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Covid 2020 Allegations Most tourneys being in NA and Smash not looking promising monetarily after the allegations were probably good reasons for anyone to stop playing. In the end, you'll make more money streaming than competing. It's also budget friendly too since they won't have to a lot on airline ticket/hotel/ubers/food while in the U.S.

Imagine Hbox RTC resting in 2015-2016. He would never lose a match. He was forced to start doing this to keep up with the higher level of play from everyone across the board.

yeah i’m sure it would be easy for you in a last stock situation at a major 😂

Good ol juan

Congrats on the Nouns 2025 sponsorship!! I agree that this is a fascinating aspect of Melee mid-tier matchups. Looking forward to commentators trying to dissect the plays and counterplays that come up in tournament next year.

Congratulations on the Nouns Sponsorship! Your "hard work" is paying off ;)

13:51 - this may be a philosophical question, but if you play the Red and white ICs your main climber is the girl, so the NPC part of duo should be Popo. Or is the NPC one always called Nana?

The angle at 18:43 was insane

Pound 2 Chudat as a major is crazy, but IMO this whole conversation is kind of dumb. icies could totally win a major :P

A well articulated, great video. It felt like it was going into a sponsor me type vibe but after hearing your rational, logical analysis and the fire burning in your soul to compete and learn, not to mention the entertainment factor of a new character in the mix, I’m rooting for you Nikki Good luck!❤🎉

It wouldnt surprise me that another version of wobbling might win a major

I think any character above ganon on tier list can win a major

Oommmmmgggg ich bin sooooo betrunken 😭😭😭 nickiiiii 😭😭😭

My view is that if you can get 3rd at a supermajor, you can win one. I don't necessarily feel that way about just making top 8, but 3rd is another matter. Love your ICs and seeing you at events recently, hope to see you at many more, and to see you take one!

Yes

Ich glaub an dich, eines Tages wirst du es schaffen!

Good luck with the nouns travel sponsorship! You got my vote and was very impressed with your play don't park.

No, but Slug can. :))

If Hugs can win a Dreamhack with Samus, why can't an Icies

btw hope u got something planned for that final voting phase, dont get spiritbombed!

Yes.

You made it this far hardly playing all these top players. I really do wonder what might be possible if you played them more regularly.

You are such an inspiration Nicki. :) I'm just one of your many new fans and I'm sure you already know this, but do not give up. Even if you don't hit the same peak of getting 3rd at a major/supermajor, just keep at it and we believe you'll eventually win one with Icies. 2025 will be your year though!! :D

9:10 Scrolls up, sees Trif, laughs and decides to scroll back down and keep talking about Soonsay

uhhhhhhhhhhh, i mean with a good streak of execution and perhaps a bit of bracket luck it can happen. Peach is the main brick wall for ICs and a knowledgeable Falcon as well. As an ICs you're basically going to hope that spacie sheik and marth players filter out the peaches and falcons and it becomes entirely possible. Being bad against spacies marth and sheik is much worse and fortunately ICs don't have that issue. There is puff, but ehh, I see puffs drop sets to weird MUs even if its in their favor due to puff being so volatile in nature because it dies so easily. I'd say the optimal pick for an ICs main is a laser heavy defensive Fox secondary for floaties on BF/DL. Defensive laser heavy fox completely addresses the shortcomings of ICs and will punish any floaty for trying to abuse tri plats. Fox also spanks Falcon, so thats also very useful. Falcons are not bothering learning the ICs MU because they're busy optimizing their top tier struggle MUs, but I've seen Falcons out there nerding the unorthodox MUs out and its kinda messed up what Falcon can do to ICs I'll just leave it at that.

Why do you use "-" as a name tag?

I BELIEVE!

