I'd like to dip my toes into this discussion of why these characters that were buffed in patches still aren't seeing the usage/results that they may have been hyped up to get after they got buffed. This is a pretty common topic since a lot of relatively rare characters have gotten buffed recently (think
,
,
, or
) but still don't receive much usage in tournament play.
A.) Why pick up a new character when your current main still works? Now this is mostly referring to upper-level tournament play as most casual and lower-level players can pick up a new character and do fine because of their lower skill cap. But when it comes to bigger tourneys, a lot of top players usually solo main or carry a secondary around for certain hard matchups. A good example of this is MkLeo who's been solo maining Joker recently and only plans to use his new secondary, Chrom, for matchups that he finds annoying for Joker. This is a fair and common mindset, but when it comes to these rarer and more unknown characters, they often don't get picked up by these upper level players even after they got buffed. For example, Cosmos is still going to go solo Inkling despite Corrin receiving good buffs to her recovery and some other moves. An exception to this is WaDi, who picked up
as a secondary shortly after their big 3.0.0 buffs and has used them a few times in bigger tourneys. (He used them in his set against Lui$ at Smash Con for example.) However, one could say that putting time into Wii Fit isn't worth it when his R.O.B. is still beating plenty of top-level players and can do well even in harder MUs. This is likely one of the reasons why WaDi rarely goes WFT because R.O.B. still does fine for him and he doesn't want to lose too much grind time in R.O.B. by practicing Wii Fit.
B.) The vicious cycle of a character's results being low being tied to them being seen as bad. Now this is a tricky point to discuss as many people could say "Oh this character doesn't get results because they're Bottom 5 anyway" and it can apply to some characters like Kirby and King K. Rool, but for characters like Mewtwo and Corrin who are generally seen as mid-tier, they can be seen as having hidden potential that hasn't been reached yet because well, nobody plays them. Of course there's always the character specialists that spout stuff about their character's potential and are on occasion right (
mains rejoicing after Brood showcased their character's potential in ledge-trapping), but we may never know just how good someone like Mewtwo can be without someone playing them at a higher level and showing all of the stuff that Mewtwo can do. Mewtwo's actually a great example of this because back in Smash 4, nobody wanted to put time into him until Abadango showed his tricks at Pound, and his playerbase only increased after Mewtwo got buffed to a low top tier character. If someone were to get great results with Mewtwo in this game after his buffs, perhaps more players would be interested in trying him out and bringing him at more top-ranked tourneys, thus proving Mewtwo's potential and improving his results to show that potential. However, the sad truth is that right now, a character like Mewtwo just doesn't have the results or the playerbase getting results, and thus will be looked down upon by other players except for those few that play Mewtwo mains and are like "GUYS MEWTWO IS TOP 25" on Twitter. (They exist and you know it, except maybe not for Mewtwo because nobody actually plays that character)
C.) The above point about Abadango's run with pre-patch Mewtwo in Smash 4 kind of ties into this next unfortunate point. Even though Abadango's run theoretically proves that a rare character that's perceived as low-tier can get good results (Brood's run too), the unfortunate reality is that for some characters they usually won't get the chance to make these results because their best players just aren't at the top level as players like Abadango, Brood, or Dabuz with Ultimate Rosalina. Like for Corrin, her playerbase is already tiny enough that it's hard to find good players for her, especially without Cosmos at the helm of her meta. Her best mains are players like LetsTickle and Shadic, who have achieved decent results at the tourneys they've gone to but no breakouts really. LetsTickle mainly uses Inkling too, which doesn't exactly help Corrin's argument here. What I'm trying to say is that even a best main for a rare lower-tiered character may be very good, they still may not be on the top-top level and thus won't achieve the best results. Another example I could say is my main Lucas. While I do believe that players like 8Mitsuki, Hakadama, and Mekos could achieve great results if they went to bigger tourneys more often (it hurts even more that two of the players I mentioned are Japanese and don't travel much at all), you can't really say they are PGR level because they haven't done anything too notable outside of 8Mitsuki winning some bigger tournaments in his region. This point can also be expanded to players who are clearly great, but don't have the opportunity to travel to prove their character's might. I'll use the Pits for this, as Trela has been a lot of time into them recently and we all know how good Trela is, so you'd think he can show up to a major and showcase those nice Pit buffs. Well, sadly, Trela hasn't attended anything outside of his region since his disappointing performance at Prime Saga, so Pit's results are still as good as dead at the moment. However, it's not impossible of course, because these players are always improving and may break out in the same fashion as Joker the
main who nobody knew anything about until he took Cosmos to Game 5 and got 9th at Low Tier City. This result improved some people's opinions on Samus after Joker showcased the amazing movement options and mixups that Samus has. You could even apply this to
, as Dakpo got 13th at the same tournament (which was after Diddy's buffs!).
Overall, I just wanted to make this post just to give some of my ideas on this topic of these buffed characters and why they still haven't seen much exposure in tournaments after their buffs. Like I said, it's definitely not impossible to get notable results even if your character doesn't have a player that's on a Dabuz or Brood level. But it'll definitely be hard when the playerbase is small and nobody's willing to get into those characters. A harsh reality truly, although honestly I'd rather not see someone like Isabelle being played everywhere.
