Official Competitive Character Impressions 2.0

[NairWizard]

He's trying to be Rizeasu or something. Though you would think that with a wide array of proven characters at tournament he would use them to counterpick like Banham, but he doesn't seem interested in that, rather just play who he feels like it. Like how he loses so much to Mario these days, during his Aegis phase he defeated pretty much every competent Mario.

Rizeasu doesn't get results either -- at least not the consistent top 2-3 results that Leo is aiming for and has been historically known for.

I can't recall a player who's ever been top 5 worldwide but able to juggle like 4-6 different characters for multiple tournaments.
All of your characters end up good, but none of them end up great.

His Joker got 4th at LMMM and then won Genesis, and after that he decided to add Byleth back into the rotation? And Meta Knight? And then briefly Corrin? And then Marth?

I'm extremely puzzled by what he thinks he's doing. Having a few bad tournaments doesn't mean that you have to switch characters -- just learn the matchups that you lost and keep improving.

 

[Hydreigonfan01]

Speaking of "Corrin might be better than Lucina", Japanese top Snake Hurt made a tier list:

キャラランク作ってみた！ pic.twitter.com/1tekR3HJ6y

— E36/Hurt (@Hurt_ssb) November 1, 2023

I've noticed that many Japanese tier lists tend to be very different from most European and North American tier lists in some aspects. Yoshi and Diddy Kong seem to be viewed more highly over there, Pikachu considered a low high tier or a mid tier?

Some notable placements: Yoshi and Diddy Kong top 10, Ryu, Pit, and Falco top 20, Sephiroth, Palutena, Wolf, Captain Falcon, Kazuya in top 30, Pac-Man, Lucina, Pokémon Trainer top 40, Zero Suit Samus, Pikachu top 50, Byleth, Mega Man top 60.

G&W being top 5 seems to be a decently common opinion right now. Hurt putting Snake in top 5 is not too surprising, I think it's plausible that Snake could be that good.

Personally I don't think the difference between Corrin and Lucina is that big, I think they're fairly close to each other, but Corrin is certainly getting much better results right now, so if you base it on results Corrin does better. ESAM thinks Lucina is better than Corrin though, and in NA and Europe that's probably the more common opinion right now, although I've seen a few Japanese tier lists that list Corrin higher than Lucina lately.

DDee also believes Corrin is better then Lucina in his tier list.

Tell me I’m stupid ^-^ pic.twitter.com/kCEsCH1yUL

— SS | DDee! (@ddee_ssbu) October 30, 2023

 

[NairWizard]

I've seen some people suggest (even recently) that we should do character first rather than stage first when selecting counterpicks. I don't really get the logic behind that. Seems like this would give a bigger advantage to the loser of game 1, which results in lower variance for the overall set (which means that the winner of game 1 is more likely to win the set).

 

[Frihetsanka]

Character first has been standard for years in Europe and Australia and more and more NA majors (including Port Priority 8) run it these days. One major issue with stage first is that it enables situations like

Stage first gives a significant buff to the winner, meaning that whoever wins game 1 is more likely to win the set. Imagine that someone plays Mario and Kazuya. This player wins game 1 with Mario and bans some stages. The loser picks Final Destination. The winner of the previous game switches to Kazuya and now you're facing Kazuya on FD (something like this happened with Myran vs acola at Summit, acola went Kazuya on Myran's counterpick, and acola won the game and the set).

One way to avoid this is to implement a character lock system. The winner of the previous game cannot switch character. This is standard in many fighting games, but it's not common in platform fighters, and I imagine many Smash players would not appreciate it. Character before stage solves this issue: Player 1 wins game 1, say they're switching to Kazuya, and now player 2 knows this and will likely not go FD.

 

[NairWizard]

Stage first gives a significant buff to the winner, meaning that whoever wins game 1 is more likely to win the set.

But this is false, right?

