GENESIS 7, the 2020 edition of the Smash community’s largest grassroots major. With thousand-plus entrance numbers and massive prize pools for both Smash Ultimate and Melee, #G7 is sure to be one of the most electrifying Smash tournaments of the year. Though EVO Japan is also going down this weekend, featuring many of Japan’s top Smash Ultimate players, GENESIS brings the rest of the world’s top Ultimate and Melee talent stateside.

On the Melee side, Juan “Hungrybox” DeBiedma holds the first seed, but he’s not necessarily the favorite to win. Breathing down his neck is Joseph “Mang0” Marquez, who won the last two Melee majors—including his own Birthday Bash event—and defeated Hungrybox 3-1 in their last meeting. Also in the hunt for the trophy are contenders such as William “Leffen” Hjelte, Justin “Wizzrobe” Hallett, and Jeffrey “Axe” Williamson.

Melee fans are also excited about the presence of another Smash “god” at GENESIS: Kevin “PPMD” Nanney, who recently announced that he will be commentating at the event.

A little birdie told me that PPMD was originally scheduled to co-commentate the first wave of Melee’s top 64 bracket alongside Adam “Armada” Lindgren. Unfortunately, this doesn’t look likely to occur, as Armada lost his passport and will be unable to attend the tournament.

On the Smash Ultimate side, Leonardo “MkLeo” Lopez Perez will look to score his fourth consecutive GENESIS victory this weekend. He’s certainly favored to accomplish this feat: the Mexican phenom has won the last five events he’s attended with his most recent tournament loss coming at the hands of Nairoby “Nairo” Quezada at Mainstage in September. 

There will be plenty of other top-level contenders in the bracket this weekend—Nairo, Tweek, Dabuz, and Ezra “Samsora” Morris come to mind—but MkLeo is undeniably the man to beat at GENESIS 7.

Be sure to tune in for EVO Japan this weekend as well; the stacked Japanese S-tier event features players such as Zackray, Tea, Shuton, and KEN. Unfortunately, however, due to Japanese law, the first prize at EVO Japan is simply a fancy gold Nintendo Switch Pro controller.

Rankings, rankings, rankings

This week marks the end of the release period for both the Melee Panda Global Rankings and the Panda Global Rankings Ultimate. You can access the full rankings here and here, but I wanted to call out a couple of the more interesting results below.

First of all, there are three Ice Climbers players ranked between 30 and 21 on the #MPGR: Daniel “ChuDat” Rodriguez at No. 23, Armand “ARMY” Del Duca at 26, and Connor “Bananas” Lamb at 28. There are a few notable things about these rankings. First of all, though this is evidence that Ice Climbers remain a strong part of the Melee metagame, it also shows that the character has seen somewhat of a decline over the past few months. It’s the first time since summer 2018 that there hasn’t been an Ice Climbers main within the top 20 rankings. Additionally, this result demonstrates the remarkable resurgence that ChuDat experienced in 2020. After being surpassed by both ARMY and Bananas in past rankings, Chu is back on top as the world’s best Ice Climbers player.

The PGRU has garnered a fair amount of criticism over its opaque algorithm, with a notable source of ire being the No. 22 rank assigned to Dark Wizzy shortly before the Mario main’s stellar bracket run at Glitch 8. But the real surprise of this season’s PGRU is the sheer number of Japanese players in the top 50. In the past, the sporadic nature of Japanese player activity has led Panda Global Stats to give Japanese events a multiplier in terms of their value towards the global rankings—but this might be proof that such a multiplier is no longer necessary. With the super-stacked EVO Japan this weekend, we’ll soon see much of this top-level Japanese talent in action

Roster moves

There was only one major roster change over the past week, with Stephen “Sandstorm” Myers joining Tempo Storm on January 21.

Though Sandstorm is primarily known as one of the world’s best Brawlhalla players, he is also an Ultimate pro: maining the “shotos” (Ryu and Ken, thus named for their Shōtōkan fighting style), he currently occupies the No. 1 spot on the Central Pennsylvania Smash Ultimate power rankings.

Clips of the week

To round out this wrap-up, here are a few of the funniest and flashiest clips of the week for both Melee and Ultimate. Enjoy ‘em—and be sure to check in next week for the seventh edition of GGRecon’s weekly Smash breakdown!