At the highest level of play, killing potential doesn't matter if your opponent can't hit you or hits you at a very very slow rate (slow enough that you get them to their killing % before they get you to your killing %). It doesn't matter if MK can only kill Falcon at 900%, since it's mathematically impossible for him to get through MK's fair due to the frame data (ignore perfect shielding)
The same logic applies to DDD. Notice how the top tier characters who get chaingrabbed (Snake, Wario, Diddy) all do reasonably well against DDD. That's because they have the tools to play safe and not get grabbed/outranged (whether through projectiles, superior range, mobility, grab mixups, etc), because they're GOOD characters. BAD characters don't have the ability to fight DDD due to his range because they have no possible way of getting through it. Even if DDD can't chaingrab you it doesn't matter if you can't approach without being bair'd/grabbed
I don't really know how MK's tornado change would affect anything (now it apparently makes people fly out instantly instead of being stuck inside) but it probably wouldn't be too big. Snake's reduced killing power affects stuff a lot though against characters like Diddy who can hit him but have to wait like twice as long Snake does to kill. In the end though the top metagame of Balanced Brawl would just be MK, playing almost exactly as MK would at the top level of regular Brawl, and the few good characters which can play evenly with MK, which were all made worse than they were before with the exception of Diddy Kong, making it even HARDER to beat MK outside of dittos
Well, I don't know, to be honest.. You can pull the MK vs CF matchup, and sure, that match was and I'm sur still is hard... but that's not the case in every matchup.
The thing is, MK is not unhittable... he just had the most superior moveset in the game. Not that his killing potential is taken away, and a nearly unbeatable move (against some characters) is gone, he is severely weakened... and may very well have very bad matchups that move him away from being at the top...
For instance, the Marth Vs MK match was fairly even, with it being in MK's favor almost entirely because MK could kill Marth much easier than the other way around...
Samus was unable to fight MK mainly because of tornado, and her lack of killing power... now, tornado is weakened, and Samus received such huge buff that they are considering her one of the best... everything might change...
Even in vBrawl, characters like Fox had very close matchups with MK, but were slightly overpowered in the matchup...
if you take away tornado (against some chars) and MK's killing power, many of the characters who were roughly even before may move up and actually become counters to MK... because he can no longer kill them easily, so the war of attrition plays out...
And I feel this would be greatly amplified in tournament match, because matchups state that each character is played perfectly.
I'm going to try this out sometime soon... it seems interesting.