Character-first gives the loser a bigger counterpick advantage for one game, but bigger counterpick advantage for the loser is bigger advantage for the winner of game 1 across the set.

You can see this is trivially true at the extreme ends.

If the counterpick advantage is close to neutral (about 50%), then the winner of game 1 wins the set ~70% of the time (just math on the odds).
But if the counterpick advantage is 100% (as in, you always win on your counterpick), then the winner of game 1 wins the set 100% of the time.

given players A and B with 100% counterpick advantage:
Game 1: A wins
Game 2: B counterpicks and wins
Game 3: A counterpicks and wins
Game 4: B counterpicks and wins
Game 5: A counterpicks and wins the set

Giving bigger advantages to the loser makes it more lopsided toward the winner, not less.

You want to minimize the counterpick advantage for the loser as much as possible so that the winner of game 1 doesn't decide the set.

 

[Hydreigonfan01]

Results from a regional in Ohio

1. Neo
2. Onin
3. Dice
4. AnthonyIsntCool
5. AndrewT
5. Doorstop
7. TimeGear
7. Grease All Mighty

 

[NairWizard]

Corrin is so extremely good.

But this is false, right?

Character-first gives the loser a bigger counterpick advantage for one game, but bigger counterpick advantage for the loser is bigger advantage for the winner of game 1 across the set.

You can see this is trivially true at the extreme ends.

If the counterpick advantage is close to neutral (about 50%), then the winner of game 1 wins the set ~70% of the time (just math on the odds).
But if the counterpick advantage is 100% (as in, you always win on your counterpick), then the winner of game 1 wins the set 100% of the time.

given players A and B with 100% counterpick advantage:
Game 1: A wins
Game 2: B counterpicks and wins
Game 3: A counterpicks and wins
Game 4: B counterpicks and wins
Game 5: A counterpicks and wins the set

Giving bigger advantages to the loser makes it more lopsided toward the winner, not less.

You want to minimize the counterpick advantage for the loser as much as possible so that the winner of game 1 doesn't decide the set.

To kinda follow up on this and generalize it, I think that most people in the smash community misunderstand the point of counterpicking.

Counterpicking isn't about giving the loser a chance to come back. In fact, any counterpick system will actually favor the winner of the first game over the course of a set.

Let's consider a 3-game set.

Scenario 1: no counterpicking system, evenly matched characters and players, blind picks, neutral stages. 50% chance for each player to win.
If player A wins game 1, then the chance that player A wins the set is just 50% * 50% (lose game 2 win game 3) + 50% (win game 2) = 75%.

Scenario 2: a counterpicking system that gives about a 20% advantage to the counterpicking player, so you're 70% likely to win on your counterpick; evenly matched characters and players, both players have valuable counterpicks.
If player A wins game 1, then the chance that player A wins the set is now 70% * 70% (lose game 2 win game 3) + 30% (win game 2) = 79%.

The counterpick system actually made player A more likely to win the set after winning game 1, and the effect is more pronounced in 5-game sets.


Any counterpicking system favors the winner of game 1. Counterpicking inherently reduces variance; counterpick systems make you less likely to win if you lost game 1.

It is not to your benefit to be able to counterpick in game 2 after losing game 1, assuming your opponent can do the same back to you. That belief is just a logical fallacy, but I see it everywhere.

What counterpicking does do is force players to diversify their character selections and stage knowledge, since if one player has a good counterpick option and the other doesn't, then that's a pretty big advantage with a counterpick system. Counterpicking adds an important strategic element to the game, rewarding the mastery of multiple characters and stages, but the point is not to give the loser a chance to fight, and in fact the opposite happens when both are ready to counterpick!

 

[Frihetsanka]

Something to keep in mind is that stage first can also benefit the loser, if they play multiple characters and the winner does not.

