What if the Smash Ball was Legal? (Part 1)

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What if the Smash Ball was Legal?

Part 1

edit created by TG.

This is the first of two parts. Though it doesn’t matter what order you read them in since they will both cover separate topics.

Good day/night/evening everybody. Today I have a question. Do you play Smash competitively? You do? Well, then I’m gonna guess that you don’t like items that much. Which includes the elusive Smash Ball, one of the best items. But today I present you with a question… What if this item was legal? But just this one item, nothing else. Today I seek to answer that question, hopefully in a hilariously absurd fashion.

Let’s first go over what the Smash Ball actually is with a brief history lesson. The Smash Ball is an item first introduced in Brawl, the third entry into the Smash series along with the most controversial one. Though something most people can agree that the introduction of the Smash ball is a very warm welcome for the casual side of Smash. The Smash Ball is basically a floating ball that flies all across the stage. When a player attacks it, it will eventually break after multiple attacks. Breaking it gives that player a special ability after using their Neutral Special attack. Replacing it with a sort of super move. Though it highly depends on which character.

In this first part I’ll be discussing how this will change the competitive scene. Though I’ll only be discussing characters and how it will change their viability, I won’t be going into how it will effect history as a whole. I’ll begin the blog with a possibility of how the tier list would look like taking into the Smash Ball’s legality.

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Character Viability

First of all, let’s discuss character viability. Now which characters would become greatly hindered with the Smash Ball in place. The first one I can think about is Little Mac…

{img: mac}

As you should all know, Little Mac can’t jump. Or at least, his aerials are ass. This means he’s gonna have a very hard time trying to get the Smash Ball unless it faithfully hovers close to the stage. And even still his Final Smash isn’t that great.

Here I have composed a tier list of how of how it could look considering the Smash Ball’s legality.

(Don’t @ me on this or get into a heated debate, I created this purely for this blog.)

Let’s talk about this tier list here. This is based on how the characters could changed based on their Final Smashes, let’s go over it.

First of all, Bayonetta. Yes, she’s still first. Her final smash is actually really good. Pretty much instant Witch Time without needing to counter an attack and all you have to do after that is hit your opponent enough times in order to activate it.

Something else you may have noticed is Zero Suit, yes I put her at #2. This is because her final smash is also really good and it is very easy for her to actually get it. Her up air does tons of damage to it and especially her back air.

A few more placements later and we get to the low tiers. These characters are really hindered, especially with Mac placing him at bottom 2. You may have noticed that I put Ganondorf at deadass last. Now I’m on the fence about these and to be honest, I’m not even really sure about my own placement. In a 1v1 scenario Ganon could have a fairly hard time reaching the Smash Ball, although his Final Smash really is something. So maybe I underestimated him…

Anyway, let’s move on.

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The Competitive Scene

Oh boy, here we go. Onto the competitive scene. With this I can see the top tiers dominating the competitive scene even more than they already are. Bayonettas, Zero Suits, Sonics, Mewtwos, they’ll be flooding the pools since their abilities to get the Smash Ball and their actual Final Smashes are both amazing.

Along with this I can see several people labbing out these characters, discovering true setups with the Smash Ball in hand. Though some people have already done this, the meta will be further evolved because of this.

Changes in the Metagame

Let’s talk about how this could evolve the metagame even further. Let’s say that in this parallel world, that the optimal setups for each final smash has been discovered. What will this do? Well for one, people will need to learn how to counter this. Questions will be asked like…

”How could I avoid this?”

”Can I use this against them?”

”How can I stop THEM from getting the Smash Ball?”

”How could I stop them from using their final smash?”

That last one, that’s a critical one. There is one thing to the smash ball that lot’s of people actually forget, the fact that you can stop someone from using the Smash Ball once they get it. That’s right, once they get it, you have two options. Either to run away and defend yourself, or fight back.

An optimal strategy could be to use this advantage state against them and make them make risky decisions. Such as baiting them with a laggy move and maybe even an extended dash dance backwards. Rushing down an opponent with the Smash Ball could be one of the better choices since they will be forced to use it so they don’t lose it before they even get the chance to use it. Though this doesn’t apply to transformation attacks. Since they should activate it as soon as they get the chance.

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Conclusion to Part 1

Thanks for reading this everybody! I’ve been sitting on this project for a while now and have been wondering how this would come out. Note this this was the first part solely focus on how the game itself would change.

Next time, we’ll be covering how the tournament scene itself would look like. Hopefully including interviews with some people. :eyes: