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This is part of an article series on the top 50 players in Rivals of Aether drawing data primarily from NA competitions.

Articles in the Series

• #40 – 31
• #30 – 21
• #20 – 11
• #10 – 4
• #03 – 1

For more information about the methodology and how rankings were decided, check out the Rivals Top 50 Introduction Post.

To enter free Rivals of Aether events online, head to the Rivals Championship Series 2 Smash.gg page.

Rank	Rating	Rivals
50	60.00
37th	33rd	7th	54th
Summary

Solar has been around for quite a long time, first picking up the game in early alpha. While he’s certainly grown as a community leader he’s also steadily risen in skill. Surprising even himself, he was able to secure his most notable finish recently at CEO Dreamland by defeating Willby. That finish along with his other solid placings at RCS events has secured his spot in the top 50.

Rank	Rating	Rivals
49	63.00
N/A	N/A	1st	1050th
Summary

C9 Mang0 is a legendary SSB Melee player who has been known to dabble in Rivals of Aether from time to time. While he has not entered as many Rivals events, his results when he does compete are strong. He defeated PG Plup at Smash Summit 3 in a runback of the Rivals finals from Smash Summit 2. Mang0’s skills are proof that Smash skills do indeed carry over to Rivals, a trend also shown by players like PewPewU, SFAT, SmashG0d and Xaltis. Based on his experience and clutch factor, we think Mang0 could take a run at some of the top players in our game by putting in the time to grind.

Rank	Rating	Rivals
48	66.00
34th	N/A	N/A	34th
Summary

SisterEden is considered the best female Rivals player in the NA community. She consistently places well in online events and has pulled off some major upsets. Since being featured in a Player Spotlight in 2016, SisterEden has also picked up Absa to compliment her deadly Kragg.

Rank	Rating	Rivals
47	67.00
43rd	17th	35th	58th
Summary

One of the few notable solo Maypul mains, Nevereatcars is also a TO for the longest running community tournament series to date – the NCS. He brought his skill to bear during the RCS and fought his way onto the leaderboard, ending with a strong finish at Genesis 4. A fan of off the cuff and crazy tournaments, he’s the yin to TheFailWhale’s yang.

Rank	Rating	Rivals
46	67.50
57th	5th	37th	111th
Summary

Renzo capped off his online play most recently by attending CEO Dreamland and landing 5th place after a nailbiting victory against Solar in Top 8. Renzo is a solid player who is looking to make a big splash in Season 2 of the RCS.

Rank	Rating	Rivals
45	67.60
N/A	N/A	33rd	15th
Summary

Mephiles is a skilled Absa main who is always improving. He has earned some impressive wins against players like TheDuoDesign, GamingClan and more. While he has fantastic online results, he can easily be found at local events due to his conspicuous choice of headware.

Rank	Rating	Rivals
44	67.80
N/A	N/A	25th	43rd
Summary

Allergic to Bullets has allergies to many things, entering tournaments under the guise of everything from “Allergic to Cannonballs” to “Allergic to Kragg”. Bullets can tangle with the bottom half of the top 50 just fine and has secured some great upsets. Now it’s time for him to put it all together and take first place at an event. He’s a fierce competitor in the WCS taking out the likes of Kenneth, Protagify, and others.

Rank	Rating	Rivals
43	68.00
34th	N/A	18th	27th
Summary

GamingClan has been a mainstay Zetter player throughout the online scene. He has a massive number of games under his belt, participating in as many NCS and CCS as he can. This practice has paid off by netting him wins against the likes of Failwhale, Heyodogo, and more. His win count is second only to Kisuno in the entire NCS.

Rank	Rating	Rivals
42	69.00
N/A	33rd	N/A	67th
Summary

TheBestAdamCarra is most known for his Rivals YouTube videos, but also plays a mean Maypul. He likes to focus on emulating top players’ techs and says that Ralph and Lz are his go tos for Maypul. Adam has placed well at several local events (G4 and Twitchcon) and will be traveling to Bigger Balc as well for the second season of the RCS.

