Jamble
I think Toon Link is great: not only does he have completely polarizing matchups against some characters (i.e. Peach) but he is also a good character to fall back on if you need to change pace in the middle of a set or feel out what your opponent is doing since he can drag games out for so long. Not that you can't feel out what your opponent is doing with a different character, but sometimes it's good to be able to analyze what they're trying to do and force options out of them. That being said, he also has some really bad matchups that hold him back (i.e. Falcon, Spacies, MK is bad although I think it's a little exaggerated how badly Toon Link loses).
nimigoha
I can't really think of Marth being below top 5 either personally. I can see someone making a case for it, but I think he has the tools (movement, grabs, disjoint, edgeguards) to win most matchups. Kills can be hard, but they're not that hard to find.
And why isn't Falco top 5? No one's ever answered this and I don't care if I get torn apart for saying this right now but his neutral + punish is just sublime. I mean, his combos work in basically every matchup and lasers are still amazing for spacing, zoning, forcing opponents to approach, and getting hit confirms. Yeah, they can be power shielded, but even with this counterplay to lasers is tough. He has some close to even matchups like Samus, Marth, and Kirby (with many more) but I don't see him losing any.
marth and falco have somewhat the same issues but are slightly different in execution, but its basically that they both lose the long game in the face of good counterplay. for a good example, i had a long talk with
@Dakpo on thursday at the dfw weekly about how yeah falco is really good but to realize that you have to be flawless to a point that i consider ridiculous- if you make absolutely any mistakes with falco, youre basically going to lose in a way that is almost always more flexible for the opponent. and he was telling me how he does well with GAW, but that character illustrates the opposite, which is having a character that is way more forgiving of misplays, and takes good advantage of the opponents misplays in a way that doesnt require perfection. in theory, falco is way better than GAW, but we know that it doesnt play out like that in tournament. even our very best players make dozens of mistakes every match, and it only goes up from there. in a tournament format where your goal is to go X-1 or X-0, the best approach is to accept that both players will always make some number of mistakes and to account for them appropriately. therefore, in a real tournament setting, you could make a reasonable argument that GAW does better than falco from the margin falco loses from misplays over a tournament day. you'll suicide here or randomly slightly misplace a dair or something and get obliterated for it. and that my friends is exactly what an over-rated character looks like.
as a marth and sheik player, i get this all the time.
@Lunchables will occasionally make fun of me saying i suck because "think of a character skype group where the players dont think marth/sheik beats their character", and he knows exactly why- everyone thinks they lose to my two characters because its all mid-level players doing free play. sure, marth are sheik are hilariously soul-crushing at mediocre levels of non-tournament gameplay to the point where i make it a point to tell other dev team members not to mimic sheiks ground game properties on other characters. but at top level they both have very real setbacks. lets stick to marth since you asked about it- marth's range is very good, but other characters can now match it unlike melee. his low growth moves mean he can combo well but has a hard time killing. better recoveries mean opponents live longer but marth retains his mediocre recovery and combo weight from melee. he doesnt really have any outs to the better projectiles introduced by the brawl characters like bananas or grenades. he cant really finish stocks on heavy characters like ddd or dk or yoshi or rob. an experienced opponent that understands marth can force him to fish for tip fair conversions which is just really bad in most cases. more variable combo weights make throw combos less reliable across the cast. relatively faster characters across the cast make it much harder to dashdance the opponent out of the game. marth is way more understood to play against than say ness or charizard. relatively larger stages in PM means he cant close out kills well. marth can hit the opponent and still get punished for not hitting the correct part of the move. now on one hand, thats just a list of stuff that marth has issues with but he can still compete (except vs ddd/dreamland, seriously **** playing those). but thats not the point, the point is that over a tournament day, you WILL lose margin on those things, and they will cost you wins, and you wont be able to go X-1 or X-0 forfeiting margin like that. its much better over a long tournament day to play a character like say diddy where you have multiple dynamic ways to solve your problems and can get more on free margin than by losing it. marths primary way of winning in PM is hoping he gets a lucky bracket against jank like luigi players and bad CPs than it is because hes a good character with no issues. in melee where the stages are small and he has double everyone elses range and upthrow is a OHKO against half of the relevant tournament sets, marth is absolutely hard top tier. in PM, hes merely pretty good, at best in the 11-15 range out of 41. i personally wouldnt recommend anyone learning the game to play either of these characters even though theres nothing really wrong with them. i encourage people to play characters like diddy or MK or ZSS where you're not necessarily out at the character select screen or from a handful of common mistakes over a full tournament day.
edit- kirby vs a really good fox is only fun if youre the fox or you like losing a lot as kirby, that MU is ****ing awful
