How to Revive the Amiibo Spirits Meta

by Doc – Owner, Founder, Knows How To Revive Amiibo Things Because He’s An Amiibo Doctor

At the moment, I’m preparing for the bar exam, which is the sort of exam that we call “difficult”. To cope with the stress, I’ve been planning out the future of Amiibo Doctor and how to bring amiibo training “back” into the mainstream (it was never mainstream in the first place). Shelved in my Google Drive is a very long document that I update frequently with my ideas and strategies for growing this content outlet and, resultingly, the amiibo training hobby as a whole.

While I won’t post the whole document here, I’ve been circulating it among several amiibo trainers to get their opinions and feedback, and one of the common questions I get is “Doc, what about the spirits meta?” This is a good question – the spirits amiibo meta is just as old, though not as popular, as the vanilla amiibo meta and plays a big role in the history of the amiibo meta. There’s a large chunk of trainers who mostly or only train spirits, and any plans to grow our hobby need to include spirits or risk losing a lot of good trainers.

Let’s run down the historic and current issues with the spirits meta, so we can talk about how to solve them.

The Problems With Spirits Amiibo Training

The Meta is Solved

The caption for this section is a bit overbroad, as no amiibo meta can ever truly be solved. However, the understanding of what loadouts work best and which training styles are useful on what amiibo have largely been figured out. We know pretty well what the best loadout or loadouts for every character is, and we know how to take advantage of those loadouts. No more spirit effects are coming, and no new amiibo are going to shake up the meta. The only area open for innovation and change is enhancing the performance of the amiibo through training.

That’s not particularly exciting. Spirits trainers don’t train spirits because they want to face the same amiibo running the same loadouts over and over, they train spirits because they want to experiment and find a new loadout that everyone has overlooked. At some point every spirits trainer has imagined themselves using a forgotten or ignored spirit to win a tournament. That’s no longer possible in the current meta, and it hasn’t been possible for a long time.

Lack of Unified Ruleset

Most people agree on banning the Big Five spirits. Outside of the “B5B Ban”, there’s a lot of room for debate on banning spirit effects like Critical Healing + Metal (called CHM), Instadrop, Trade-Off Ability, Autoheal (which is a Big Five spirit, but the weakest of the bunch) and so on. These spirits aren’t at the level of the Big Five, but they don’t need to be. They become the best spirits in the game without the Big Five legal.

Instadrop in particular is very controversial. Some amiibo are only good with Instadrop, and drop a few tiers without Instadrop legal. Others get demolished by Instadrop for lack of quality anti-air options. Legalizing Instadrop is like manually adjusting the tier placement of a noticeable chunk of the tier list, and it’s also not interesting to watch if you’re a content creator.

So what combination of these spirits should be legal?

Who knows? The meta goes back and forth in debate from time to time, and the ultimate issue is up to tournament hosts, who set whatever combination of legal spirits they want. That’s a good thing: we want amiibo tournament hosts to have a lot of freedom with how they structure their tournaments so the onus is on the competitors to decide whether they want to participate.

But that’s also a bad thing. Suppose that some tournament hosts ban Critical Healing + Metal, but some don’t. If you’re a trainer observing that CHM is often banned, you have no reason to train one. It won’t be legal half the time! Why put time into refining an illegal amiibo?

Vanilla doesn’t have this problem, which is why vanilla is more popular. All vanilla rulesets need only worry about what characters to ban, not what spirits. A spirits meta with a unified ruleset could reduce this friction for new trainers.

Lack of Novelty

This likely sounds odd to someone who isn’t in a content creation mentality, but novelty in an esport is one of the driving factors of interest for most competitive video games. In games that get regularly updated to accommodate competitive players, such as Team Fortress 2*, the developers of the games will often introduce new gimmicks or strategies for the competitive players to theorycraft on and eventually incorporate into gameplay. The novelty of these updates create fertile ground for the competitive meta to get deeper, and make it easy for content creators to produce content about the competition so the game reaches a broader audience.

Spirits has been stuck with the same “game” since its inception, as Smash Ultimate didn’t receive any meta-relevant spirits during its lifetime save for CHM. We know which spirits are bad (most of them) and which spirits are good, and that basic knowledge hasn’t changed in years. If we were able to expand our choice of spirits, we could benefit from some of that new novelty.

Unfortunately, many spirits trainers start training in spirits and then lose interest precisely because of this lack of novelty. Spirits are inherently interesting for amiibo trainers: when a trainer first joins spirits, they’re wondering what the best spirit loadout is, what kind of experimentation they can do and how they should train to take advantage of that. It’s a similar curiosity as what new competitive Pokemon players have when they first start teambuilding. But once they find out that there’s not much novelty left to explore, that explorative, interested spirit dies and the trainer quits.

