Official Competitive Character Impressions 2.0

[Nobie]

Speaking of grabs, I noticed in the video that Min Min's grab range is actually shorter than her attack range, which is unusual for a tether grab character. It's still long as heck, but it also might mean that going for grabs puts her in a more vulnerable position, and might make for an interesting risk/reward balance.

 

[Nate1080]

Speaking of grabs, I noticed in the video that Min Min's grab range is actually shorter than her attack range, which is unusual for a tether grab character. It's still long as heck, but it also might mean that going for grabs puts her in a more vulnerable position, and might make for an interesting risk/reward balance.

To be fair, do you really want a grab that’s nearly as long as half of FD? Lmao.

Also, grabs making you vulnerable makes sense. In her original game, grabs in general are high risk / high reward (dragon arm gives her one of the highest rewards in her original game btw).

What I’m curious about is if having Megawatt equipped will affect the grab / throw? In ARMS, as a heavyweight arm it’s grab is slow but it gives an extra boost of damage. No telling if Sakurai brought over such a mechanic to Smash with Min Min, and if he did does it also affect knockback...

 

[NotLiquid]

The question of how Min Min will fare against ROB and G&W has already been voiced. When it comes to the latter especially I think something that's held back distance demons from doing as hypothetically well as we always speculate is that they usually offset their mobility options to attain their range, but being able to move while applying continuous uncontestable pressure means Min Min is going to be one of the very few characters who can actually shield pressure G&W with very little fear. I was kind of optimistic about Byleth's MU in that regard but this could hypothetically be a huge boon.

Another MU I'm curious about is Peach. I know she's kinda more or less dropped off for the time being but she's still commonly considered one of the better characters in the game. The aerial space which Peach occupies doesn't look like it's in the realm of Min Min's blind spot angles. One of the top Peach players at our locals is already considering a counterpick in the event that the suspicions about her are proven correct.

Also, Sonic. Hypothetically I think he might do decent in this MU but his bait-and-chase playstyle looks like it'd be absolutely stymied by Min Min. As long as we're still in the online meta, she may be a really popular online pick.

We won't really know either way until we try her but again I don't think this is gonna be as simple as "she stomps bottom tiers and gets stomped by top tiers", her hypothetical MU spread looks context sensitive as hell just because everything about her traits that would seem like a solved game by Smash standards has several caveats applied.

 

[ARISTOS]

1. How safe is her general gameplan on block? We know it has some custom behavior, and we did see Sakurai comfortably wack a CPU who dropped shield after a tilt, but the specific math is going to matter A LOT for a slow ground-based character with a super slow grab.
2. I'm guessing her grab is less aobut kill throws and more about this dragon buff. All the numbers and behaviors of that matter a ton. (It's impossible to even begin to judge WFT if you don't understand Deep Breathing, or Shulk without Monado.)

1. From what it seemed in the preview her tilts/Smashes on block aren't going to be fantastic but open up a couple neutral layers given you can act out of the 2nd ARM almost immediately afterwards. If I tilt and you drop shield, you get slapped. If I do two tilts and you shield both you could probably punish. If I do one and wait, that gives me time to reposition. If I do one and you retreat, then Min Min gets to continue playing her game.

The layers to how Min Min controls and how others react to her neutral will be pretty interesting I think.

2. Definitely agree. Her grab seems to be similar to ARMS grabs where they're really only a mixup option to keep you on your toes. The good thing is it covers the space players want to shield in, which means doing so gives Min Min a potentially huge? buff.

I can see issues with Chrom/Roy divebombing on this character, and I think she'll definitely prefer stages like T&C and Kalos compared to Battlefield. She probably wants at least one or two platforms to escape to though.

 

[Funbot28]

Not sure if people saw Larry Lurr's latest video on Min Min but it is definitely interesting to say the least. While I understand certain opinions and viewpoints in this video, I still think it's just too early to tell whether the new DLC will have as much of a disastrous effect on the meta as pre-patch smash 4 Bayo did. While ppl alrdy came to the conclusion that Bayo might be well busted even before she was officially released, I personally do not feel that Min Min as that much of a explosive movekit as Sm4sh bayp did to come to the same conclusion.

What are your guys thoughts?

 

[Rocketjay8]

Not sure if people saw Larry Lurr's latest video on Min Min but it is definitely interesting to say the least. While I understand certain opinions and viewpoints in this video, I still think it's just too early to tell whether the new DLC will have as much of a disastrous effect on the meta as pre-patch smash 4 Bayo did. While ppl alrdy came to the conclusion that Bayo might be well busted even before she was officially released, I personally do not feel that Min Min as that much of a explosive movekit as Sm4sh bayp did to come to the same conclusion.

What are your guys thoughts?

The main reason why everyone hates Bayo is because of her zero to death combos just from a single mistake.
I don't see any combos like that from Min Min

 

[DJ3DS]

The question of how Min Min will fare against ROB and G&W

I briefly mentioned my feelings on the former, but I can go more into depth.

Min Min appears to be a lot about controlling space and keeping a distance and a lot of the characters people expect her to struggle with are the ones who can close that distance. ROB to me represents a more unique question: How will Min Min fare against someone who is comfortable fighting at her distance?

That question can honestly be chalked up to one move - Laser. There's reasons to hope that Min Min can deal well with zoners based on her reflector and her disjoints beating weak projectiles, but ROBs question is a fast, long ranged, transcendent option that her Arms won't stop and which can be fired at an angle. It seems a unique tool that none of what she has is really geared to deal with in the sense that it should beat her buttons at range. Any of her tilts runs the risk of a short hop backwards and a laser fired down. If ROB wants to wait for the big laser, that's hitting 18% each time so he can probably just choose to trade if he likes.

