Best Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Players Based on 2022 Performance

Once again, MkLeo is wildly considered the greatest Super Smash Bros Ultimate player of all time. However, 2022 was probably his worst year yet, due to how good everyone else has gotten. It is very possible that by the end of 2023 we will see someone else than MkLeo be considered the best player during that year. Right from the start, we saw how he wouldn't be as dominant, by getting his first placement out of the top 2 in years in Smash Ultimate Summit 4 where he got 4th, and this event repeated when he got 3rd at Collision and G4 Smash Invitational. When the second half of the year kicked in, MkLeo was perhaps when he looked at his weakest. He got 5th at Super Smash Con, where he notably got 3-0d by Onin, the set where he arguably got humiliated the most. Not only that, but he got 9th at Ultimate Summit 5, his worst major placing ever since Umebura Japan Major in may 2019! To be fair, Ultimate Summit 5 was absolutely crazy, but still, Leo looked weaker than ever during that period. ...more

Honestly, if you told me acola did better in 2022 than MkLeo I wouldn't blame you. This 16 years old previously unranked player suddenly appeared into the scene at the start of the year, he immediately proceeded to win almost any japanese tournament he would come across. You can literally count the amount of japanese tournaments he DIDN'T get first in on one hand. acola definitely ruled all over his home country, which does say a lot since some people would argue Japan is the strongest region in all of Smash Ultimate, myself included. But if you think he would only be good in Japan, you can guess again. He won the Gimvitational, and when he got 4th at Ultimate Summit 5 this was the worst performance of his whole career alongside that one time he got 4th at Maesuma offline in Kagawa. And it didn't stopped there since he got second at the incredibly stacked Ludwig Smash Invitational, and won his first opened supermajor outside of Japan with Let's Make Moves Miami. He did get a little ...more

I feel like in another dimension, the new rising star Sparg0 would have been the best Smash player of 2023. In fact, there is a strong case for us to say that at the start and the end of the year he was the best player in the world. He won his first major ever with Ultimate Summit 4, and continued the streak by winning Collision. And at the end of the year he won Mainstage and the Scuffed World Tour. He also got other good results in the middle of all this like a second place at RETA 2022, 3rd at Genesis 8, winning Low Tide City 2022, and getting 4th at Ludwig's. His worst placings were a 7th place at both the Gimvitational and Smash Ultimate Summit 5, which were both crazy invitationals with crazy events. In fact those were the worst results in all of his career ever since he started to breakout after in person tournaments came back. The only reason I say he is only third place is that there was a period of time where Sparg0 stopped competing for a while. Attending tournaments is ...more

At first I was somewhat hesitating to put Shuton in the top 5, since out of all the players in my top 5, Shuton is arguably the one that lacks the most super peak results. By that I mean, with even the other players below him you could see tournaments where it felt like they were on top of the world, that they were the best player in the world that one day. And I am someone who values peak results more than most people. However, Shuton's consistency is simply too high for me to put him any lower. He only missed two top 8, and whenever he got beaten by another player, it was rarely a bad loss. His best performance though was probably at the end of the year at the Scuffed World Tour though. He may have gotten only third, he went on to defeat Sonix, Glutonny, MkLeo, and even Acola who was the one to sent him in losers in the first place. Throughout the year I felt like Shuton was missing that really good run, but by the end he got it.

The way I would described Tea's run in 2022, it would be that he was "The Europe slayer". This Pac Man player from Japan went to Europe and won 4 tournaments over there. Say what you will about Europe not being as strong as the US, Mexico or Japan, but this is still amazing. Not to mention his 3rd place at WANTED is still another amazing Europe result. His results weren't the best in NA and even Japan, but even then he did get third at Double Down and second at Battle of BC 4 which is really good. So yeah, Tea is really good player.

Knowing how good Tweek was before, this was a rather disappointing year for Tweek all things considered. He did start the year rather strongly with a 2nd place at Collision, but as soon as Genesis 8 started where he got 33rd, it started to go down from here. Not that he didn't have good results, but the results he got were never the one we expected from this once amazing player. It's not like he always lost to players that were on fire that day. However, when I watched Ultimate Summit 5, I already felt that something was different. Sure Tweek was only 7th in this tournament, but he did a lot of crazy stuff during that tournament with his Diddy Kong, and when he lost I was like "His opponents were just really good that day". And the best part is that I was right, because ever since this Summit, Tweek went a bit into a renaissance of some sort. He was 4th at the Big House, only losing to Riddles, who would end up winning the tournament, and Light who is obviously really good. And after ...more

ProtoBanHam is kind of an interesting anomaly. Before Acola came in, ProtoBanHam was the one who ruled over Japan by winning many tournaments over there with his Lucina and Min Min. Now however, obviously Acola is the one winning most Japanese tournaments now, but it's not like he was mostly getting second places. He was mostly wasn't getting top 4. He sometimes didn't even get top 8. So why is he on the list you might ask? Well, for some reason the very few North American results he got are absolutely INSANE! His worst placement in NA was a 3rd place at Ultimate Summit 4, and then the proceeded to win Ultimate Summit 5 and Double Down. He was pretty much slaying North America. We do need more good results for me to put him higher, but I understand all the people I saw on Twitter that said he was the best player of all time right after we saw him win Ultimate Summit 5. Crazy player.