The Best AEW Tag Teams Right Now (June 2022)

The 5 Best Tag Teams in AEW

With Forbidden Door’s much-hyped “Winner Takes All” match for both ROH World Tag Team and IWGP Tag Team titles, and the build to this major inter-promotional event heavily comprised of tags and trios matches, the focus on tag team wrestling in AEW has peaked for the first time in many months. With the past few months alone seeing compelling action from teams such as Jurassic Express, Young Bucks, Blackpool Combat Club, and members of NJPW’s United Empire, let’s take a look at which teams have made the strongest cases for being AEW’s current top dogs.

(5) Roppongi Vice

If entrances made exciting and winning matches, Max Caster and the Ass Boys would be in this spot. Heck, they’d be a Top 3 team, no questions asked. But in terms of making tag team wrestling look all too easy, Roppongi Vice are the absolute kings.

With a pair of great matches this year against 2 of AEW’s best tag teams, Young Bucks and FTR, as well as a show-stealing trios match teaming with a freshly returning Orange Cassidy opposite United Empire on Dynamite, Roppongi Vice have slowly built up a solid year. It is, however, their lack of appearances in AEW that prevents them from ranking higher—the only thing, really—because it takes 1 match of theirs to see that they are leagues above the rest.

(4) Jon Moxley and Bryan Danielson

Blackpool Combat Club’s Jon Moxley and Bryan Danielson are among the two best wrestlers in the world, without a qualifier. Despite wrestling numerous tags and trios matches with the newest BCC recruit Wheeler Yuta, however, Moxley and Danielson still primarily feel like singles wrestlers either dipping their toes or in a holding pattern in the tag division.

The reason being that, while they continue to face lower-ranked teams such as Gunn Club and semi-regular teams like Matt Sydal and Dante Martin, BCC won’t really be looked at as a tried and true tag team. Still, their resume as proven main-event singles wrestlers, who haven’t even scratched the surface with BCC, is enough to bolster and provide an ominous threat to the tag division.

(3) Nyla Rose and whoever (Emi Sakura, The Bunny, Diamante, and Marina Shafir)

Nyla Rose has quietly become the MVP of Dark: Elevation, wrestling in sound tag matches with a plethora of partners. The most prominent of these partners would have to be the 27-year veteran, Emi Sakura. One could argue Sakura herself was the Dark wrestler of 2021 by holding down the same fort with consistent tag team matches; so it’s no wonder then that Rose would pick up a lot from having teamed up with Sakura so often, the most memorable match coming against Skye Blue and Yuka Sakazaki on Elevation 64.

But a lot of credit needs to be given to her other frequent partners, The Bunny and Diamante, who have been a consistent Dark/Elevation highlight in trios matches, including Dark 148’s Rose/Sakura/Diamante versus Anna Jaye, Ruby Soho, and Kris Statlander.

Most recently, Rose would find herself aligning with “The Problem” Marina Shafir, in a combination of vastly different personalities and wrestling styles that doesn’t read like it would work; but against the imposing Max the Impaler and Heidi Howitzer tandem on Elevation 68, their contrasting brands of “dangerous” gelled, cementing Rose as a tag wrestler to look out for.

(2) Young Bucks

The tag division really does revolve around the Young Bucks. The division seems to make sense when they’re champion—they appear on TV regularly, even via quick pre-tapes; when they do have matches, they can conceivably main event any AEW show.

And this is them when they’re not on difficult mode.

The Bucks would use a lot more basic maneuvers against their early-career heroes, the Hardys, at Double or Nothing (including wrestling as the Hardys in the lead-up to the big match); wrestled a show-stealer they can do in their sleep against the Lucha Brothers on Rampage; followed by a grueling Ladder match (that may as well be named a Table Landmines match) against Jurassic Express on Dynamite: Road Rager, to become the first 2-time Tag Team Champions in company history.

Maybe, with the Bucks, the “champions away from the belts,” now actually holding the championships, we’re more likely to get that PPV tag team main event, sooner rather than later.

(1) FTR

As great as the Young Bucks are on easy mode, FTR have been the far more consistent and superior team for a while now. Of course, such is the life of dual AAA and ROH World Tag Team Champions: more belts, more defenses. But all year, both their title and non-title matches alike have been the company standard for tag wrestling, opposite the likes of the Young Bucks, Roppongi Vice, and United Empire’s Aussie Open and Will Ospreay.

CM Punk doesn’t slip too often on the mic, and there’s a reason he’s once slipped on commentary, referring to FTR as “our tag team champions.” They weren’t, in fact, AEW’s tag champions, but sometimes you’re just so good you make people forget that you’re not on top yet, or that without Forbidden Door, you’re yet to have an AEW PPV match in 2022.

Nevertheless, it should only be a matter of time before this version of FTR catches the eye of “our tag team champions.”