Let's say the loser plays Mario and Kazuya. The loser loses game 1 as Mario. The winner bans stages based on Mario, and the loser picks FD and Kazuya. Ultimately it's a nerf to solo mains and a buff to people who play characters who are strong at multiple stages (like ProtoBanham).

Players who play multiple characters already gain an advantage due to having a better MU spread. Do they also need the ruleset to cater to them in order to buff them even more? Europe and Australia have been running character before stage for several years now, and it seems that more and more US majors are doing it as well. Character before stage has the additional advantage of being more beginner friendly: Someone who is new to a scene and is playing someone who they've never faced before might not know their secondaries, and might, for example, go to Final Destination against someone with a Kazuya secondary. Additionally, solo mains might be encouraged to play it safe and go to stages that are considered fairly neutral instead of trying to get a stronger counter-pick, since they don't want to risk getting counter-picked on their own counter-pick.

Ultimately, there are pros and cons to both approaches. How bad is cheese? How important should it be to study your opponent's characters before a set? Do we want to give people who play multiple characters even more incentive to do so, or is it enough that they're already getting a superior MU spread (at the cost of spending time on more than one character)? I will tell you this though: I've heard very little complaining from Europeans about character before stage after it was implemented.

(Yes, Corrin is good, I'm thinking around top 30)

 

[NairWizard]

Sure, there are valid reasons for character first. It’s just that the biggest (only) reason I always hear is to make it more fair for the loser of game 1, but that’s not how counterpicking systems work, nor the point of them.
FD Kazuya gets brought up a lot whenever I see this discussion, but that is part of the balancing of a minimized-advantage counterpick system.

if the argument is “we don’t want to reward playing multiple characters as much” then I can see character-first making sense. It’s a relative buff to solo mains at the cost of g1 winner deciding the set more often, a decent tradeoff.

 

[Hydreigonfan01]

Results for Tech Republic VII

1. Glutonny
2. Bloom4Eva
3. Sisqui
4. Luugi
5. Raflow
5. AndresFn
7. Space
7. crêpe salée
9. SkWiirrel
9. NaetorU
9. Leon
9. Supahsemmie
13. marcpq
13. Oryon
13. Neeroz
13. Pepo

 

[Rizen]

Hot take: is a bottom 5 character but not the worst in the game. Characters like Kirby, Mac and Isabelle are worse than him. The reason is he favors a strong punish game and advantage state, which is the way the meta is heading. Ganon controls a lot of space with huge attacks and has huge reward on hit. As cons he has the worst disadvantage state in the game, terrible mobility and is slow. But who else does this represent? Kazuya. Now there's no comparing Ganon to Kazuya. Kazuya has a lot more going for him than Ganon. But it shows how the meta is leaning toward strong advantage states over good neutrals. Ganon has high enough reward to just eek out a place above a few other bad characters.

 

[Sucumbio]

Roy is good at this game.

 

[st0pnsw0p]

Ganon better than Kirby? What recent results have Ganon mains been getting? Haven't been keeping up with Japan but I haven't seen anything in NA that matches Kirby's recent wins and results courtesy of Guilheww.

 

[Rizen]

Ganon better than Kirby? What recent results have Ganon mains been getting? Haven't been keeping up with Japan but I haven't seen anything in NA that matches Kirby's recent wins and results courtesy of Guilheww.

I didn't see that; what did Kirby do? When talking about characters like Kirby and Ganon, they're hard to compare because to be frank, they never do much of anything. I know Shiny Mark used Ganon outside of top 8 in Cumbre 2 to style on worse players but he switched to Pika during top 8.

 

[st0pnsw0p]

I didn't see that; what did Kirby do? When talking about characters like Kirby and Ganon, they're hard to compare because to be frank, they never do much of anything. I know Shiny Mark used Ganon outside of top 8 in Cumbre 2 to style on worse players but he switched to Pika during top 8.

