EURank 2023: The Honourable Mentions
Europe is among the strongest regions in the world when it comes to competitive Super Smash Bros. Melee. With EURank2023 beginning its release tomorrow, we will use today to look at some of the players who are good enough to rank highly, but were excluded due to insufficient relevant data.
Leffen
This will not be a surprise to most of you. Leffen has been the highest-ranked European Melee player since 2019, and the few tournaments he did attend in 2023 confirmed that it would not have been any different. Unfortunately, Leffen only attended a single European tournament. He attended Smash @ Space 2, a tournament that was being held on a Tuesday, where his alternate ego Mewtwoman defeated some of Europe’s best players to win the tournament using — surprise, surprise — Mewtwo. His results at international events in 2023 were incredible, taking first place at the Ludwig Ahgren Championship Series 5 over the best players in the world, and we’re hoping that we will get to see him at European tournaments again this year.
Pricent
The best player in Norway is slowly making a return to the competitive Melee scene, and we couldn’t be happier about it. Pricent’s Fox is a pure joy to watch and when they showed up at Arcamelee #4, Pricent put forth a strong performance in singles. But even more impressive was their incredible gameplay in doubles, placing a strong 2nd place with Pipsqueak and only falling to Cody Schwab and Jmook. Anyone who has played against Pricent knows that they would be a lock-in for the very upper parts of this ranking, and independent of rankings and numbers, we are simply looking forward to seeing them again at events.
Jadde
I will let Flippy from Sweden take this one for me:
Every Europeans worst 3 AM unranked nightmare; the red Sheik from Stockholm. One of the longest still-active players in the Swedish Melee scene, Jadde has somehow become an even stronger player than before. You might be at the same tournament as Jadde and not even notice that he is attending until you see him walking up to the stage for his top 8 match. While Jadde doesn’t attend much locally, whenever he does enter tournaments abroad he really makes it count. It’s always a treat for us Swedes to see Jadde play, as it’s so rare for us to witness his insanely clean Sheik and even cleaner fits.
Jadde was on the EURank ballot that our panelists received, but enough of them voted that there wasn’t enough data from Jadde to accurately rank him. Hopefully we’ll see Jadde on an EURank in the future!
Steff$
Austria has historically been the country known for its hidden bosses, and Captain Falcon main Steff$ is their current number one. While Steff$ did not travel much in 2023, it seems like this is changing in 2024. European Captain Falcons have become a rare sight, so Steff$’s rise in the rankings is an exciting prospect for Melee players on this continent.
That’s it for our honorable mentions. Tomorrow we will begin by revealing the players ranked 50th-41st; we hope you are as excited as we are!
The EURank Team
Dominik “Nicki” Kunze — Director
Wout “Noxxa” van Poppel — Assistant Director & Data Lead
Nago — Assistant Director & Data Collection
EuO — Data Collection
Ambisinister — Data Processing
zondy — chill viber
Filip “Flippy” Tengwall — Graphics Lead
Brendan “GimmeDatWheat” Malone — Consultation