Rank	Rating	Rivals
41	69.50
N/A	N/A	22nd	14th
Summary

Jesier is an east coast player with a propensity for high flying air based Rivals. Often making it deep into NCS brackets, I expect Jesier to start showing up big in season 2. Notable upsets include TheDuoDesign, Ceztellz, and Guyron.

Season 2 of the Rivals Championship Series kicks off this weekend with the Road to Shine, a free online tournament that can net you a trip to Shine 2017.  Before the monthlies get into full swing however, we thought it would be nice to look back at past events and players in our scene. That’s why all this week we’ll be putting out an article each day as we countdown the top 50 Rivals players – ending on Friday with #1!

Articles in the Series

• #50 – 41
• #40 – 31
• #30 – 21
• #20 – 11
• #10 – 4

Methodology

When taking an in-depth look at our players for this article series, we recognized that we have a lot of good players. Many of them have never played each other locally which makes this a tough exercise. Past the very top players, many players are also separated by razor thin margins. To that end, we tried to employ a methodology that would rank the players in as fair a way as possible:

Player Results

Tournament results (as long as the events meet the right criteria) are one of the best indicators of player skill. Overall standings and set count data is useful, though it’s still hard to find events where all of the top players are competing at once in Rivals. To this end, I separated events from the past year into tiers. Events in higher tiers were considered more heavily when determining a player’s rankings, and events were ranked this way due to amount of top players in attendance, total attendees, amount of rounds, etc.

Tier 1

• RCS Online Events
• Genesis 4

Tier 2

• NCS Online Events
• CEO Dreamland
• Super Smash Con 2016

Tier 3

• EVO 2016
• PAX West 2016
• Garden of the Gods

Tier 4

• Twitchcon 2016
• Rewired 2016
• GUTS 4
• Shine 2016
• Smash Summit 3

Panelists

In addition to looking at player results, a panel of 20 players was created and surveyed for additional insight. This panel consisted mainly of top players, as well as a few other community members who are in a position to fairly judge player skill (e.g. TOs intimate with player results). These players ranked a list of over 110 players that qualified past on event placements.

Panelists were instructed to rate players from 1 – 10 based on, “… times you’ve played against [players on the list], past tournament results you’re aware of, and how you perceive their general skill level at this current time.” The main goal was to capture rankings based on their experience playing their peers and NOT for the panelists to do in-depth research.

Community Impact

On occasion, players were weighted by a third factor of community impact. Though this was never a large portion of a player’s total score, it did help separate players due to the very thin margins I mentioned earlier.

Final Notes

In some cases we were missing data (e.g. players are not active enough, limited bracket interactions) so certain players may not be listed even though they are generally accepted as being high tier. Other times even if a player was inactive, the panelists vouched so strongly for a player’s skill that they were included with less recent results.

We recognize arguments can be made for many players to make this list. If you’re interested in competitive Rivals of Aether, make sure you play in premiere events to test your skills against the best. You can check out the new monthly schedule for our free online RCS tournaments here: Rivals Championship Series – Season 2. Stay tuned for the first installment in the top 50 coming later today!

I promised we’d be back with details and today I’m here to deliver – with lots of tables. Don’t worry though, they’re the kind of tables with good stuff inside instead of boring things like annual report data. Alternatively, you can always keep up to date on the RCS over at our circuit page on smash.gg. Let’s kick it off with our summer schedule!

Summer Schedule

These offline events are all big tournaments or cons that are a ton of fun. If you can only make it to one this summer and want to meet some of the devs, we’d recommend Super Smash Con as we’ll be able to attend that one personally. As Rivals registration for events open, we’ll be adding them to our RCS season 2 circuit schedule.

*Rivals bracket registration is not available on smash.gg yet for these two events. We figured even though registration wasn’t available yet it’s better to know these are coming up so you can make plans.