This year Guilheww took Sparg0 to game 5 last stock in Smash Factor X, got two set wins on Master at two different Mexico Hooters tournaments (at least one of which is being counted for Lumirank according to ssbwiki), and a set win on Tilde at LMMM.

 

[Hydreigonfan01]

Port Priority 8 is happening this weekend, and is looking to be one of the most stacked Ultimate events ever, alongside EVO 2019, Frostbite 2020, Battle of BC 5 and the Ludwig Smash Invitational

 

[Hydreigonfan01]

Top 128 for Port Priority 8
https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/17taua5

 

[Rizen]

Top 128 for Port Priority 8
https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/17taua5

Everything is stacked up like you'd expect it at this point.

 

[The_Bookworm]

Here are some of our most notable upsets.
From yesterday:
Peabnut 2-3 X'avier
Goblin 2-3 PkChris
BassMage 0-3 Eddawg
Chronos 0-3 Silver


From today so far:
Glutonny 1-3 BeastModePaul
Shuton 2-3 Skinny the Pooh
Yuara 2-3 MVD
Zomba 2-3 Umeki
Tweek 2-3 Kaninabe
AC 3-2 Goblin (out at 65th)
embo_z 3-1 BassMage (out at 49th)
Tarik 3-2 Shuton (out at 49th)
Zomba 1-3 Kiyarash (out at 33rd)

Not quite "bloodbath" status, but still a very notable list of upsets.



Top 32
Winner's
acola vs Asimo
Umeki vs Skyjay
Kola vs Dabuz
Sonix vs Pocket (Onin)
Miya vs Tea
Light vs Hurt
Sparg0 vs KEN
Kaninabe vs MkLeo


Loser's
ApolloKage vs MuteAce
Kiyarash vs Riddles
BeastModePaul vs Sisqui
Glutonny vs Sho
Gackt vs Maister
SHADIC vs Lima
Anathema vs Kurama
Tweek vs MVD

2 users of , , and in the winner's side, and is the most populated character with 3 users.

 

[NairWizard]

I have no idea how anyone loses with Fox lmao

Yes I'm on the Nairo/Tweek train

Fox is broken, like broken

Good stuff to Kaininabe, his combo game is way better than Light's, who relies a lot on reaction time to win

 

[The_Bookworm]

Top 8

Winner's
acola vs Sonix
Miya vs KEN

Loser's
Umeki vs MuteAce
Light vs Kaninabe


Sparg0 is out. Tweek is out. Glutonny is out. Riddles is out. MkLeo is out. Maister is out. So many top players have fallen short in this event.
And here, we have 2 Sonics in the Winner's side of top 8, and the Loser's side of top 8 consists of a Peach mirror and a Fox mirror.

This event feels like a bizarre fever dream.

 

[NairWizard]

I did promise you guys a Sonix-acola set analysis, so hopefully this upcoming set is good.
Part of me thinks that acola just wins game 5 though.
edit: never mind, dang, matchup-checked to the max

 

[The_Bookworm]

I did promise you guys a Sonix-acola set analysis, so hopefully this upcoming set is good.
Part of me thinks that acola just wins game 5 though.

Well the set ended up being a 3-0 slaughter in favor of Sonix.
Aside from the beginning of game 3, that entire set was completely one-sided in Sonix's favor.
The set ended up simply looking like a contest between the fastest character in the game vs one of the slowest characters in the game mobility-wise. Sonix gave him very little room to breath, and pretty much everything acola did got whiff punished with ease.

 

[NotLiquid]

Oddly gripping Grand Finals. It felt surreal to see Sonix progressively transform from community "villain" into hero all in one surprisingly engaging set, and it somehow wasn't against Acola or a Steve player. Ultimate's storylines have been wild in the post-pandemic era.

 

[Sucumbio]

Ridley is no punk. If MKLeo isn't fond of his choices anymore he should try Ridley. I think his execution style fits Ridley really well.

 

[Rizen]

Ridley is no punk. If MKLeo isn't fond of his choices anymore he should try Ridley. I think his execution style fits Ridley really well.