From that perspective I don't think Min Min will want to play at maximum distance in this matchup - but she's not going to want to fight up close either, because none of her OOS options appear quick enough to deal with ROBs pressure. There's likely a sweetspot somewhere in the middle where her attacks will be harder to react to, and ROB has to be more careful about which buttons he presses. One of her cited weaknesses is from good attacks from the air, and falling nairs sound like they'd be a promising option if she's cornered.

Beyond that, ROB loves his advantage, especially offstage, and I can only imagine Min Min will struggle there with only her tether. ROB has a lot of coverage in this regard. I'm not really sure how the reverse will go; ROB can stall or go high to probably completely avoid her ledge traps but the latter comes with the challenge of then landing. We've been told she is bad at covering the air but ROB isn't exactly good at landing either and I can imagine Min Min might have some nasty frame traps that make that difficult.

 

[Nemesis561]

The main reason why everyone hates Bayo is because of her zero to death combos just from a single mistake.
I don't see any combos like that from Min Min

I see that Larry has delved into the world of silly click bait. Can't blame him for it but that video title gets big *eye roll* from me

 

[NotLiquid]

Given that Larry even addresses his own primary concern by acknowledging Min Min isn't coming out anywhere near the end of Ultimate's life span for potential balance patches to avoid addressing her, his video feels less like it's about how good Min Min will be and more like a thinly veiled rant about the optics of Ultimate deciding to add a character who will probably be really good in this online meta, only hours before the Melee community got a second wind (or third at this point) with its improved netcode bringing the game up to a local equivalent experience.

Don't get me wrong, it does suck that Ultimate still has to live with being a lesser experience considering the circumstances of the world, and Min Min being such a "different" character compounded by the current environment is something people have historical reason to be intimidated by, but the hysteria surrounding the potential of Ultimate's competitive community getting snuffed out is getting a little overbearing when this is something most communities in general are forced to deal with as of present.

The best thing you can do is embrace this era of Ultimate as the time skip era, take a little step back and allow some new perspectives to flourish. Multiple pros who are still bothering competing in these events don't even opt to use their most known mains anymore in adherence to the shift in mentality. Leo is basically an all-Byleth player now, sometimes even digging out Greninja. Alpharad and cr1tikal's Quarantine series are now running random character tourneys. We might not be having the same traditional competitive experiences, but we're still making the best out of the Ultimate experience, which at least I'd say is a testament to the Ultimate community and the strength of the game as a whole (which is especially why Maximilian's video on Smash Ultimate was a sobering contrast compared to ZeRo's). Hell, when we eventually do get passed this hell on earth situation we're all in, the game may well come back even stronger. Though maybe that's just a romanticized way of looking at things.

But yeah uh, back to Min Min. As far as his actual points go, he has a point about her off-stage disadvantage being probably the more glaring issue about her as opposed to much of what she does on-stage. That said something that more or less hit me is that given you can still employ ARMS in the air, Min Min might theoretically sport pretty devious coverage on her recovery via angle up Ramram if the opponent opts to go off-stage. Her air speed doesn't look great but she isn't a fast faller and her jumps actually seem pretty good, so she might not be entirely defenseless in direct engagements.

 

[SwagGuy99]

Not sure if people saw Larry Lurr's latest video on Min Min but it is definitely interesting to say the least. While I understand certain opinions and viewpoints in this video, I still think it's just too early to tell whether the new DLC will have as much of a disastrous effect on the meta as pre-patch smash 4 Bayo did. While ppl alrdy came to the conclusion that Bayo might be well busted even before she was officially released, I personally do not feel that Min Min as that much of a explosive movekit as Sm4sh bayp did to come to the same conclusion.

What are your guys thoughts?

I don't think there is any way that Min Min will be the next .

That would require their kit to be so overtuned that their weaknesses are incredibly minuscule and made up for by their absurd strengths, and Min Min's strengths I don't think completely cancel out her weaknesses (very punishable moves, somewhat unsafe moves on shield, mediocre but passable frame data, slow, might be very susceptible to low profiling). Also, just based on pre release opinions (which could be wrong) I don't seem them having a matchup spread anywhere near as dominant as or .

It's a bit hard to definitively say how they will fare in a lot of matchups currently, but based on what we've seen, this is kind of what I'm feeling. Of course, this is all speculation, but since we've seen a lot of her kit and know how a lot of it functions, we can predict this at least semi-accurately.

• Meta Relevant Matchups I can see Min Min winning: ()
• Min Min might win slightly or go even with these characters, but I can see these characters having good tools against her:
• Min Min might lose slightly to these characters, but I can see her doing fine if their kit is more well rounded than it currently looks like (not to say it isn't decently well rounded as is):
• Min Min likely loses based on what we've currently seen, but I can see some of these maybe being even: ()(ESAM seems very optimistic about Min Min here if you've seen his twitter posts regarding it over the last 24 hours, but if her vertical blindspot is as bad as it seems, Pika probably wins)
• Min Min most likely loses these matchups:
• Could end up going either way, but I don't see either side being strongly favored in the matchup:
• More obscure characters I can see doing fine against her, but I could also totally be wrong here:
• Honestly no clue, I feel like we need to see more of Min Min's kit in action more before really being able to figure out any of these:

Granted, I don't expect everyone to agree here and I'm trying to put characters into as broad of categories as possible and not bothering with them if I truly have no idea how I think they will do, but at least based on my very early opinions of this character, there's no way she's the next Smash 4 Bayo.

Does she have good tools that can overwhelm some characters? Yes

Does her playstyle look a bit obnoxious? Yes

Are most people going to enjoy fighting her? Probably not. I know I'm not looking forward to it

But just because a character looks like they will be a pain to fight and has moves that cover half of the stage doesn't mean they'll be great. There's been talk in here of comparing the design of Min Min to and , all of whom may fit into a sort of 'distance demon' archetype, but none of them are anything amazing. Most people will agree and are mid tier and is low tier. So Min Min might not be as good as she looks initially once people figure out her weaknesses, something that happened to as well.


