by Doc
As of this writing, no official amiibo tier list has been released that includes Joker and Hero. It’s not hard to see why – they’re very tricky amiibo to pin down, especially Joker, who just had a handful of AI fixes in 9.0. So… where should they be?
Hero
Hero’s much easier to pin down. Despite the fact that multiple playstyles are viable for Hero, it’s pretty clear that he’s at the top of B+, absolute minimum. Hero appears to be outplaying most of his amiibo opponents, most notably in the last two Amiibo Hospital tournaments, which had dominating performances from multiple Hero amiibo. With any amount of long-term results Hero is destined for at least A tier.
One could argue that having multiple viable playstyles for Hero is actually an indication of how simply powerful the amiibo truly is. If an amiibo must only remain in one playstyle to be viable, then it’s less likely the behavior RNG will turn up with a viable playstyle in mind – after all, there’s only one. But if an amiibo is useful in many playstyles, then the behavior RNG has more opportunities to select a good playstyle, which will result in more victories.
Playstyle aside, Hero’s character and build is also tremendously beneficial to him. He’s generally a heavy hitter and doesn’t have much in the way of difficult-to-use moves. You can screw up a Hero amiibo and he’ll still end up on top.
Joker
As Bill Burr once said, “Ohhh geez”. The Joker amiibo’s pretty difficult to pin down, for three reasons:
- The 9.0 AI patch means we need to relab a lot of the Joker AI – it’s pretty clear at this point that Nintendo loves the Joker amiibo, so future patches could also occur
- Arsene means Joker is inherently inconsistent – sometimes he’ll get Arsene in a stock and kill, sometimes he won’t, and sometimes he dies before he can get Arsene at all
- Joker has Up-air chains and drag downs that don’t really exist in other amiibo, and it’s not clear what impact those will have on horizontally-built matchups. If Incineroar gets caught in a chain… he doesn’t really have an answer for that besides his Down air.
Given these points, the only thing we can go off of right now is the Joker amiibo’s results. Off the top of my head I don’t know of any major Jokers in the scene – checking the overall rankings of amiibo indicates that the winningest Joker is Murbert’s in about 500th place.
However, Joker’s also really new, and he’s got tremendous room for improvement. He’s taken sets off some high tiers, and he’s lost to some low tiers. It seems kinda possible that as he improves, he’ll shape up to almost a wild card in amiibo tournaments, much like the anti-meta amiibo (Zelda, Snake).
So for now, I’d say to put him in B tier. He could go up, he could go down, but it’s difficult to say in the long run whether this will end up being his final position.
Amiibo Doctor 