I disagree; Ridley is not a good character. Although in Ultimate no character is truly bad and anyone can be threatening, Ridley's in the bottom 20 of the cast. His hurtbox is huge but he lacks the weight to compensate for it. He has a few midair jumps but has poor airspeed and still lacks any meaningful way to escape juggles and vortexes so he's bound to take a lot of damage from most interactions. He also lacks any kind of armor, unlike Bowser or Krool. His recovery is worse than it seems because he can only upB in four directions so if you hit him offstage at a weird angle he's forced to flop around positioning himself under the ledge and is very easy to intercept. His fire breath is slow and only good when he's in advantage meaning he has no good projectiles to zone with. He has sword-like disjoints on his tail but doesn't do anything that traditional swordies can't do without all his glaring disadvantages. I know Creepooba is doing well with him in some locals but he never places significantly in anything major. MKLeo's better off with his current characters.

 

[Sucumbio]

I disagree; Ridley is not a good character. Although in Ultimate no character is truly bad and anyone can be threatening, Ridley's in the bottom 20 of the cast. His hurtbox is huge but he lacks the weight to compensate for it. He has a few midair jumps but has poor airspeed and still lacks any meaningful way to escape juggles and vortexes so he's bound to take a lot of damage from most interactions. He also lacks any kind of armor, unlike Bowser or Krool. His recovery is worse than it seems because he can only upB in four directions so if you hit him offstage at a weird angle he's forced to flop around positioning himself under the ledge and is very easy to intercept. His fire breath is slow and only good when he's in advantage meaning he has no good projectiles to zone with. He has sword-like disjoints on his tail but doesn't do anything that traditional swordies can't do without all his glaring disadvantages. I know Creepooba is doing well with him in some locals but he never places significantly in anything major. MKLeo's better off with his current characters.

Even better he can tank from neutral special, but I just think he specifically would gel with MKLeo who loves nuanced characters with a large nair and good punishes.

 

[NairWizard]

Someone told me today that Game and Watch was zonable and I did a double take. Are we watching the same game?

Game and Watch is only zonable if you're Sonic or if the extent of your opponent's Game and Watch play is up-b OOS and powershield.

 

[Cheryl~]

Sonix-Miya GFs was great but I kind of hate that one of the big adaptations Miya made from WFs was just spamming the hell out of Down Smash and how it worked almost perfectly. That move is a whole ass warcrime, almost moreso than GnW Up B, Nair, Up Air, Bair... yeah this character is in the S+ tier with Sonic and Steve for sure lmao

 

[NairWizard]

100% for sure.
I have thought GnW was the best character in the game since before Miya started doing this well.
GnW just has too much going for him to be anything other than in top 3 contention.
You have to be almost willfully ignoring his positives at this point to pretend otherwise.

 

[Rizen]

Even better he can tank from neutral special, but I just think he specifically would gel with MKLeo who loves nuanced characters with a large nair and good punishes.

To be fair, I would have said the same thing about Incineroar as Ridley (bottom 20 character) before Skyjay's breakout performance. It's always possible for some top player to pick up a previously thought bad character and surprise everybody with them.

 

[NairWizard]

That reminds me, one last observation from this tourney.
Disadvantage state is easily the #1 most important thing in this meta.
Swords are no longer the meta; the meta focuses around options to avoid juggles and ledgetraps.

 

[Frihetsanka]

I think advantage state is more important, but the two go kind of hand in hand. Characters with strong advantage states like Steve, G&W, Aegis, Kazuya, and ROB seem to do really well right now, even if their disadvantage states aren't necessarily great in every aspect. Having a strong disadvantage state helps versus strong advantage states, though.

