It’s been a few months since we’ve updated the official Exion amiibo tier list, but it’s time to change that. Today we’ve got a fresh new list with a few interesting changes. We aren’t quite ready to rank Banjo & Kazooie, Terry, or Byleth – they’ll come later – but we do have one particularly eye-catching change: Bowser is no longer S-rank. How could this be?!

The Fall of Bowser

Let’s start with the big tier shift: how is Bowser back in the A+ tier?! As you might know, Bowser was banned from Exion metagames in December 2019. This was for a variety of reasons, including his high weight, reliable recovery, and powerful kill moves. Bowser’s biggest strength, though, was his start-up super armor. During the startup of his tilts and smash attacks, Bowser can’t flinch unless he takes a high amount of damage, and most opponents’ attacks don’t reach the damage threshold required to break that super armor.

Many of these traits are still true, but the 2021 metagame is much different than the 2019 metagame. In comparison, modern amiibo trainers place a higher emphasis on teaching their FPs to perfect shield. Most of Bowser’s attacks only strike once, so if he’s faced against an opponent that uses many perfect shields, he’s at a disadvantage. It doesn’t help that several of Bowser’s moves suffer from rather high ending lag – mainly his smash attacks – so if they are parried, he’s left vulnerable in exchange.

Then there’s Bowser’s matchup spread. He does do well against most opponents, but recent tournaments have proven that Bowser struggles against Mii Gunner and King K. Rool (especially the former). Furthermore, he’s hard countered by Incineroar and goes even against Ridley. But wait, there’s more! Bowser has a number of AI flaws that make him difficult to work with at times. It’s unclear whether these AI flaws were overlooked or non-existent at the time of Bowser’s initial ban, but they’re very prevalent ones nonetheless. First, Bowser’s AI is hard-coded to mercilessly spam its neutral air if left unchecked. This problem is so severe, in fact, that if your Bowser amiibo lands a neutral air on you while you’re training it, you should quit out of the match entirely. Bowser is also hard-coded to use a single second of Fire Breath at the edge, and to use a grounded Whirling Fortress out of shield. Both of these tendencies can work sometimes, but they’ve also got the potential to get him damaged or KO’d outright. One more thing: his AI sometimes jumps off the stage and falls too far to be able to recover with Whirling Fortress. And this counts as a self-destruct!

So as you can see, Bowser’s got many flaws. He’s still really good — just not quite as good as he used to be. More and more tournaments on the Exion Discord server have been allowing Bowser, so if you’ve got one you’ve been wanting to enter, now’s the perfect time to get involved! With all of that being said, let’s move on to our regular rises and drops section.

Rises & Drops

There are a ton of changes in this tier list update. So many, in fact, that we can’t possibly include descriptions for every single change! This may very well be the largest tier list update we’ve ever had. Without further ado, then, here’s the big list of changes:

• King Dedede moved up to A+
• Link moved up to A+
• Donkey Kong moved up to A
• Snake moved up to A
• Olimar moved up to A
• Hero moved up to A
• Pokémon Trainer moved up to B+
• Mii Brawler moved up to B+
• Cloud moved up to B+
• Robin moved up to B
• Ice Climbers moved up to B
• Isabelle moved up to B
• Pac-Man moved up to B
• Joker moved up to C+
• Toon Link moved up to C+
• Dark Samus moved up to C+
• Samus moved up to C+
• Meta Knight moved up to C+
• Pikachu moved up to C+
• Greninja moved up to C+
• Rosalina & Luma moved up to C+
• Sheik moved up to D+
• Bowser moved down to A+
• Marth moved down to C
• Inkling moved down to D

As you can see: that’s a lot! If you found this post via a search or something and it’s one of the first amiibo training articles you’ve read, we have a bunch of other resources here you could check out. First up is our guides list, and we have specific training guides available on every character in this game! We’ve also got the amiibo Wiki, which includes lots of helpful information for new trainers. And then we’ve got our Discord server, where you can find tournaments to enter! In the meantime, thanks so much for reading — until next time!

If you would like to read more informational posts, please follow this link.