The NA Invite Top 100 is a project merging history and shenanigans with the purpose of highlighting some of the best players in North American TF2 history. Access the hub post here to view outlines, honorable mentions, and previous reveals. Tune in every Monday and Friday for the next release!
Going from Monday's sea creature Scout to another, squid (not to be confused with squidie, Squidmatron, or Squid) played a majority of his seasons with three teams: Pinball Wizards, Classic Mixup, and The Five Dollar Club. He got his LAN debut during S14 with Apocalypse Gaming but
uh...let us move on. Going into his first season with Classic Mixup in S15, squid was 3rd in the league with 319 frags, outpaced per hour only by grape, b4nny, and lansky. Across three Mixup seasons, he averaged 50.4 FPH, enjoying success on both the stats sheet and playoff podium. In addition to his four ESEA LANs, squid also has an iSeries appearance with Mixup at i52, where they finished 3rd. Oh and how can we discuss squid without mentioning his
trash talk at least a little bit.
Four of the previous five players on the Top 100 have been on Classic Mixup at some point, so why not add one more into the equation? smaka played for Mixup two different times: S11 as his classic Demoman role and S14 as Medic. S14 was so bizarre for Quick Fix-related reasons that he may as well have played like three seasons worth of Medic. Moving right along, the following season he played Soldier for eventual 3rd place team lost in translation. It's rare enough to see someone to play Invite with three different classes, let alone play them at LAN. Even if you expand it to Invite playoffs (not just LAN), smaka is still in rare, limited company. All this and I haven't even mentioned his one championship with Blight.own all the way back in S6. Go further back and smaka was competing at a high level before ESEA, too.
As one of the original members of eMazing Gaming, mackey played Soldier alongside enroyt as they quickly rose the ranks and established themselves as premier Invite talent. His numbers as a roamer were never noteworthy, nor was he ever considered the best compared to his competition. So why is he here at #58? First, because it's my list and these rankings are still pretty damn loose at this range. Second, simply put, mackey was one of the greatest wild cards Invite has ever seen. The class he was playing did not matter. Soldier, Sniper, Heavy, Spy. mackey utilized them all and as far as offclassing goes was a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. What better spot for him than somewhere in the middle. Note that I do not have proper data to claim mackey was huge on Spy, but if only one person on the entire Top 100 gets to have Spy next to their main, mackey definitely deserves that honor. He even had a brief stint as Medic for eMg before Reptile fell into their hands. When mackey was in the server, something crazy or goofy was gonna happen. You could've
guaranteed it.
After spending just two seasons in ESEA Open, indust landed a spot on S14 Apocalypse Gaming. That is one of the fastest climbs to Invite for any Medic, and would be in the conversation for all classes even including some of the ancient legends. indust has played in a handful of seasons across three different eras, albeit always sporadically. Since 2013 he's never played more than two consecutive seasons, not that that's his fault or anything. Many might remember his most notable season with iT in S15. With merely 76 deaths in just over five hours of play, his 14.5 DPH was far and away the best in the division. He finished his ESEA career at #9 in ubers (2303) in ~86 hours of playtime. Conveniently, the next two Medics below him also live in the same zip code playtime-wise: TheFragile at ~84 hours and peyote at ~82.5 hours. Of these three, indust had the highest UPH at 26.8 and the most dominations (nice).
I was extremely tempted to just put
Rocket Science as the entire blurb. But fine, might as well commit all the way as it would feel cheap to have one player's section be a single video. grape played his first full season of Invite in ESEA S15 for Show Me the Monet, where he not only had the most frags in the division but also the highest FPH. Not bad for someone that didn't even make playoffs that season. grape would also land within the top five between all Invite Soldiers in frags for every remaining season of his TF2 run. With Street Hoops, he went to three straight LANs. With TeamSoloUber, he helped knock out froyotech on the way to 2nd place. He is also 4th for most frags in a single ESEA match, wracking up 66 of them in S19 on Gullywash - which is also the record for any Soldier. Okay but actually go watch Rocket Science now, and the
two sequels too.
