EVERY Wrestling Gimmick Match Ranked From Worst To Best
67. Eye For An Eye
In AEW, the Eye For An Eye match was a subplot of surprising emotional weight pitting Jon Moxley - blinded by Chris Jericho - against Santana - blinded by Mox in retaliation. What Mox and the viewers didn't know, in a shock twist, is that Santana's father had succumbed to blindness. Pathos! In a Chris Jericho programme!
In WWE, Seth Rollins defeated Rey Mysterio by literally extracting his eye. This didn't happen - Rollins extracted a cue ball with a dot on it - but you were expected to think that he did.
So about a 50% success rate, then.
66. Beat The Clock
This should work - sudden death urgency and injury time are terrifyingly dramatic when your sports team is involved - but all too often in WWE, the trope exists as an easy way of building a midcard title challenger. The urgency should be off the charts as the seconds recede, and the favourite is in real danger of a shocking loss, but when has it truly felt like that? The promotion has never once worked that "buzzer-beater" feeling.
65. Special Guest Referee
The logic behind the Special Guest Referee match is chronically wrestling brained.
The experienced specialist keeps making blunders, so let's resolve that by replacing them with a complete amateur with a preexisting grudge with one of the competitors!
A good referee is invisible. The bad Special Guest Referee is guaranteed to affect the action and mess up the finish. Done very well at SummerSlam 1997, ever since, the Guest Ref was a woeful contrivance that V-Triggers the intelligence. Mark Briscoe only got away with it because the man can do anything, and Shawn Michaels was astonishing in the role, but it's an inherently dumb one.
64. No Count-Outs
The No Count-Out genre covers either the match between Sable and Stephanie McMahon at WWE Vengeance 2003 or every AEW match ever promoted. As such, it's probably the most uneven stip in wrestling history. The former was rotten, and the best AEW matches are up there with the greatest wrestling experiences ever felt.
63. Lumberjack
An antique of a stip, it's fundamentally very silly and feels more boring than ever, now that the vast majority of wrestlers have forgotten how to work a match without a spot on the apron. The idea that heel wrestlers are automatically driven to punch any old babyface they can get their hands is the most stupid conceit ever. Pitifully one-dimensional character "work", mediocre action, a match towards which everybody rolls their eyes: it's miraculous that Wardlow and Luchasaurus somehow did a great job with it back in 2020.
62. One Weapon
Just have a No DQ-type match and be done with it because, unless the weapon of choice is a ladder or table, it's probably not very good. A 'Chairs' match, for example, is a concept as daft as it is boring. A wrestler obediently using just one weapon defeats the object of a hateful brawl that one doesn't win but survives, and the repetitive structure of such a match betrays also the point of a plunder brawl: to use various shortcuts, plural, to open up different avenues of action. A gimmick match in the regular and pejorative sense used mostly to pad out the undercard of a PPV that, by scheduling its heated and uncontainable conflict, also defeats the object: the Chairs match stinks!
61. Spin The Wheel, Make The Deal
This entry, covering the various standards and one-offs "randomly" selected at WCW or NXT Halloween Havoc events, ranks low because nostalgia is deceptive. A violent plunder match should mean something - otherwise, why waste your bump card? - and since the appeal of Halloween Havoc lies mostly in the set design, wrestlers hurting one another against the backdrop of an inflatable pumpkin seems pointless. Fun!
But pointless.
60. Battle Royale Variations
Much like the Royal Rumble, many have failed to imitate a format that has endured for as long as it has for a reason: when done well, it's a gloriously simple and complete thing. The Bunkhouse Stampede matches were fun enough in the days of JCP, but WCW's Battlebowl - in which the idea was to throw the field into a second ring - reeked of doing sh*t just to do it.
On that, Vince Russo was so stupid that he booked a Reverse Battle Royale without grasping that it, logically, was a running race. In trying to do anything different to the wrestling he detested, he made himself look like a complete moron.
CONT'D...