Best Smash Melee Players Based on 2022 Performance

Very often in Melee's history, there is someone that is clearly better than the other players. 2022, however, was a year where the competition for number 1 was higher than ever before. I say that because even though I and others would rank the Marth player, Zain, at number 1, it isn't by an enormous margin. That being said, damn was Zain good in 2022! He had an incredible start of the year by winning Genesis 8, the Melee tournament with the most entrants that year, and then winning Pound right after. He later would win Shine, and the incredibly stacked Ludwig Smash Invitational. The worst part is that when he won those events he didn't lose a single set and looked almost unbeatable. And if we are talking about raw placements, Zain is very good on that front, and he never got below 5th at any events he attended. Zain's biggest weakness is probably the fact that compared to other players of a comparable skill level, he is probably the most prone to get upset by random player, which does ...more

If we have to talk about one of Melee's most incredible stories, especially in 2022, we have to talk about aMSa. AMSa has been playing Melee for years, and with a character that pretty much nobody else plays at high level: Yoshi. People at first thought Yoshi was a bad character, but aMSa singlehandedly made people think he is much better than we actually thought. And when 2022 started, it already seemed like his best year so far. 5th at Genesis 8? 3rd at Pound? 4th at Battle of BC4? Those are very good results! Easily enough to be somewhere near the middle of the ranking for 2022. And then he got 2nd at Double Down, only losing to Cody, and this was easily the peak of aMSa's career at the time. We even started to ask ourselves if it was possible for a Yoshi to win a major. Little did we know that this part of the year would be where we would see aMSa's weakest performance in 2022. AMSa, who was Japanese player up until this point, ended up moving to Canada, so now this guy lives in ...more

Mango. The kid. The GOAT. All that stuff. The history behind this Melee player, who was considered to be one of the 5 gods, is quite massive to say the least, and he is extremely popular as well. So I guess that for some people it must have hurt quite a bit to see Mango having rather underwhelming results at the start of 2022. In fact, that somewhat extensive period of underwhelming results are pretty much the main reason why he isn't higher if you ask to me, since none of the other players in the top 5 or even some of the players outside of it had a period like this. Like aMSa similarly started his year not as good as he ended it, but he still did impressive stuff during that period of time where he was "weaker". However, even back then, I knew that at ANY TIME, Mang0 could come out and remind us why he is such a legendary player. And that moment happened when he won Super Smash Con. And Mang0 wasn't done, because he would also win Lost Tech City, Smash Summit 14, and Mainstage. In ...more

Cody Schwab, formerly known as IBDW, is simply an incredible Fox player that did amazingly this year. He has a couple of very good wins under his belt like Smash Summit 13, Double Down, and Phantom, as well as very good placings in tournaments he didn't win like 3rd at Genesis 8, 3rd at Big House 10, 2nd at Smash Summit 14, and 2nd at Mainstage. He also has very good head to heads with other players. He doesn't have as impressive wins as the players above him, and he did suffer from that time he got 9th at Function 2 and Pound (less so Ludwig Invitational, because again it's not that painful to lose in an event this stacked), but Cody is still an absolutely amazing player. And with him being second at Genesis 9 at the start of 2023, it doesn't seem like he is going to stop.

Here is the other former member of the five gods on this list. Hungrybox was pretty much the titan of 2017, 2018 and 2019 in competitive Melee, with his terrifying Jigglypuff, and even though he isn't unquestionably number 1 anymore, he is still one of the absolute best players that are currently in the game. In fact, most people agree that in 2022 there is a clear definitive top 5, and most people agree that Hungrybox is on here, so this is definitely an exploit. The main reason why he is the lowest of that top 5 is that his wins are probably the least impressive of the top 5, but it's not like he doesn't have any impressive wins, since he did win Get On My Level, where he notably got his legendary for many reasons win over Cody. Those who knows, knows. And it's not like winning Wavedash and Riptide was nothing too. He also arguably has some of the most impressive non wins placing on here with a second place at Pound, Super Smash Con, Scuffed World Tour, and most notably the Ludwig ...more

Formerly known as the Godslayer, for being the one to show that anyone can challenge the best in the worlds with enough training, Leffen is still a very good player this year. Leffen's biggest problem in 2022 was a lack of attendance, and the fact he didn't have the best results to make up for it. However he still has very good results, like an extremely impressive 3rd place at the Ludwig Smash Invitational, a win in Dreamhack Rotterdam that shown he is still the best European player out there, and most importantly, a rather dominant win in Battle of BC 4. Overall Leffen is truly great, and we need to watch out for him whenever he shows up.

Like Leffen, Plup does suffer from a lack of attendance, but still has great placings. In the middle of the year in particular, it was almost unreal how good Plup was. He had really good 2nd places at Smash Summit 13, Riptide and Lost Tech City, and even though his CEO 2022 win wasn't exactly the most impressive tournament win we saw this year, it is still a tournament win that he should be proud of. Unfortunately, he didn't have the best runs in Genesis 8, Smash Summit 14, and the Scuffed World Tour, but it doesn't take out his better results throughout the year. And he did get 4th at Genesis 9 which is really good, and we'll see if he'll continue having good results in 2023.

You would think that after wobbling, the infamous infinite that made Ice Climbers so good, got banned more than a year ago at this point, we wouldn't see Ice Climbers players making deep runs anymore. Well, it turns out SluG managed to do a lot of stuff in 2022. Like A LOT of really cool stuff. It started at Double Down 2022 where SluG managed to defeat Zain in an impressive upset, allowing SluG to end up at 4th place that tournament. If you thought this would be a one time thing we would never see again in the rest of the year, you wouldn't be ready for what would happen at the Ludwig Smash Invitational. This guy ended up in 4th place, beating Mango and Jmook along his way, only to lose in a tight 5 games against Hungrybox. He even got a very good 4th place at Mainstage after that, which is neat. The main reason why SluG manages to be in the top 10 is that despite not having any big tournament wins or anything, and never going beyond 3rd place, he has pretty much proven that he can ...more