Best Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Players Based on 2022 Performance

Once again, MkLeo is widely 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 other 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. 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 at his weakest. He got 5th at Super Smash Con, where he notably got 3-0'd 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.

However, at the end of the day, there are still many tournaments where Leo reminds us that he is still an amazing player, and in my and others' opinion, still the best player in the game right now. Not to mention his worst performances are still performances other players would dream to have, and that he has that huge of a standard. He won 7 major tournaments and won the most supermajors out of any player with 4. Genesis 8 and the Ludwig Invitational probably being his biggest wins.

The latter in particular was an invitational full of almost every player that is considered to be the best players in the world, and he proceeded to only lose one game the entire tournament! And it took place right after he got 9th at Summit, so it really served as a reminder of how he is still the GOAT. And even though he didn't exactly end the year in style since he got 5th at the Scuffed World Tour, it does not undo the previous results he got throughout the year. When 2023 started, he proceeded to... more

Honestly, if you told me acola did better in 2022 than MkLeo, I wouldn't blame you. This 16-year-old, previously unranked player suddenly appeared on the scene at the start of the year. He immediately proceeded to win almost every Japanese tournament he came across. You can literally count the number of Japanese tournaments he didn't get first place in on one hand.

acola definitely ruled over his home country, which says a lot since some people argue that Japan is the strongest region in all of Smash Ultimate, myself included. But if you think he would only be good in Japan, think again. He won the Gimvitational, and although he got 4th place at Ultimate Summit 5, this was the worst performance of his whole career, alongside that one time he got 4th place at Maesuma Offline in Kagawa.

And it didn't stop there, as he got second place at the incredibly stacked Ludwig Smash Invitational and won his first open supermajor outside of Japan with Let's Make Moves Miami. He did become a little less dominant in Seibugeki 12, where he placed 9th, his actual worst result in his career, and "only" got 4th place at the Scuffed World Tour. However, he still won Kagaribi 9 right after that.

And if you think he'll stop being as good in 2023, despite his 7th place at Genesis 9, he has already won two Japanese majors. You could argue that acola is a representation of Smash Ultimate. He is a super-duper good player and yet he is only 16 years old, showing that in Smash Ultimate, anyone can come at any time and make a case to be one of the best of the best. Also, he mains Steve and occasionally plays Kazuya, which are probably the most infamous characters in Ultimate, so that helps him being a representation of Ultimate.

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. 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 second place at RETA 2022, third at Genesis 8, winning Low Tide City 2022, and getting fourth at Ludwig's. His worst placings were a seventh 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 break out 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 rather important to build a case for being the best in the world because if you do very well throughout the whole year but only went to a few tournaments, it's hard to say if you were just on a good day during those tournaments and that you wouldn't have won the tournaments you didn't go to.

That's why I say there is another dimension where Sparg0 is number one in the year because maybe he would have won a lot more tournaments if he didn't go on a hiatus. Perhaps 2023 would be the one, especially since he keeps on getting very respectable results. You still need to watch out for his terrifying Cloud for the rest of 2023.

At first, I was somewhat hesitant to put Shuton in the top five. Out of all the players in my top five, Shuton is arguably the one that lacks the most super peak results. By that, I mean even the other players below him had tournaments where it felt like they were on top of the world, that they were the best player in the world that 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 8s, and whenever he got beaten by another player, it was rarely a bad loss.

His best performance was probably at the end of the year at the Scuffed World Tour. Although he may have gotten only third, he went on to defeat Sonix, Glutonny, MkLeo, and even acola, who was the one to send him to 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 describe 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 four 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 third 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 a really good player.

Knowing how good Tweek was before, this was a rather disappointing year for Tweek, all things considered. He started the year strongly with a 2nd place at Collision, but as soon as Genesis 8 started, where he got 33rd, it started to go downhill from there. Not that he didn't have good results, but the results he got were never the ones 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 thought, "His opponents were just really good that day". And the best part is that I was right because ever since this Summit, Tweek went into a bit of 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 a 13th place at Ludwig's, which again isn't a tournament to be ashamed of not placing that well in, he placed 7th at Let's Make Moves Miami, only losing to Riddles, which isn't a bad loss at this point, and Acola, who is not only really good but would win the tournament by the end.

But the last three tournaments he went to this year were when he truly got crazy. He finally won his first major in years with Port Priority, where he did one of the craziest loser's runs in Ultimate history. And he got 2nd at both Mainstage and Scuffed World Tour, losing against Spargo for both.

I guess what we can learn from Tweek and even players like MkLeo is that at any time a player can have really good, and then not as good results, only to come back stronger than ever, and that we shouldn't pretend that we know exactly what will happen every time at every tournament. And it seems like Tweek is set to have a promising 2023, with him already winning the last Let's Make... 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, but it's not like he was mostly getting second places. He mostly wasn't getting top four. He sometimes didn't even get top eight. 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 third place at Ultimate Summit 4, and then he 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.