I don't think we really need to be worrying about this character being too good right now. If it turns out it's an issue, then it will probably be discussed then.

 

[meleebrawler]

To be fair, do you really want a grab that’s nearly as long as half of FD? Lmao.

Also, grabs making you vulnerable makes sense. In her original game, grabs in general are high risk / high reward (dragon arm gives her one of the highest rewards in her original game btw).

What I’m curious about is if having Megawatt equipped will affect the grab / throw? In ARMS, as a heavyweight arm it’s grab is slow but it gives an extra boost of damage. No telling if Sakurai brought over such a mechanic to Smash with Min Min, and if he did does it also affect knockback...

The boost in ARMS is so negligible that it hardly matters. And it only works with an upgraded version anyway.

 

[Nate1080]

The boost in ARMS is so negligible that it hardly matters. And it only works with an upgraded version anyway.

It does matter; in ARMS any extra damage you can squeeze out matters and adds up. In fact, that’s true for any fighting game.

If they did bring over that mechanic into Smash, grabbing and throwing with a Megawatt equipped may be meaningful depending on how much extra damage. And yes, I’m assuming Min Min is using upgraded arms, because why wouldn’t she?

 

[StrangeKitten]

I've heard people say that Incineroar's up air is so good, it would be complained about were Incineroar not such a lackluster character. Min Min's up air looks awfully similar

 

[KirbySquad101]

Coming up with random jumbled thoughts on the character, because what a fighter we're looking at right now:

• I'm probably guessing Min-Min's going to be on the lighter side? It is fairly tradition at the point that female smashers (unless they're interchangeably male like Robin or Village) that female fighters tend to be on the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to weight, with the heaviest female (Palutena) somehow weighing less than a 13 year old kid.
• Thinking of Sakurai's statement of who will give her a hard time, characters who can weave around in the air that generally come to mind are and . From the looks of it, her air game has noticeable blindspots in upper diagonal region like or ; how she'll circumvent around it will be interesting and will most likely depend a lot on the usage of her Ram Ram; the coverage on that thing looks insane.
• USmash being both a reflector and a F9 OoS is awesome, and gives her some really nice defensive options that you don't see on other "distance demons", even if her USmash is looking a little on the weak side (might be because of high ceilings and lower multipliers, but USmash couldn't even kill at 127%).
• Having to manage the usage of both her arms AND being able to switch between weapon types on a dime is going to be where a major bulk of her difficulty in mastering her comes from and requires a level of management skills that you would require from characters like or . Mastering it will certainly help in allowing her to control the pace of the match.
• I can definitely see a bit of combo potential going on with her kicks and her arms gimmick; maybe not quite as diverse as someone like , but I can see a few routes she can go down.

I'm not going to hold my breath on the G&W match-up, mainly because it's more than apparent at this point that you need more than good range to win against G&W (look at what or have compared to or that make them do so much better against him if it isn't obvious enough), but her unique attributes like being able to use both her arms for simultaneous attacks might be a major boon in the MU (like NotLiquid pointed out). It's definitely a match we would have to see footage of to get a feel of it given both characters are bizarre by nature.

I do find it humorous that Sakurai literally spelled out some of the character's flaws - most likely in an effort to prevent people from fear mongering about her obscene range - and yet people are still losing their mind.

 

[The_Bookworm]

It does matter; in ARMS any extra damage you can squeeze out matters and adds up. In fact, that’s true for any fighting game.

If they did bring over that mechanic into Smash, grabbing and throwing with a Megawatt equipped may be meaningful depending on how much extra damage. And yes, I’m assuming Min Min is using upgraded arms, because why wouldn’t she?

Minor correction: Min Min can only power up her left arm, the arm that is in Dragon form permanently.

Your point on the extra damage does still stand, especially since this power-up also applies to the lasers that the Dragon shoots out as well.

 

[meleebrawler]

Minor correction: Min Min can only power up her left arm, the arm that is in Dragon form permanently.

Your point on the extra damage does still stand, especially since this power-up also applies to the lasers that the Dragon shoots out as well.

He is actually talking about a system in ARMS where you collect weapons in a Trophy Rush-style game. You can get up to two of each type for every character, the second one boosting damage, and in the case of heavies, grab damage.

The boost is rather small, however, especially that grab bonus. Because there are no redundant pulls everyone is guaranteed to have everything upgraded by continuing to play, thus making the upgraded damage standard. Far from an essential mechanic, and if Megawatt actually did give stronger throws in Smash we would have heard about it.

Coming up with random jumbled thoughts on the character, because what a fighter we're looking at right now:

• I'm probably guessing Min-Min's going to be on the lighter side? It is fairly tradition at the point that female smashers (unless they're interchangeably male like Robin or Village) that female fighters tend to be on the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to weight, with the heaviest female (Palutena) somehow weighing less than a 13 year old kid.
• Thinking of Sakurai's statement of who will give her a hard time, characters who can weave around in the air that generally come to mind are and . From the looks of it, her air game has noticeable blindspots in upper diagonal region like or ; how she'll circumvent around it will be interesting and will most likely depend a lot on the usage of her Ram Ram; the coverage on that thing looks insane.
• USmash being both a reflector and a F9 OoS is awesome, and gives her some really nice defensive options that you don't see on other "distance demons", even if her USmash is looking a little on the weak side (might be because of high ceilings and lower multipliers, but USmash couldn't even kill at 127%).
• Having to manage the usage of both her arms AND being able to switch between weapon types on a dime is going to be where a major bulk of her difficulty in mastering her comes from and requires a level of management skills that you would require from characters like or . Mastering it will certainly help in allowing her to control the pace of the match.
• I can definitely see a bit of combo potential going on with her kicks and her arms gimmick; maybe not quite as diverse as someone like , but I can see a few routes she can go down.

