Tomorrow, King K. Rool, Piranha Plant and Ice Climbers release in amiibo form. If you haven’t already pre-ordered them, good luck: they’re out of stock in most online stores. A few brick-and-mortar stores have accidentally started to sell them early, which resulted in the King K. Rool bin file being leaked on NFC Bank three days early.
Last night, the 2.13 Direct confirmed what we already knew: Ultimate’s cast is going to be filled out with amiibo. These images were provided:
On top of these confirmations, since the Direct aired we’ve had a few preorders go up. Ken, Daisy and Young Link are now all available for preorder, and presumably will release before or when the 3.0 update comes out.
As far as the meta goes, there’s not going to be much that changes that we can see. The three amiibo that release tomorrow will have the most effect: we’ll have three more characters to take into account in the metagame. The Ken/Daisy/Young Link wave won’t affect much because Ken is the only new character, and out of the Snake/Simon/Squirtle/Trainer/Ivysaur wave only Snake and Simon will have a large effect because Pokemon Trainer already exists through the Charizard amiibo.
If you recall my post Making a Meta, which I believe to be the most important post I’ve made on this blog, one of the four factors that shift the amiibo metagame is the introduction of new amiibo to the scene. In addition to new amiibo, balance patches to the game are also occurring alongside the new amiibo. Therefore, I think that this is the point where the amiibo metagame has the most potential that it can ever have from this point onward: it’s all downhill from here. We still don’t know what the best character in vanilla is (although the Spirits meta has started to settle down), instead being able only to say that there’s four or five amiibo that all counter another amiibo of that group and otherwise perform very well against most amiibo. Hilariously enough, each of those amiibo have one or two amiibo counters, meaning that even the best amiibo have many weak points from all over the tier list.
If you haven’t yet entered an amiibo tournament, now is a great time to enter one. They’re unpredictable and thoroughly interesting, and there are still many going on every week.
Amiibo Doctor 