Here’s the schedule for our online monthlies for all 3 regions. Part of our reason for moving to monthlies (instead of the weeklies from season 1) was to put less emphasis on grinding.  These should make it easier for players to plan ahead and attend as well as still allowing community run events to flourish without the RCS dominating every weekend.

You definitely won’t want to miss these since they’ll be our biggest streams of the month, get you rewards, and just be a general good time for the community to come together.

Prizes

Now on to the extra good stuff. We’ve got a bunch of new skins and other rewards planned for this season, starting off with Champion Wrastor and Champion Kragg.  Champion Etalus will also be making a return, but this time he’s stepping off of his pedestal and letting other Rivals take the limelight.

To get Champion Etalus

• Simply sign up for the first time for any RCS Season 2 event that you’re eligible for (i.e. stick with your region).

For Champion Wrastor

• Champion Wrastor will be awarded to the top 8 of each online monthly.

For Champion Kragg

How to get Champion Kragg differs for each region, but the idea is the same across the board. For each monthly event that hits a certain amount of registrants, every player in the tournament will receive a Champion Kragg skin! This applies for players making good efforts to attend, so tell your friends to give a tournament a try so we can break these numbers!

• NA Monthly must hit 250+ participants
• EU Monthly must hit 125+ participants
• AU Monthly must hit 75+ participants

Points structure

Last but not least, here are the exact amounts of circuit points players can earn from participating in RCS events.  Standings will be tracked on our circuit page on smash.gg. Our point structure last season worked well so we’ll be keeping it similar this year.

Circuit point standings award travel vouchers at the end of the season to our finals event as well as other perks. For example, players higher in circuit points may be selected for invitationals as well as being a good pickup for upcoming Rivals fantasy drafts.

Online Monthlies

Register here >

Offline Majors

Hopefully this sheds some light on what to expect in season 2. Feel free to ask any questions you have in the comments and let us know your thoughts. And don’t forget to sign up for our first monthlies!

Rivals players around the world – today we’re pleased to announce the return of the Rivals Championship Series!

The Circuit

At its core, the Rivals Championship Series is our premiere circuit for players who want to test their skills against the best. Players from around the globe are invited to battle for points, prizes, and the glory that comes with being the RCS champion.

Each month from May – December of 2017 will have an online RCS monthly. In addition to these online events, certain large offline events will also be marked as a part of the RCS schedule. Each player that participates in these events will earn prizes and points based on standings.  

We’re expanding to 3 regions this season – North America and Europe are returning from Season 1 and we’re also adding Australia as a region. At the end of the circuit the top 4 players from NA and top player in EU and AU will receive travel vouchers towards our final event. Last year that was Genesis 4 with a prize pool of over $10k. We aren’t announcing the finals location yet, but it is planned for early 2018 and is set to be the biggest Rivals event ever.

Road to Shine

This year we’ll also be raising the stakes for a few of our RCS monthlies. We’re jumping right into it for season 2 and teaming up with Big Blue Esports for the first two NA monthlies to add additional prizes. This means the first two NA monthlies will also act as Road to Shine qualifiers, where the top 8 of both get admitted to compete in a separate 16 player bracket this June. The winner will be flown out to Boston this August for Shine 2017!

Register for the first NA monthly right here >

The Community

No matter your skill level, we want all players to feel at home in the RCS. We’re encouraging players to come hang out on twitch and discord during monthlies to make it as much of a meetup as it is a tournament. We plan to roll out fantasy drafts, new community rewards for participating, and all kinds of fun stuff.  If you plan to play in just one online Rivals event each month – make sure it’s an RCS monthly! 

More to Come

Now that you’ve seen the overview, stay tuned throughout the week as we announce our full schedule for all regions, offline events, and the full rules and points structure for all of our detail-oriented players. Make sure you also sign up for our first monthly – the Road to Shine: Rivals event. Next week, we’ll also be doing an article series on the top 50 rivals players to kick off the new season. Let’s start off RCS Season 2 with a bang!