I'm not going to hold my breath on the G&W match-up, mainly because it's more than apparent at this point that you need more than good range to win against G&W (look at what or have compared to or that make them do so much better against him if it isn't obvious enough), but her unique attributes like being able to use both her arms for simultaneous attacks might be a major boon in the MU (like NotLiquid pointed out). It's definitely a match we would have to see footage of to get a feel of it given both characters are inartistically bizarre by nature.

I do find it humorous that Sakurai literally spelled out some of the character's flaws - most likely in an effort to prevent people from fear mongering about her obscene range - and yet people are still losing their mind.

Fun fact: Her intro in her ARMS Grand Prix route lists her weight as "unimportant" and that she is on a diet. Kind of implies her weight is actually higher than she'd like to admit, probably due to occasional overeating.

I get more Pokemon Trainer vibes when I see how the right arm rotates, to a lesser degree of course. My thoughts from another thread:

This is like asking which Pokemon in Trainer's lineup is most valuable. Fact is switching has next to zero commitment, making it really easy to switch arms for even the mundane purpose of just throwing off an opponent's defensive timing, and making sure the necessary piece is only out when it is needed and not a liability.

Ramram may be the most consistent option in neutral and low percent combos, but it doesn't look like it will ever kill anything except the weakest of recoveries. Kind of like Squirtle.

Megavolt may be easily dodged and punished raw, but using other arms and moves to condition can give you an opening to quickly swap and punch for bigger punishes. And considering Min-Min will likely not be big on combos, it will be in her interest to also find opportunities to use it for bigger damage. (Charizard)

Dragon is the most consistent zoning option with decent power, but is more conditional when it comes to killing (again relying on gimps, edgeguarding or throw power-ups for on-stage killing). Like Ivysaur.

 

[NairWizard]

I was gonna give you guys my thoughts on Min Min, since I think my take on her is pretty different from most, but given that I've never been so excited for a DLC character before (despite having had relatively light interest in the ARMS release before the direct), I decided to upload this in video format instead.

 

[StrangeKitten]

I was gonna give you guys my thoughts on Min Min, since I think my take on her is pretty different from most, but given that I've never been so excited for a DLC character before (despite having had relatively light interest in the ARMS release before the direct), I decided to upload this in video format instead.

I agree with this Min min looks like she's got loads of option coverage. I'm having a hard time seeing where opponents approaching from the air will be such a struggle as Sakurai claims. Ram ram looks like it'll have a crazy hitbox, and her nair and up air look solid enough for when opponents are closer. I do think fast characters will be rough for her, but I'm skeptical about her having such a huge weakness to aerial approaches in general.

She honestly looks like an excellent character, which is exciting, because I didn't feel that way towards Terry or Byleth upon their reveals. But of course, take my opinions with a grain of salt. It's hard to say how good Min Min will be when the character is not yet in our hands.

 

[Arthur97]

Considering only Joker seems to have been remotely overtuned competitively of the Ultimate DLC, I don't predict any earth shattering brokenness. Perhaps in an effort not to repeat mistakes, they seem to err more on the side of under performing these days.

 

[Thinkaman]

https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/hfb2ep/i_analyzed_one_million_matches_and_found_smash/

Das Koopa is still my GOAT BFF, but this guy can be #2.


Edit: I'm extremely happy he did the stage data, but would take it with a bigger grain of salt. This sort of raw data as a couple massive cultural confounders that will majorly overstate the volitility of less common stages.

There are massively more games played on PS2 than other stages, and on BF/FD/SV/TC than the less common 3 he collected data for. (Which might not even be legal in a given event.) However, I strongly suspect this only a small contributor to the volatility we see.

Every braindead gentleman's to PS2. Zero people in human history have ever gentleman'd to Kalos or Lylat or Yoshi's. So PS2 results are watered down with 100s of thousands of casual picks, where the stage is not chosen for parituclarly meaningful tactical reasons, while just about every game on Kalos/Lylat/Yoshi's is because someone picked it for a very specific reason, with a specific plan.

Pros pick (and ban) PS2 for very specific reasons with specific plans all the time too, but that data is heavily diluted and can't be visible here.

 

[ParanoidDrone]

https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/hfb2ep/i_analyzed_one_million_matches_and_found_smash/

Das Koopa is still my GOAT BFF, but this guy can be #2.


Edit: I'm extremely happy he did the stage data, but would take it with a bigger grain of salt. This sort of raw data as a couple massive cultural confounders that will majorly overstate the volitility of less common stages.

There are massively more games played on PS2 than other stages, and on BF/FD/SV/TC than the less common 3 he collected data for. (Which might not even be legal in a given event.) However, I strongly suspect this only a small contributor to the volatility we see.

Every braindead gentleman's to PS2. Zero people in human history have ever gentleman'd to Kalos or Lylat or Yoshi's. So PS2 results are watered down with 100s of thousands of casual picks, where the stage is not chosen for parituclarly meaningful tactical reasons, while just about every game on Kalos/Lylat/Yoshi's is because someone picked it for a very specific reason, with a specific plan.

Pros pick (and ban) PS2 for very specific reasons with specific plans all the time too, but that data is heavily diluted and can't be visible here.

I think it does, however, highlight the importance of stage selection, which feels like it sometimes gets lost in the shuffle as people gravitate towards their favorites and more or less ignore the rest.

 

[Thinkaman]

Quick post without commentary:

 

[Planty]

I think what a lot of people are missing about Min Min is that she's a puppet fighter.

Of course, it sounds a bit odd to call her a puppet fighter since she doesn't have some sort of follower with her, yet mechanically she's more similar to Rosalina or Ice Climbers than she is to the other "distance demons" of Byleth and Belmont. This is because of the way her arms function independently of each other, allowing for frame traps and for making unsafe options risky to punish.

