Please note; as of February 2021, Bowser is no longer officially banned from tournaments. We’re keeping this here for historical purposes now. Read up!

2020 is almost here, and with the new year comes the inevitable new year’s resolution – and our new year’s resolution is to revitalize the amiibo metagame by cleaning up a noticeable stain on its character diversity. As of today, Bowser is officially banned from the Exion amiibo metagame. To summarize our reasoning:

• Bowser is the heaviest character in the game, making him extremely resilient
• Bowser’s recovery is incredibly reliable for a character of his weight
• Bowser has several powerful kill moves, including forward tilt, down tilt (at the ledge), down aerial, forward smash, up smash, down smash, Flying Slam, and Bowser Bomb
• Bowser is statistically dominant, winning over sixty percent of his total matches over the course of a year
• According to many top trainers, Bowser is the easiest amiibo to train, making success far too easy to find relative to the amount of time needed to train him
• Bowser has almost no counters (save for Little Mac, who is rather uncommon and is himself countered by many other characters)

For a more in-depth look at the amiibo metagame and its Bowser problem, please watch this analysis video by Splice. It goes into great detail on Bowser’s position in the metagame and shows matchup data and tournament clips to back up our claims.

P.S. The amiibo tier list has been updated alongside the release of this post to reflect Bowser’s explusion. You can check that out here. Thanks for reading, and happy training!