The Solutions to Reviving Spirits Amiibo Training

I propose a few solutions. Please bear in mind that these solutions are very radical and will likely have to overcome a lot of preference for the current state of the spirits meta. The effectiveness of these solutions hinges on the widespread adoption of all of these; if most people don’t accept most of them, then the spirits meta will remain dead and there’s little I can do to fix that.

Please also bear in mind that these solutions should be adopted at a later date, after my growth strategies in the previously-mentioned document have come to pass and the hobby is getting an influx of new trainers. These solutions aren’t aimed at reviving the spirits meta so it’s interesting for the old trainers – this is aimed to make it interesting for new trainers that will be coming in. We’re aiming to do this around mid-2025, and not a moment sooner.

Unsolve the Meta By a Change in Tournament Format

I’ve talked before about the Baton Pass tournament format, a format that I invented last year to liven up amiibo tournaments. Each trainer sends a pair of 2 amiibo (or 2 pairs of 4 amiibo, 3 pairs of 6 amiibo, however many amiibo the host allows). In the pair, one amiibo is designated as the primary amiibo, and the other amiibo is the secondary amiibo. The primary amiibo is typically a lower tier than the secondary amiibo, such that the primary amiibo is something like B+ tier and the secondary is A tier.

Baton Pass tournaments are unique in that all the sets are best of 3. In the first game, the primary amiibo of both trainers play first. The primary amiibo that loses is switched out for the secondary amiibo, which is a higher tier than his primary amiibo. If the secondary amiibo loses, then the opponent has won 2-0. But if the other primary amiibo loses, then it’s now a 1-1 set with both trainers using their higher tier secondary amiibo.

Let me illustrate this with a proper example.

Amiibo Doctor sends a Dr. Mario as his primary amiibo and a Mario as his secondary amiibo. Amiibo Therapist sends Daisy as his primary amiibo and a Luigi as his secondary amiibo.

In the first match, Amiibo Doctor’s Dr. Mario wins. This means that Amiibo Therapist’s Daisy is out of the set, and is replaced by Luigi. In the second match, Luigi wins. This means that Dr. Mario is out of the set, and Mario is in. In the third match, it is now Mario vs. Luigi, and the winner takes the best of 3 set.

The hypothetical ignores the current tier placements of the amiibo being used – work with me, here.

Why Baton Pass Unsolves the Meta

With Baton Pass, amiibo training is no longer about applying the single optimal loadout with the single best playstyle. Now, it’s about understanding the matchup of each amiibo in your team and using spirits to compensate for those matchups. Let’s pretend you’re running Zelda as your primary, and Zelda only beats King Dedede 25% of the time. You know that you need an amiibo to cover your King Dedede weakness, so you pick Link who beats King Dedede 66% of the time. You also happen to know that many of the King Dededes in the meta like to rely on Forward Tilt, so you make sure that Link uses a bit more Boomerang than a normal Link to keep him at bay. The end result is that you have a team that is well-structured to beat a trainer who is running King Dedede, because you’re much more likely to win at least one match against that trainer.

Structuring amiibo tournaments like this introduces teambuilding into the amiibo meta, which is something that we’ve never done before. It also captures the excitement of teambuilding in a unique way, because placing tier restrictions on Baton Pass tournaments means that you’re only really likely to have to plan for ~15-20 possible opponents. This is just enough that teambuilding can be fun without overwhelming trainers with too many possible outcomes.

Oh, and it’s great for content too. Can’t forget that.

Unobtainable Spirits Make Things Novel

Thanks to World of Light and jozz’s Spirits Amiibo Editor, we’ve found that there’s a lot of functional spirit effects that are not accessible in-game that can be edited onto amiibo. These spirit effects work just fine, and some of them may even be tournament viable. Jozz put together a list of all the possible spirits that can be edited in Smash in this spreadsheet, which you should look at.

Sort the sheet by A-Z in the Vanilla column to have it organize them into “vanilla” obtainable and unobtainable. See all those spirits? By my count, there’s about 75 spirit effects that are not legitimately obtainable in Smash Ultimate and have never been legalized in the amiibo meta. Who’s to say that these spirits should remain illegal? The fact that they can only be obtained by amiibo editing?

Let me tell you something you probably already know: when the community first decided to ban amiibo behavior editing, part of the reasoning for it was that only a very small number of people 1) knew how to edit the amiibo to actually perform better and 2) had the programs to edit the amiibo. A lot of people tried to edit amiibo, but they didn’t know what the values did and ended up with bad amiibo as a result. In the interests of fairness, we banned amiibo editing as a whole outside of simply tacking on legal spirit stats.