Consider how Ice Climbers players often use alternating blizzard. One climber pressures the opponent with blizzard, while the other is free to act and to move to try to cover the opponent's option. Or consider how Rosalina will poke at opponents with lunar land bair while she is free to move. Essentially, the puppet fighter archetype involves the usage of distinct entities, where one applies pressure while the other is free to act to respond to the opponent or to cover a different option. Through smart usage of the two entities, the player can cover more options than would normally be possible, as well as making the character's frame data "better" by making things unpunishable, or allowing followups where they would normally be impossible.

Puppet fighters in Smash have normally achieved this through (possibly unintended) situational desyncs. Min Min is the first puppet fighter where the "desyncs" are an actual intended mechanic that can be used freely, rather than in only specific circumstances or when certain setups have been done. It'll be exciting to see how this ability to desync freely will impact the character in the long run.

All that to say, we should classify Min Min appropriately to her archetype if we want to better analyze her, just like you wouldn't be able to properly analyze Megaman if you thought of him as a rushdown character. Min Min is a long range puppet fighter.

 

[Thinkaman]

Min Min is a long range puppet fighter.

Sort of; usually a puppet implies a more broadly independent state and position. A boomerang is not a puppet, nor PK fire or any other attack just because it overlaps or option selects with another attack.

I think Min Min is more like you took a jab2, ftilt2, fsmash2, dancing blade, that type of move, and made it into an entire character that controls like Megaman.

I agree with NairWizard on the dealing-with jump issue, among other things. I think Nintendo will make a lot of money selling the Ramram to NATO as a comprehensive anti-air option.

 

[SwagGuy99]

This is the best video I've found that breaks down Min Min.

I agree with just about everything here.

• Min Min's disadvantage seems poor, but just about everything else is at least passable, with some very good (possibly overtuned) aspects to her as well.
• She's going to beat "every zoner" and "especially Pac-Man." I can think of arguments for and doing fine based on what we know, since Snake might be able to throw grenades far enough to get past her disjoints, and Toon Link will be incredibly hard for her to hit, as he's probably the fastest zoner in terms of move speed, but I do see her going even or winning against the rest of them. I do think she will beat specifically really hard since she doesn't have to worry about Hydrant and he shouldn't be able to approach.
• Min Min's normals are very fast given how much range they have
• She's at least high tier, possibly better.

 

[NairWizard]

Quick post without commentary:

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The most notably hilarious thing here by far is Marth. 0 results at high level, but quite a high winrate across the board. I wouldn't expect otherwise, to be honest--he's from a well-practiced archetype and still just as fundamentals-based as ever.

 

[Thinkaman]

The most notably hilarious thing here by far is Marth. 0 results at high level, but quite a high winrate across the board. I wouldn't expect otherwise, to be honest--he's from a well-practiced archetype and still just as fundamentals-based as ever.

The easy explaination is player behavior + Koopa's methodology. Lucina is super popular, and plenty of Lucina players will whip out Marth in pools, why not. Those matches will show up in one of these data sets and not the other.

It's impossible for even a significant fraction of the Marth players to be an entirely separate group that somehow achieves a comparable win-rate but zero results.

Edit: To be clear, Marth is played 1/5th as much as Lucina, and is within 0.8% (nominal) of her (#1 in cast) win-rate. (Marth is #3 to dark horse Falco)

Also shoutouts to Bowser being the #4 most played character, dang.

Edit2: Longtime data nerds will note that this is the first lens in which Wario is not amazing. He has only a run-of-the-mill 50.4% win rate, and a 55/76 usage ranking. Wario historically tops the charts in online data, VOD data, and PGR-based data, while sitting comfortably at #6 on Orion. Yet in this rather comprehensive measure, he's extremely mundane.

 

[NairWizard]

It's impossible for even a significant fraction of the Marth players to be an entirely separate group that somehow achieves a comparable win-rate but zero results.

This is what I mean, but I don't think it's just the Lucina players. People who play FE swords tend to play all the swords, because they're all based on the same set of fundamentals that people have been learning since Melee. If you play one, then you don't need a lot of investment to pick up and play another one against a weaker player (though the investment is the same as picking up any other character against a player of equal skill, past a certain threshold).

e.g., when I started playing Ultimate in tournament, I used Roy for a bit while searching for a main, and I found myself switching to Chrom, Marth, and sometimes Lucina when I felt like it or when the matchup felt easier, but only against players who were notably worse.

Even though all the swords are very different and I've vouched for the differences between Chrom and Roy before, the mindset required to play them is pretty similar (fear whiff punishing, respect distance, don't strike unless necessary, laser-focus on ledgeplay), and mindset is really all you need to have on lock when you have significant skill advantage.

Corrin has a pretty notable winrate for, I imagine, similar reasons, and I would even tentatively place Mewtwo on that pile.

To be clear, Marth is played very close to 1/5th as much as Marth

Having the third highest winrate may be impressive, but not as impressive as being played only 20% as often as yourself.

 

[FruitLoop]

The easy explaination is player behavior + Koopa's methodology. Lucina is super popular, and plenty of Lucina players will whip out Marth in pools, why not. Those matches will show up in one of these data sets and not the other.

It's impossible for even a significant fraction of the Marth players to be an entirely separate group that somehow achieves a comparable win-rate but zero results.

Edit: To be clear, Marth is played 1/5th as much as Lucina, and is within 0.8% (nominal) of her (#1 in cast) win-rate. (Marth is #3 to dark horse Falco)

Also shoutouts to Bowser being the #4 most played character, dang.

Edit2: Longtime data nerds will note that this is the first lens in which Wario is not amazing. He has only a run-of-the-mill 50.4% win rate, and a 55/76 usage ranking. Wario historically tops the charts in online data, VOD data, and PGR-based data, while sitting comfortably at #6 on Orion. Yet in this rather comprehensive measure, he's extremely mundane.

I mean from my guess. I always thought that the reason why Marth sometimes shows up on Smash.gg outside of the general obscure Marth mains is because a decent amount of Lucina mains don't like the ditto and since it's agreed upon that Marth wins the mu vs Lucina they might whip out Marth for a better advantage for a seemingly similar character.

