3. Lil Dre — ‘Manifest Destiny’

For all the ‘future’ trappings around this Karl Watson-blessed kid and how he closed out the Maxallure video, from the high fashions to the ‘2070’ dateline on the into, he put something together that hits strong notes across a bunch of different eras from the last few decades. There is East Coast ledge technicality in his kickflip backside noseblunt pop-out on the wooden block, hill jumping in the Bay, some ride-on no-comply shit, and hammer-swinging flips down big gaps, like the fakie frontside flip that he crazily hangs onto. There is a chain wallet. Lil Dre generally though is just fun to watch, with his strange and mesmerizing switchstance flick delay, the back-and-forth windmill on the halfcab to backside tailslide, and his raspberry after that fakie ollie to switch frontside crooked grind (or whatever this fairly heavy trick must technically be termed).

2. Ishod Wair – ‘Wair N Tear’

Future pros who master the art of juggling corporate sponsorship video productions and VX-flavored bro-cam affairs, bankable via messageboard-approved Bitcoin dividends, will look back on early masters of the great balancing act such as newly anointed SOTY Ishod Wair, who initiated his 12-month pillage of US spots late last year in the legendary ‘Sabotage 3’ and wound it down with another NKE-underwritten one-two Thrashermagazine.com combination that proved effective in snaring the industry’s most-prestigious award for the second time in three years, after Grant Taylor similarly ran the servers in December 2011. Depending on how you count them Ishod Wair turned out four video parts this year, but this one for Fourstar earns the highest across-the-board score as far as the after-black hammer material he’s capable of, the lengthy lines and the much-beloved ‘Photosynthesis’ production, from the cameras to the Love ledges. Some of Ishod Wair’s tricks have this ethereal, floaty quality, like the full 360 out of the backside tailslide and the drift on the heelflip over the rail toward the beginning, but then he’ll set down something like that nollie backside kickflip around 2:29 that is solid enough to seal international peace accords. Ishod Wair in 2013 is a dude at the height of his powers but still putting in work — witness his fountain combat for the switch frontside bigspin here if you haven’t seen it.