As for swords, it seems to me that swords tend to be a bit volatile. I think part of it has to do with sword characters often lacking a cookie-cutter gameplan. Characters like Steve, Sonic, G&W, and Kazuya can stick to their vanilla gameplan in most MUs and still do well, meaning they don't have to adapt as much and can play more comfortably. In a game with over 90 characters, that's huge. Meanwhile, sword characters like Corrin, Lucina, and even Aegis have to adapt more to different MUs. They're still good characters (especially Aegis) but it's not as easy as some other characters.

I think it's starting to see more and more to me like we have a clear top 3: Steve, Sonic, and G&W. I could be wrong, but these characters seem to have relatively mild flaws while having significant strengths. acola, Sonix, and Miya are the strongest of each character, but it's not like Sonic doesn't have other strong players (like KEN or Wrath or Peli), and G&W has Maister and Monte.

 

[NairWizard]

Sure, advantage state is important, and if you don't have a good advantage state then you don't really matter in the meta.
But almost the entire cast has a strong advantage state. Kirby's doing 60 off a hit, Fox is doing 90, Mario is up-air chaining you, Samus is ledgetrapping you, Steve is up-tilt chaining you, and then GnW and Kazuya are just killing you.
I saw Sonic doing 70-80 and he's not known as an advantage state machine outside of his edgeguarding, but characters do damage in this game, stocks are ripped off pretty easily. The few exceptions such as Palutena (and I'd argue Diddy Kong) have been struggling to keep on top of the meta despite their otherwise great top-tier traits, and you see previously thought to be bad characters like Incineroar, Jigglypuff, and Bayonetta succeed.

Within this cast of strong advantage states, disadvantage is the most important thing, and swords don't have it. Cloud's recovery is middling and his landing options are poor outside of his attempts to double jump to center. Byleth's disadvantage is terrible and ledgestalling doesn't work any more. Corrin's disadvantage looks strong until you actually have Corrin experience and then you realize it's pretty average (you can whiff-punish the n-air out of disadvantage, d-air autocancels at a very specific spacing and you can play around that pretty easily given Corrin's drift speed, and her recovery can be intercepted despite mixups).

Characters like Steve, G&W, and Sonic have great disadvantage tools, which puts them above the pack. G&W up-b skips disadvantage in more scenarios than is comfortable, Steve has Anvil, block, and Minecart, and Sonic can spindash past the ledgetrapping and has spring and strong drift.
All three of them have crazy strong recoveries too.

It's not a coincidence that we're thinking of these three as the strongest in the game. In Ultimate, everyone has a strong advantage state, but it's the characters who pair a strong advantage state with mashable neutral options to skip playing the spacing game and a strong genetic makeup for disadvantage that really appear at the tippity top.
Aegis and ROB aren't keeping up with the same kind of consistency at the top level for exactly this reason -- they don't have the same kind of disadvantage options.

It's also worth noting that I'm not saying that neutral doesn't matter. In fact, neutral is still the most important state of the game, since it's the one state that you must always play to even start the game. The more advanced advantage states become, the more important it is to get that first neutral win in a game, so if anything, the importance of neutral has inflated over the years of meta advancement.

It's just that advantages in neutral between characters at the top tend to be unnoticeable in practice. Universal options like roll and spotdodge are so strong and most aerials are so safe that most characters already have a very strong neutral game by default, and advantages like additional speed tend to be minor by default, unless the difference is huge like Aegis vs. Byleth, or one of the characters is Sonic with unreactable Spindash mixups.

Our understanding of what makes a strong neutral has also evolved. Today, when it comes to neutral, mashing is absolutely the meta. Once upon a time, we thought of mashing as a scrub tactic, a noob trap that sometimes worked. Now, it is literally the way to play the game, for better or for worse. You're either mashing or whiff punishing your opponent's mashing, and that's really the two types of characters we see at the top right now. That was what Grand Finals was at port, and that's what most tournaments will be like for a long time.

