Can We Teach Amiibo to Parry Now?

Parrying and Power/Perfect Shielding are the same thing in Ultimate, which is why top players use those words interchangeably. 

Let me start by saying I can’t say for certain if this works. I have witnessed some minor improvements that can’t be attributed to RNG, yes, but I also don’t know if they’re because of my intervention. It’s totally possible that older amiibo just parry more. This is all up in the air.

I think I figured out how to teach amiibo to parry more often, and it IS as simple as you’d think. Just parry more yourself, and they’ll pick it up over time. I’ll explain how I found this out, so that it makes more sense why I don’t know if I’ve done anything or not.

I have been confined to playing Ultimate in handheld mode for two weeks now, which makes tech skill very difficult to pull off. Joy-Cons aren’t useful for long-term intense playing. However, I have still been training amiibo. I was training a Ganondorf (and playing as Ganondorf), and I accidentally parried his forward smash twice in succession. Previously, I hadn’t parried any of his attacks and he hadn’t parried any of mine. Then, about ten seconds later, I parried another forward smash from him. From that point, he parried many of my forward smashes, and also parried an aerial attack or two.

It’s possible that this would’ve happened as he leveled up anyway, and I only directed him to the attacks that should be parried the most (by parrying them myself). I have observed amiibo parrying attacks completely independently without ever having a parry demonstrated to them, which is why I’m skeptical that I had any effect. I could confirm this by continuing to parry his attacks… except I parried them by accident in the first place and can’t recreate it with any consistency. Such is life for handheld players.

Parrying aside, I think it’s time to lay out the information for the Amiibo Doctor’s first amiibo tournament! Being the sneaky guy that I am, I’ve named it a certain, specific word to make the tournament clips more likely to show up in search results. The tournament’s name is…

Amiibo Sensory Meridian Response, or ASMR for short. (There won’t be any real ASMR in the tournament clips, though.)

The winner of the tournament will receive a $10 Amazon gift card, or a $10 Nintendo eShop code, whichever one they choose. (Victors will need to coordinate with me outside of the tournament to transfer the prize, as I’m new to this myself and don’t know for certain how to do all this.) In the event that one of my amiibo wins, the runner-up will get the code.

The tournament will follow the ruleset of the Amiibo Doctor, outlined here. Each trainer may submit up to two amiibo, but the tournament itself will cap off at 16 amiibo. If we have fewer than 16 amiibo, then I will either downsize to 8 or fill in the gaps with my own amiibo. I’m doing that because the focus of this tournament is more to test out the ruleset and stagelist, as opposed to simply getting more data on the best competitors in the amiibo metagame.

Please submit your two amiibo .bin files to amiibodoctor@gmail.com by next Friday, January 4! By that time I should have a more solid date and time for the tournament itself to take place. There won’t be a livestream however: instead, each tournament match’s replay will be uploaded individually to the Amiibo Doctor Youtube channel, and a Challonge link will be provided that keeps track of the matches. I am not a skilled or well-equipped video editor, and frankly this is the best I can manage.

Anyway, I hope to see you there! I’ve been tearing at the bit to see what our community has to offer for Ultimate.