Based nicki sensei

I hope tf not

Yes you can believe

I really like your attitude towards this, feels extremely healthy and realistic. You talk about bracket luck and day-to-day performance variance similarly to how the high level Smogon tournament community talks about winning tournaments: you need to be good enough to be able to ride some good luck all the way to the finish line, and if that's how the chips fall, it happens. Edwin Budding said this in his September 30, 2024 Monday Morning Marth: "Not to take credit away from Zain, but a Wavelength win would feel anticlimactic. With two other majors and an invitational to close out the year for big events, winning Wavelength would effectively lock up No. 1. Zain would have a two-major lead over Cody, whose future currently seems limited, and an insurmountable three-major lead over Mang0, who is barely in the discussion right now. At the same time, can someone really be number one when they’re literally winless against a peer? Does the best player in the world happen to be the luckiest one? The truth: sometimes that’s how it is. Armada won No. 1 in a year where Mang0 farmed him with Marth (okay, it was really only one tournament where this was the case; I’m being slightly hyperbolic). In the year before that, his toughest continental rival was banned from entering the United States before the last few majors of the year. Conversely, Hungrybox’s reign coincided with Armada’s retirement and two of his toughest opponents experimenting with Ultimate. It happens - there are always asterisks and downsides to people’s dominance. Zain can be an exceptional competitor, a worthy number one, and a lucky player at the same time." I felt like this was pretty well-articulated. Not saying you WANT a "lucky bracket" or for your opponents to have an off day or something, more so that it's not about being able to consistently beat everybody, but consistently beat enough people that when given the chance you can convert that opportunity into a win. Hope to see you at more tournaments next year!

6:24 DAMN THE FLEX 🔥🔥

9:14 that nervous laugh when you went over trif lmao

i think its possible now that hbox has slumped where u dont need to beat him to win a major (and armada too he legit never lost to an icies player) ull still need more bracket luck

great thumbnail

ICs can definitely win a major. But they can’t beat Hbox/SDJ or Trif/Llod/Polish I do think ICs needs a secondary fox or young link (lmao). Although I think most characters need a secondary

Omg bro, whenever people call ice climbers IC’s I always thought they were saying Icies , like a cute lil way to name em rather than just the abbreviated version. This makes me sad :(

that controller would be sick but the shell doesnt say nintendo gamecube on it so i will not be entering

Nice vid! Curious what you think about the Samus MU, if you ran into Morsecode or a Plup as I know he favours Samus in that matchup. In theory I've always thought that MU looked hard for ICs.

I'm really impressed by your run at DPoTG! You can win a major with ICs. Great work!

You can, i believe!

Yes, obviously. But the discussion is fun.

Honestly the more time goes on the less important I think having good floaty matchups is in terms of just trying to win 1 major. I think for getting like top 10 it’s way more relevant, but they aren’t common enough for you to be consistently worried about running into top level floaties outside of literally just hbox. I’m still not a super believer in characters worse than ics to get it done, but I think if you have a winnable (not even necessarily good) mu against 4 of fox falco marth falcon sheik it feels pretty possible to me rn

im coming from the future to say that icies win 6 supermajors before 2030

Goat

I believe!!!

I'm a hard believer for IC's to win a major ❤

I read or heard from some video that 8 out of all major wins this year had to go through Hbox, so avoiding him might just be extremely hard. But I wish you the best of luck on the road to winning a major!

no they won't and if they do they should be banned 😡🤬😡🤬 more seriously nice video i have two tangentially related questions who do you think is the character where it stops being realistically doable? I've been playing a lot of Doc lately and Idk if that's just optimism for your main but every top tier feels kinda hard but doable as it stands with lot of room to improve but can a character who just struggles like 60-40 or 65-35 against 90% of the player base have a shot at the highest level? ICs have some matchups like Sheik or Marth that are maybe even to compensate for harder ones like peach/puff but that's not the case for like Doc or Luigi (less familiar with but I feel like that's the case too) i told you in dms that i was praying for your defeat Vs aklo and i felt sorry about that and in retrospect that was a weird thing to say, hope you get the nouns thing for more tourneys gl