Unfortunately, we never considered that there might be unobtainable spirit effects, and a ban on unobtainable spirit effects got swept up in the editing ban before it ever got real consideration. I sincerely believe that if we sifted through these unobtainable spirits, we would find at least a few that could open up new, novel possibilities in the spirits meta. We just didn’t see ’em the first time.

Novelty aside, the content possibilities are easy as pie. No existing Youtuber has done content on the “hacked spirits of Smash Ultimate” to any real degree (I did a video, but it wasn’t in-depth), and that niche could be a great source of untapped traffic on Youtube. (Let me remind you that we’re aiming for a Mid-2025 release here – you won’t see Amiibo Doctor content on this for a while, and if you’re planning to do content on this reach out to me first so we can coordinate this.) This kind of “The Cutting Room Floor”-style content is wicked popular on Youtube, and the amiibo training hobby has a monopoly on this topic. Let’s harness what we’ve got and use it for content.

But unobtainable spirits probably won’t be enough to really revitalize this aspect of the amiibo meta, which is why we need to also add…

The Spirits Sequence-Breaking Bug Finishes Reviving the Meta

I recently learned of a bug in Smash Ultimate called, for lack of a better term, the Spirits Sequence Breaking-Bug (SSBB, for short) that permits amiibo editors to attach more spirits than the game permits onto an amiibo. This bug allows for a trainer to submit a 1-slot, 1-slot and 2-slot loadout, a 1-slot and 3-slot loadout, or a 1-slot, 1-slot and 3-slot loadout using certain spirits in the first 1-slot option. Basically, you can put more spirits on than you normally could subject to certain conditions.

This bug should be legal to use for three reasons:

1. We’ve never thoroughly experimented with allowing extra slots before, and never felt the need to because we didn’t have a lot of good 1-slot spirits to use – but if we legalize unobtainable spirits, we will! This also lets us use 2-slot spirits without locking us down to only one other 1-slot spirit.
2. The content potential of this ruleset would be insane.
3. If we legalize SSBB, we can also condition the use of the Big Five on only allowing that spirit to be used. This could balance out the Big Five. So if someone is running Armor Knight, we can tweak the rules so that you can only run Armor Knight and have a cap of 4200 stats (the typical cap for all 3 slots being used) while everyone else gets to use the bug to compete with the Big Five. This gives trainers an option: run the Big Five, or run less-popular spirits and be just as powerful*. Legalizing this bug and unobtainable spirits lets us try to power creep the meta to the point where the Big Five may have competition.
   • *We would definitely have to experiment with combinations to see if the Big Five are still so powerful that no unobtainable spirits can compete with them, even when assisted by having the extra spirit slot. It’s not guaranteed that having the extra spirit slot means we can compete against Big Five.
   • *CHM and a few other spirits aren’t compatible with the SSBB bug, for unknown reasons. Further experimentation is required to compile a full list of everything that works and doesn’t work with it.
   • *Alternatively, if we’re going to allow editing we can also allow trainers to go over the in-game 5000 stat cap and achieve a more manual balance of the meta. Suppose Big Five loadouts get to use the SSBB bug but are capped at 4200, while non-Big Five loadouts are capped at 5500.

Amiibo editing is much easier than it has been historically, and the ability to use this bug would incidentally serve as a great foot-in-the-door to get new trainers to learn about amiibo bin files so they can host their own tournaments.

Taking a Step Back

I’ve thrown a lot of suggestions at you, so let’s take a step back and see what we’re really talking about here. Let me bullet point it real quick:

1. I have an overarching plan to bring amiibo training into the mainstream
2. One component of that plan includes reviving the spirits meta with an aim to bring in new trainers with content
3. To revive the spirits meta, we should
   • Use Baton Pass tournaments
   • Legalize unobtainable spirit effects
   • Legalize the SSBB bug

I understand that there’s probably going to be a lot of apprehension about making such a radical change all at once. That’s a fair concern, and I fully expect that long-term trainers are going to be against it.

However…

Consider the alternative before us. The spirits meta is effectively dead, and has basically been dead since CHM was introduced. Let’s not forget that it was basically dead before CHM was introduced as well, so there was really one single spark of time post-launch where spirits could really be said to be lively and that was when CHM was being tested. Is a forever-dead meta a preferable alternative over doing some experimental tournaments to see about making this meta finally work?

*TF2 hasn’t been updated in seven years, that was a joke.