 

[Thinkaman]

Having the third highest winrate may be impressive, but not as impressive as being played only 20% as often as yourself.

I realized my mistake and thought I blocked before anyone reacted, but you read my block and now have a SUPER DRAGON ARM, whatever that means.

I mean from my guess. I always thought that the reason why Marth sometimes shows up on Smash.gg outside of the general obscure Marth mains is because a decent amount of Lucina mains don't like the ditto and since it's agreed upon that Marth wins the mu vs Lucina they might whip out Marth for a better advantage for a seemingly similar character.

Well, incidentally, Marth did win 55% of his matches against Lucina in this dataset!

In fact, it is her worst matchup.

 

[Hydreigonfan01]

I realized my mistake and thought I blocked before anyone reacted, but you read my block and now have a SUPER DRAGON ARM, whatever that means.



Well, incidentally, Marth did win 55% of his matches against Lucina in this dataset!

In fact, it is her worst matchup.

Leo did say on his Lucina matchup chart that she loses to Marth because the tipper beats out Lucina's moves instead of trading.

 

[Thinkaman]

Polarization aka Matchup Consistency aka "Relative Difference To The Expected Standard Deviation for a Character's Sample Size"

(Higher is more consistent, less polarized)

This passes the smell test: PT is among the least polarized, while the 10 most polarized characters are exactly who you'd expect. Banjo being uniquely non-polarized is also not a surprise.

...but I dunno that anyone would have come up with Brawler, WFT, Bayo, or Ken as the paragons of matchup consistency. But that's what the data says! Very interesting. Chrom also being less polarized than Roy is surprising to me. Also, look at Little Mac! Gasp! This same data set also suggests that Mac is one of the absolute least stage-polarized characters. My brain is shutting down; I have no idea how to reconcile this.

Edit: To be clear, this data suggests all of Mac's matchups are indeed within a ~42:58 spread. Honestly, I'm interpretting this as proof that Mac matches are predominantly based first and foremost on this unusually potent meta-question of "Do they know how to fight Mac?" that transcends character and stage.

 

[DungeonMaster]

The error bars on this data are probably quite large. The big swings between Samus and Dark Samus can't be readily explained.
Also does anyone know if this covers the entire range of patches?
Because Ryu being down there with Belmont as terrible is probably only applicable with a heavy dose of pre-patch Ryu.

 

[Das Koopa]

New data post:

https://twitter.com/LoopBarnard/status/1276228876822331396

Things are start to (slowly) mesh together. Here, we see what characters suffer or benefit from having a full profile of mains analyzed. For simplicity's sake, placement values are used. A broad sampling internationally was taken.

Superregions used;

-United States
-Canada
-Mexico
-Japan
-Europe
-Oceania
-Western South America
-Central America
-Caribbean
-Southeast Asia
-Middle East

*These represent the bulk of sampled areas for the purposes of the larger project. A full map is available here;

Regional information beyond what I usually refer to as Smash Ultimate's five "Primary regions" (USA, JPN, EUR, CAN, MEX) is very scarce as regions outside of these typically, at best, have only category 3 (Superregional events) on rare occasions or even rarely muster up category 2 events. The outlying nature of these areas makes it less likely to get travel data.

Gathering the data for each of the five mains used, listed below, was a matter of extended discussion with peers. In contentious cases I would score 6 or more and use the highest scoring among those. Some players with minimal data were excluded or some were limited - i.e., I went with FOW for Ness but not Awestin or both. In cases like YB, I used pre/post major weeklies. For Terry, I went with what existed, and I frankly think he should be put in the "NED" category with Marth/Byleth.

Notes:

1: Marth is largely unused. I would be mostly using old, defunct, highly limited data if I were to somehow eek out a data set of 5 players, and I don't believe it would be representative of Marth's place in the game. Marth is essentially where Lucina was in Smash 4 during 2016/2017 in the post-patch environment. I expect Marth will eventually sustain some results upon broader exploration, but it's unlikely we'll see that anytime soon.

2: Byleth existed for ~2 months before COVID-19 slapped the game. Blade is the only player I'm aware of who used her in regionals. With Mexico only having ~1-2 majors a year, Blade's events fell on superregionals rather than majors, meaning she has no data or information to work with.

Anyway, the first thing to note is that low scores don't necessarily tell the whole story. As noted on twitter during the construction of this list, Ice Climbers has Big D at a very high score, but this is cancelled out by the other four Climbers scoring very low. Kirby also suffers from this. Jesuischoq has a presentable score, Ferretkuma's is passable at best, but the remainder simply don't stack up and crater the character with one having a sub-200 score.

High scores do end up correlating pretty heavily with good results. The issue for some characters is perception. Inkling isn't suspected as a top character and has been somewhat disregarded since cosmos has been outspoken about transitioning to Pikachu. Cosmos is the only huge USA representative, and he's noteworthy, so his word and presence on streams will have a lot of influence.

His results notably took a dive as the year became significantly harder in season 2. They remained good (he's unquestionably a top player when active) but the attentiveness towards "top 8 placings" rather than the more robust method of watching set records cast a lot of doubt on Inkling when getting to top 8s became significantly harder as talent pools & upset likelihood increased.

No doubt that matchup perception makes Pikachu a worthy upgrade if Tier Lists and Matchup Charts are correct. However, with Cosmos' criticisms of Inkling and Armada not cutting deep into brackets (his SSBU runs are America-focused, despite him being Swedish) people have seemingly ignored other interesting pieces in Inkling's favor

1: Mexico's rise in relevance and the frequency of the character in this country. Bedgar and Chag (the latter of whom has seen improvement in 2019/2020) are both significant Inkling users. Wonf is also highly notable and was either my 6th or 7th pick.

2: Abadango's Inkling runs past the very beginning of 2019 were pretty successful. (Coincidentally, Wario - ranked #1 here - also saw him netting some very good results.)