 

[The_Bookworm]

Here is an interesting thought experiment that just came to me: if we decide to go back to competitive SSB4 in a serious manner with knowledge on how Ultimate's meta is turning out, do you think some characters would be noticeably benefitted from discoveries made in Ultimate?

I am thinking, potentially , , and would come out more positively given what would be discovered about them in Ultimate. Yes, I know that ROB and Pac-Man are better characters in Ultimate, but I feel the character's gameplan and advantage state is more optimized with their Ultimate iterations because they are more popular.

For example for players: were they using footstool -> down air OoS back in SSB4? Nope. Were ROB players mashing down tilt akin to Mewtwo down tilt back in SSB4? Yes to some extent, but def was not nearly as abused as it could have.

in particular interests me, cause pretty much everything people are complaining and theorizing about Sonic in Ultimate is 100% possible with SSB4 Sonic, even more degenerate in some areas, yet the character is not even top 5 in that game. Would his standing be better in that game in retrospect? He had great players like KEN, Wrath, and komorikiri in that game, but no one nearly at the same skill level as Sonix is in Ultimate (Sonix started out in the SSB4 online scene, but was def not nearly as good as he is today).

Ultimate also brought out same advancements in the usage of item toss in terms of neutral, safety, and combos. I don't remember if there is any mechanic difference in SSB4 that would alter said advancements, but characters like SSB4 Peach, ROB, and Pac-Man would definitely really benefit from the item toss advancements made in Ultimate.


-----------------------------------------------

Fun fact: before Port Priority 8, I did a personal tier list, and I end up putting , , and as top 3 occupying the S+ tier.
I was not ready at all for PP8 to have all three of these characters occupying the top 4, but current meta trends seem to indeed enforce this sentiment.

 

[Rran]

Oddly gripping Grand Finals. It felt surreal to see Sonix progressively transform from community "villain" into hero all in one surprisingly engaging set, and it somehow wasn't against Acola or a Steve player. Ultimate's storylines have been wild in the post-pandemic era.

Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard a crowd cheer for someone being timed out lol

 

[NairWizard]

Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard a crowd cheer for someone being timed out lol

mew2king-Otori Apex 2013 Brawl

It's always NA crowds wanting NA players to win who cheer for timeouts

Really it's not even an NA thing, it's just a USA thing

edit: will wait for someone to post before I post a Sonix-acola analysis

 

[Rizen]

I think people are too quick to dismiss Aegis and Joker for top 5. Spargo did just win a tournament, beating Sonix, with Aegis and Cloud. MKLeo was really dominant with Joker for a long time. Meanwhile G&W got 2nd in the tournament and people are putting him above Aegis who has gotten 3 placings in top 8 of the same major tournament multiple times. Flavor of the month is a thing. That's not to dismiss Sonic and G&W's accomplishments, of which they have many, but Joker and Aegis didn't magically become worse characters since less people are using them. They're both still outrageous.

 

[True Blue Warrior]

Could end up higher on a future tier list than ?

 

[NairWizard]

Before I get to set analyses, an interesting thing sparg0 said,

The reason sparg0 is struggling is his character choices. His characters have great advantage and neutral but poor disadvantage, and that is the difference maker. To be consistent in modern top-level Ultimate, you have to have a strong advantage state, playable neutral, and strong disadvantage state.
That really only leaves a handful of characters, though, so your choices if you're aiming at the #1 spot are pretty limited, despite the variety we end up seeing in brackets.

But Aegis is definitely the right choice. I know everybody here thinks Cloud is great, but my opinion on modern Cloud is pretty pessimistic. I think Cloud is "bad" relative to the great characters. His neutral strength is just not good enough to compensate for a middling recovery and juggleability in the majority of matchups.

Now, to Sonix vs. acola. But before that, any other sets people want to know about?

(Please don't ask about Light vs. Kaininabe. There is no way you're getting anything meaningful out of me on that one, other than a huge tirade about how I think Fox players don't bother playing neutral.)