This weekend, Canada’s largest Super Smash Bros. event is going down in Toronto’s International Centre. The fifth iteration of a storied tournament series, Get On My Level 2018 boasts over 1,000 individual attendees, with stacked brackets of nearly 450 entrants in both major Smash titles.
On the Melee side, GOML didn’t draw all of the “gods”—but it will certainly feature all of the most prominent top players of 2018. The event’s top three seeds are Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma, Justin “Plup” McGrath, and Jason “Mew2King” Zimmerman. In other words, there have been three majors this year—GENESIS 5, Full Bloom 4, and Smash Summit 6—and each one of them has been won by one of the top three seeds of Get On My Level. In a sense, GOML will act as a tiebreaker between them to determine which player might be on his way to next year’s SSBMRank No. 1 spot. Though Hungrybox will still be entering this weekend as the favorite, his rivals have shown that they are more than capable of taking him out—as have other top players in the bracket, including Masaya “aMSa” Chikamoto, who seems to be playing some of the best melee of his life in 2018.
Beyond the top three seeds and aMSa, a number of interesting storylines will play out at GOML 2018. Three players in the next tier will be attending: Justin “Wizzrobe” Hallett, Zachary “SFAT” Cordoni, and Jeffrey “Axe” Williamson, the three players who rounded out the SSBMRank 2017 top ten. Each of them has had a relatively quiet year, with occasional flashes of brilliance, such as Axe’s near-victory over William “Leffen” Hjelte in Grand Finals of Flatiron 3. Get On My Level is an opportunity for one of these players to separate himself from the pack—or, as in the case of SFAT, to prevent himself from falling too far behind.
Additionally, many players who are hoping to break into the top ten, such as Jack “Crush” Hoyt and Zain “Zain” Naghmi, will be in attendance at GOML. With three “gods” and a smattering of other players who are floating around the top ten-top twenty range, there’s no telling who will end up in GOML’s top 8.
On the Smash 4 side, seven of the Panda Global Rankings top ten will be attending Get On My Level 2018, including luminaries such as Leonardo “MkLeo” Lopez Perez and Nairoby “Nairo” Quezada. While MkLeo, Nairo, and others will vie for victory at GOML, other elite players, such as Larry “Larry Lurr” Holland, will look to redeem themselves for recent underwhelming tournament runs. GOML and June’s Smash n’ Splash 4 will be the last two Smash 4 majors before the community learns more about Smash 5 at the Nintendo E3 invitational, and the results of these events will give considerable insight into the shape of the upcoming title’s metagame.
