Akuma and the Season 2 balance patch have been out in Street Fighter 6 for basically a month now, allowing competitive players to get a sense of what the tournament scene is shaping up to look like in the game’s second year.
The legendary Justin Wong recently tracked down and asked 17 SF6 pro players to name their top 5 characters on the spot at DreamHack Dallas 2024 for the start of Season 2 with some interesting results.
Those questioned include FLY|Punk, RR|Mono, WR|Nemo, NP|Phenom, BST|Fuudo, Evo champion NASR|Angrybird, C9|JB, TM|NoahTheProdigy, Bandits|Caba, C9|Lexx, Talon|HotDog29, El Chakotay, NASR|Bigbird, 4TW|SpaceBoy, XSET|iDom, Moist|JAK and Shine.
As for the reigning Evo winner, Angrybird had Guile, Ryu, Rashid, A.K.I., and Akuma making up his initial picks while noting to Justin that Ken is “done.”
Not everyone feels that way, however, with Lexx and Noah keeping the fiery Shoto in their top fighters even if that does mean he was brought up fewer times than Ryu.
“What does [Ryu] lack now?” said Bigbird in response to including the main poster boy. “He has everything. Great fireball game, some of the highest damage right now, Drive Reversal nerfs doesn’t really impact him and still gets max damage.”
There were 14 different characters in total brought up by the players, which should be a pretty good sign for the game though a handful obviously stood out.
Guile was actually the most common answer among the crowd with 15 competitors including him followed by Akuma at 13.
The others who appeared in at least half of the rankings were Chun-Li, Luke, and Rashid while around a third also had Juri and / or Zangief.
We were also fascinated to see that iDom, Bigbird, Angrybird and Mono all had A.K.I. among their ranks too.
While it is nice to have all of this together, DreamHack Dallas took place at the start of this month when the update was still very much fresh, so things have continued to develop quite a bit over that time — which means some or quite a few of these answers may no longer apply.
Phenom, for example, more recently dropped his full early tier list for Season 2 where his current top 6 is missing two fighters mentioned here.
With CEO 2024 this weekend and Evo 2024 in less than a month, things are about to really heat up for Street Fighter 6, and you can see what the players were feeling at the start of the new season below.