3: Space doing well in Europe, only faltering to similar Netherlands-based talent. People might've taken his sets over Glutonny and Kameme (two supermajor winners) for granted when he lost to iStudying, but iStudying has won a recent Category 3 european event and historically has been a solid player despite occasional dips.

4: ProtoBanham comains this character. It's likely if I replaced Chag with PB, Inkling would be higher, possibly #1, but I thought his data was lacking comparative to Chag, who was similar to the average main taken for this list.

Note that none of the players I just listed were American; I think this has an effect on perception. While I do not believe Inkling is necessarily a top 3 character and that this simply reflects that Inkling's results are broadly good among her mains, there's other interesting details.

Yoshi & Samus share the exact same composition of mains by nation - 3 JPN, 1 USA, 1 MEX. In both cases, people generally agree the best player for these characters are not USA-bound, and travel ability for most parties is fairly low.

-Ron notably is the best wifi player but has never attended a USA event and rarely attends in country.
-YB barely attends offline ever.
-Meme/Joker do attend, but they aren't located in an ideal location for USA majors, with Texas mustering 1 per year at maximum and the nearest major hubs (SoCal, Florida, and Chicago) all being a fairly far distance. This in general affects perception of MEX despite their high player quality.
-Yoshidora and Parme are largely region bound and seemingly are only able to travel to Osaka-bound Sumabato events.
-Quik, while recognized as very good, can't regularly attend USA majors, and EU majors without much international attendance aren't as watched. Despite stellar wins over KEN & Salem in the states, it was common to see people who didn't know who quiK was as late as Valhalla III, despite him being a Brawl veteran and European mainstay for 6 years.

With Advo being a step below the generally agreed top 3 (Joker, YB, QuiK - in some order) Samus' USA exposure is going to mostly be on Wifi, which will inevitably breed negative connotations that incorrectly pin the character's playerstyle, abilities, and even viability, as I doubt Samus makes many upsets beyond the players I listed. It does not help that Samus' metagame has been especially stagnant since Brawl, with only IcyMist making a huge statement towards the character's viability in smash 4. She's active online, but only recently attended events again. She might be a key to helping Samus' perception.

Yoshi is very common regionally, but I think he also has a pretty low reputation, both in terms of playstyle perception and results. Suarez made top 50 in season 1, something people were iffy on since he made it more on consistency than set records, but this was the first Yoshi success post-Melee titles had seen the yesteryear of 2015 when Aiba did well at a couple of events in Japan's early Sm4sh metagame.

Combine these reputations and slacking histories with low USA (and stream) presence and it seems people are reluctant to be favorable towards either character's kits despite them clearly being good and competitive with top 20-30 players.

That's all I have to say for right now since this is going into a much larger project. But I hope people enjoy! This was a lengthy project.

 

[Thinkaman]

Also does anyone know if this covers the entire range of patches?
Because Ryu being down there with Belmont as terrible is probably only applicable with a heavy dose of pre-patch Ryu.

Yes, this is lifetime of the entire smash.gg data set. Though I do believe my hasty processing hit some filesize restrictions that cut off a small number of the earliest matches, which I decided was probably a feature as much as a bug.

You should expect the majorly buffed characters to be underrepresented, and the more popular nerfed characters to be overrepresented. All DLC except Joker will be underrepresented. (Joker, the most played character, is hard to draw conclusions about.)

The error bars on this data are probably quite large. The big swings between Samus and Dark Samus can't be readily explained.

Well, yes and no.

On one hand, the error margins are meaningful, as evidenced by variance being coorelated (inversely) with sample size. Expected stdev = 2.0943 * sample ^ -0.39 for this data set; the most played characters have half the variance of the rarer ones. (Nothing more, nothing less) So I had to go out of my way to control for this effect in the variance chart.

On the other hand, a massive % of character usage is social phenomenon. The type of players who play Samus and play Dark Samus are not exactly 1:1. A more extreme case of this was Peach and Daisy in the months following the game's release: People playing Peach tended to be experienced Peach loyalists, which people playing Daisy tended to be new to the character. Not exclusively obviously, but enough to effect a major (>6%) difference in win-rates across two characters with relatively large samples. We observed this trend in the VOD-based data, and Sakurai even commented on it in his column.

Ironically, these days the trend has reversed, and Daisy consistently shows as marginally outperforming Peach in the broad data measures we have. It's also interesting that smash.gg data has Dark Pit solidly ahead of Pit, while that online sample we had had Pit solidly ahead of Dark Pit. Selecting for personality seems to give different results in very different populations of players.

Edit:
Looking through characters I play, the matchup numbers have far fewer surprises than not. Isabelle (and Villager), show Pocket clearly, with large, observable advantages against Piranha Plant, Lucario, Samus, Lucas, ect.

Incineroar has the best matchup in the game against Joker in this dataset, which is my experience! I love fighting Joker as the cat, and will always switch to that matchup. He also shows as unusually strong against G&W and terrible against MK, both things I have noted.

Little Mac's best matchup is suggested to be Mega Man--also my lived experience, he is the only character I will unconditionally switch to Mac for.

Ness outperforms against Pikachu and Mario compared to all other "top tiers", G&W also wallops Pikachu a bit, All the sanity checks pass.

Lucario clearly crushes swords and loses to others, it's very stark. Wario is very opposite. Olimar seems idiosyncratic.

 

[DougEfresh]

Polarization aka Matchup Consistency aka "Relative Difference To The Expected Standard Deviation for a Character's Sample Size"

(Higher is more consistent, less polarized)

View attachment 276287

This passes the smell test: PT is among the least polarized, while the 10 most polarized characters are exactly who you'd expect. Banjo being uniquely non-polarized is also not a surprise.

