Mauisnake has finalized his Top 20 players of 2025, and the key point is that this list wasn’t made in a last-minute December rush. He’s been maintaining a running list throughout the entire year, then used a final eye test to set a baseline before locking everything in. From there, he went player by player, directly comparing each name to the one above and below, adjusting placements until they felt right — all with the goal of avoiding classic recency bias.
His criteria also differs from HLTV’s approach. Mauisnake puts slightly more weight on individual impact, but above all, he values performances at tournaments that actually define a year. In his hierarchy, the Budapest Major mattered the most, followed by IEM Chengdu, then BLAST Rivals Hong Kong, and finally PGL Bucharest. More broadly, he believes not all events are equal, giving Majors, Katowice, and Cologne far more historical and competitive weight than strong showings at lower-impact events.
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To settle close calls, he leaned heavily on a “prestige test”: big-event ratings, playoff performances, and results against top teams like Vitality, Spirit, and MOUZ. Crucially, he also penalizes failures, not just rewards peaks — weak showings on the biggest stages actively hurt a player’s ranking. The result is a very personal, opinionated list that often goes against hype, favoring players who delivered when pressure and legacy were actually on the line.
