If you had to pick a consensus best character in Ultimate, it would be Joker. But it would be a rough consensus and Glitch 8 shows why. At Glitch 8, an A-tier Ultimate tournament with over 700 entrants and some of the world’s best players in attendance, according to Reddit user ItsLitTho, there wasn’t a single Joker in top 48.



Before you get really surprised, no Leo “MKLeo” Lopez-Perez was not in attendance. He’s been quiet at the start of the year and Genesis 7 this weekend will be his first appearance of 2020.

This is what I call a surface-level surprise.



On the surface it’s super shocking to see no Jokers in the top 8 of a major tournament full of good players. It breaks the norm of not just Smash, but most fighters. Imagine a Melee top 48 without Fox or Marth. Imagine a Tekken top 48 without Akuma or Geese – and now Leroy. Imagine a Street Fighter V major without Rashid or G.



But Ultimate is a beast of its own. Once you start thinking about Ultimate in its own terms – not FGC terms – then you’ll realize that this isn’t all that surprising. Hence, surface-level surprising.



Ultimate has over 70 characters, which will obviously increase character diversity just by presenting more options. However, the sheer number of characters doesn’t mean anything unless they’re balanced. In Melee, half the cast gets invalidated by the most popular competitive characters.



Ultimate’s cast isn’t just insanely large, it’s insanely balanced. Even the worst characters have enough potential to surprise people and make it to top 32 of major tournaments. We’ve seen Piranha Plant, Kirby, and Little Mac do it. It’s not just the low tiers being viable and the mid tiers being capable. It’s the top tiers being reasonable.

Ultimate aims to not just have everybody here, but everybody balanced

Ultimate made a lot of small changes that brought the entire cast in line with each other and leveled the playing field. For example, every character now has a three-frame jumpsquat (the animation before your character actually jumps), so everyone gets access to aerials at the same time – after three frames. In a game where an aerial can be your best approach option, combo tool, and out of shield option, that’s huge.



To put this into perspective, in Melee, there are four characters with six-plus frames jumpsquats. And they’re all god-damn irrelevant. Ganon, Zelda, Link, and Bowser have other problems that hold them back in Melee, but this isn’t to say jumpsquats are everything. It’s to show that Nintendo intentionally leveled the playing field in lots of subtle ways and you’re seeing a much more “anything goes” meta because of that.



Joker doesn’t have anywhere close to the raw advantages in speed, frame data, and options in neutral that Melee Fox does. Joker privilege exists but it’s no Fox privilege. Even with a lot of players at all levels picking up Joker, he’ll probably never have anything close to the raw meta presence Fox has in Melee.



In Ultimate, no top tier has that presence. No top tier can be the face of the game like Fox. This is why few of us even noticed the lack of Joker before ItsLitTho made a post (love citing Reddit names). I checked for Joker posts during and after Glitch 8. If ItsLitTho hadn’t made the post, there’s a good chance no one would’ve.



Just as we don’t instantly notice the absence of Joker without Leo, we don’t notice the absence of ZSS without Marss, Peach without Samsora, Pikachu without ESAM and so on. If you cut Samsora, Muteace, LingLing, and Umeki from a major tournament, would you bet money on seeing Peach in Top 32? Would you take the bet on Fox in a tournament without Light or ZD?

The lack of Joker doesn’t tell us a lot about how to make tier lists but it does tell us how to read tier lists. We have to understand that top tiers do have an advantage in Ultimate but not a massive one when compared to other top and high tier characters. The drop after high tier is steeper though. The characters that made Top 48 at Glitch 8 were, without exception, top or high tier on most tier lists.



Being top tier doesn’t mean dominating tournaments. It doesn’t even mean being present at every major. It just means being present at most majors and having representation amongst the highest ranked players.

Does that make Ultimate’s tier list fickle and less predictive of results than in other games? Yes. That is absolutely the case. Does it mean Ultimate’s tier lists are meaningless entirely and Little Mac is gonna win an s-tier soon? Nope. Absolutely not.

Regardless of what this says or doesn’t say about tier lists, you should savor the taste of this Joker-less tournament. Because MKLeo is about to come back for vacation and Joker will be back on the menu.