phorofor almost won back-to-back titles on two different teams. Just wanted to start off with that fact. Think of Deion Sanders from '94-'95, or LeGarrette Blount and Chris Long from '16-'17. Actually, he got 1st with Ascent in S20, 2nd with Ronin S21, and then 1st with froyotech S22. So that's nearly twice he could've accomplished the feat (so close to greatness). phorofor then collected three more 2nd place finishes in the RGL Era, so his placements have been consistently impressive. In ESEA history he is #7 in ubers, and like Shamoo the vast majority of his statistics are from an Invite environment (only 39 of his 148 career matches were non-Invite). To wrap things up for phorofor, he got 3rd at i58 with froyotech, and is one of five Medics with mutiple perfect games in ESEA (he has four, tied with ninjanick).
Wonder how many of you readers had the privilege of following Invite when the Mighty Ducks were active. Man, those were some
fun times. Decimate was a core member of the Ducks for their two and a half season run, and took a short hiatus from Invite play. When he returned, he snagged a winning record for the first time in his Invite career with lost in translation. His Scout wracked up over 200 frags in the regular season just barely inching over 60 FPH. That S15 roster fielded the likes of alfa, Ma3laa, and Bdonski, all of whom would become staples of the Exertus, eLevate, and Ascent teams alongside Decimate. Together they enjoyed five straight playoff appearances with a regular season W-L of 66-14. Unfortunately for Decimate, his swansong came right before the season Ascent would take home their only championship which is some bad timing.
aim started his Invite journey in ESEA S20 with Getawhale Fanclub AKA Luca Goers, made playoffs the following season, and until the end of ESEA was a common fixture on playoff squads. In just his sophomore season he had the most frags of any other Soldier in the division. But what I'd really like to talk about is a particular three season stretch of his: during S27 he was on SVIFT, getting 3rd in league play and 4th at Rewind II, eliminated both times by Ascent. The following season, he joined Ascent and got 2nd, eliminated by froyotech. The season after that? Yep, you guessed it. Joined froyotech and got 1st. If you want to take the cycle further, he was not active during S30 so you could say he went from 3rd to 2nd to 1st to 0th or N/A. Since RGL took over he hasn't been playing much, only seen once with MyAnimeList in S3, though he almost came back for this current season.
You guys like Juni from the Spy Kids movies? dingo does. That's been his name on RGL ever since he was verified. With his first division debut being ESEA S16 all the way back in 2014, dingo has been an active player in Invite nearly every season since. So it should come as no surprise to hear that he's T-6th in seasons played, giving him pretty solid points for longevity. He's also got class diversity, with roughly ten seasons of Demoman and then splitting the remainder between Soldier and Medic. As such, he's made Invite playoffs on all three of those classes. He's the more modern variant of smaka as they share the same class composition. The lack of consistency is a slight, seeing as dingo is the only player in range with this poor a playoffs percentage (although a few upcoming members are in the neighborhood, or have far less activity), but is aided by the multiclassing history. Still, even as we approach the top 50, it could be easily argued for many different shifts and changes. I'll be sure to let you know when I actually wasted hours debating spots.
ww was one of the original roaming Soldiers in the business. From ESEA S5 to S11 he made six LAN playoffs appearances with teams like Blight and Mihalys Flow. In that span he also was top five in Soldier frags on three occasions, and while his FPH was never spectacular he was still a consistent contributor. Especially when you consider his Soldier teammates included the likes of TLR, Seagull, and harbleu. His S9 campaign with The Experiment saw him finish the season with a positive K/D, a rare sight for roamers. Even though he never placed higher than 3rd, ww's legacy is so strong that years after retirement players decided to name a
team after him. With respect to all eras, ww is one of the best Soldiers to never win an Invite title and certainly was so back in the middle of ESEA's Golden Era.
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