For several minutes, a dumbfounded Mew2King was unable to process his own victory.
With the most stacked field in Smash Summit history, last weekend’s Smash Summit 6 was a tournament that many spectators entered with very high hopes. They weren’t disappointed.
For the first time since 2007’s Super Champ Combo, Mew2King walked away from Smash Summit 6 with a supermajor win, finally achieving what many in the scene doubted he’d ever do again by winning a tournament with all of the world’s elite players in attendance.
No bracket lucked helped Mew2King along this time—to get to Winner’s Finals, he defeated Adam “Armada” Lindgren and William “Leffen” Hjelte in back-to-back sets. There, he vanquished an unexpected opponent—Zain “Zain” Naghmi—before finishing his run with another 3-1 victory over Armada in Grand Finals.
After his Sheik lost a set to Justin “Plup” McGrath in pools, Mew2King relied on his infamous Marth to bring him to victory.
“All my fans were just saying, oh, just go Marth,” said the New Jersey native in his post-tournament interview. “So I was like, okay, fine.”
Zain’s run was historic in its own right. The up-and-coming Marth main achieved the highest-ever placement for a voted-in player at a Smash Summit event by defeating Joseph “Mang0” Marquez and Plup in winner’s bracket. This god-level run solidified Zain’s position as a major threat.
Mew2King and Zain’s Marth-powered performances were far from the only notable events of the weekend. In pools, Mang0 ran a train on the SSBMRank top 2, pulling out his Falco to defeat both Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma and Armada. This was Mang0’s first victory over Hungrybox with Falco, and the first time that he’s successfully defeated Armada with the bird since 2016. Though Mang0 faltered on the final day of the invitational, his resurgent Falco play is full of promise.
In a weekend marked by upsets, the most unexpected upset of all came in pools: Masaya “aMSa” Chikamoto’s shocking 3-2 victory over Hungrybox. Though the fan-favorite Yoshi main had taken games off of the Jigglypuff-playing world number one before, few could have foreseen that he’d actually take a set—Mang0’s falco notwithstanding, Hungrybox hadn’t dropped a set to a non-Fox player in over a year, and had certainly never lost to a mid-tier main.
But win aMSa did. As the in-venue crowd shrieked with excitement, the Red Yoshi grinded away three game wins over Hungrybox, finishing off the Floridian with a well-placed neutral air on the right side of Battlefield. aMSa would eventually finish his run at an impressive 7th place, but his Hungrybox victory made him one of the biggest winners of the event.
It’s unclear what we should expect from Melee post-Smash Summit 6. At the moment, it seems anything is possible; all of the gods are more than capable of defeating each other, and Mew2King has finally captured the supermajor title that he has long desired. Time will tell if last weekend’s upsets were a fluke—or if we’re entering a new, less top-heavy era of competitive Melee.