...but I dunno that anyone would have come up with Brawler, WFT, Bayo, or Ken as the paragons of matchup consistency. But that's what the data says! Very interesting. Chrom also being less polarized than Roy is surprising to me. Also, look at Little Mac! Gasp! This same data set also suggests that Mac is one of the absolute least stage-polarized characters. My brain is shutting down; I have no idea how to reconcile this.

Edit: To be clear, this data suggests all of Mac's matchups are indeed within a ~42:58 spread. Honestly, I'm interpretting this as proof that Mac matches are predominantly based first and foremost on this unusually potent meta-question of "Do they know how to fight Mac?" that transcends character and stage.

These are actually some pretty interesting findings. I agree with you that Banjo is quite non-polarizing in terms of his MU spread; he's got a versatile kit that is capable of handling the majority of the cast well. Even with his very worst MUs ( and maybe), I think there's room to explore for improvement in handling at least some of this handful of bad match ups.

Anyway, what stands out to me the most is that Lucario barely missed out on the top 10 of this list, being considered 11th most consistent for MUs! I would've thought that the data may have aligned more with what's common perception of him as a character and what his MU spread is like (which are usually seen as quite polarizing), but this goes to show why doing the actual research is good and needs to be done.


"Lucario clearly crushes swords and loses to others, it's very stark."

From my own experience playing Lucario, he doesn't "crush swords", and in fact, swords are frequently seen as the character category that entails many of his bad match ups that several Lucario players have secondaries for.

But I can also understand where this view may be coming from. Lucario's movement-based bait and punish playstyle, combined with his aura sphere ledge trapping and edgeguarding with dair, nair or AS, can all be used well to exploit the common weaknesses that swords have in this game: his movement can bait unsafe approaches on his shield or make landing aerials rather poorly spaced, which allows him to get his low to mid percent up throw combos from grabs, or catch the landing with an AS, dash back fsmash, or even a dash-in force palm grab if you're willing to take a bit of a risk with its inconsistency. Swords also can have a hard time getting off ledge safely and several have linear and exploitable recoveries that can be capitalized on, which can really help Lucario keep up or stay ahead against this class of characters that generally have a combination of better range, superior frame data and more consistent kill power. In some cases like Chroy, they even have better mobility stats than Luc to make things hard.

The main explanation I can think of for this perception, as well as how Luc managed to be ranked as consistent as he was listed, is the Lucario players having very good MU familiarity across the board (this is obviously beneficial for every character main, but having this with Lucario is huge for helping you play to his strengths as needed depending on the other character's tools, weaknesses and strengths) combined with a lack of Lucario MU familiarity given the usage of the character having a sample size fewer than 10,000 players according to one of the other charts you posted.

Things may look quite different if people knew the match up more, though at the same time, Jeda has been showing that it's possible to still find respectable success with Lucario even when a significant portion of his region knows (or at least, should know) the MU by now. His rank of 18th on the most recent European PR using mostly Luc and only occasionally his Joker secondary is nothing to scoff at.

 

[DunnoBro]

The main reason why everyone hates Bayo is because of her zero to death combos just from a single mistake.
I don't see any combos like that from Min Min

Bayo was just anti-fun in every single sense of smash. She wasn't even that broken going by winrates by the end, she just refused most of the fun or hype things in smash.

Couldn't edgeguard her. Unless you had extremely non-committal options like PK thunder.
Couldn't combo her. Could barely landing trap her, especially before the dABK nerf.
Couldn't ledge trap her. At least not without risking 30%-death because of Ledge Jump > ABK covering half the stage. (Standard > Dtilt and Roll > Witch Twist were also dumb)
Neutral was awkward and unfun because of witch time + grounded abk having unreasonably high reward.

Even now she's not widely considered fun at all to fight.

Minmin has a lot of range but she def looks like she'll at least let you play the game once you get in. She could be busted and toxic but it wouldn't be the same as Bayo was at all.

 

[Nobie]

Incineroar has the best matchup in the game against Joker in this dataset, which is my experience! I love fighting Joker as the cat, and will always switch to that matchup. He also shows as unusually strong against G&W and terrible against MK, both things I have noted.

What is it about Incineroar that allows the cat to do well against Joker? Is it that Rebel Guard is discouraged against a grappler? Is it that Joker's main damage comes from being very close and thus in danger of getting grabbed?

For that matter, a character with good Joker and G&W matchups sounds like something people would be desperate for.

 

[FruitLoop]

What is it about Incineroar that allows the cat to do all against Joker? Is it that Rebel Guard is discouraged against a grappler? Is it that Joker's main damage comes from being very close and thus in danger of getting grabbed?

For that matter, a character with good Joker and G&W matchups sounds like something people would be desperate for.

didn't you know? He can force Joker to never stay past his bedtime!

 

[KakuCP9]

What is it about Incineroar that allows the cat to do well against Joker? Is it that Rebel Guard is discouraged against a grappler? Is it that Joker's main damage comes from being very close and thus in danger of getting grabbed?

For that matter, a character with good Joker and G&W matchups sounds like something people would be desperate for.

I think it's due how soft Joker's midrange game is against the big cat and how Eiha / guns can be Revenge'd making zoning/run-away cost prohibitive against Incineroar ( the former is slow-ish with mid reward and the latter needs to be close to have any effect). It also helps that the recovery of Revenge was buffed so this tactic is more viable.
On top of this, Incineroar has the range and frame data to contest Joker's buttons coupled with nair OOS to make pressuring Incineroar surprisingly difficult. Even Incineroar's disadvantage state is to be noted since he can either fast-fall nair or Revenge through some frame traps to get out of trouble (both have risks, but also have their uses). The only area I can think of where Joker oppresses the cat is edge-guarding, however Incineroar can edge-guard non-Arsene with equal prejudice thanks to being able to move slightly during Darkest Lariat such that he can fall off the edge while the move is active and hit Joker (Browny brought the Lariat edge-guard up a couple times).
Dunno if it's enough to have the matchup even, but its enough to not write Incineroar off as "lol. Heavy get combo'd".