Ultimate Local Winners: 2021 Mapped And Wrapped

By Jack "Jackie Peanuts" Moore | 12/31/21

Character data is not collected at most local events. For the map posts, I directly checked tournament streams and results graphics to verify the character used to win the bracket. In cases where players used multiple characters across a tournament, the character they used to win Grand Finals was entered into the dataset (unless they picked random, in which case random was entered as its own character). The full data, with links to 99.9% of the brackets, can be seen here (make a copy of the sheet if you want to play with it yourself!); it also contains Top 8 data for, again, 99.9% of events covered.

Without further ado, though, let's take a look at a few infographics to sum up 2021 in Smash Ultimate:

First, a look at the whole world, with a slight zoom in on Europe:

30 countries hosted at least one qualifying tournament this year in the periods during which we collected data. Unsurprisingly, the United States was by far the most active region, with France coming in second with 93 tournaments qualifying.

Now, a look at the United States on a state-by-state level:

California was by far the most active state in 2021, and unsurprisingly so as both NorCal and SoCal feature scenes of sizes to rival those of most other states by themselves. Texas, New York, Florida and Ohio round out the Top 5, with Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, Utah and Massachusetts rounding out the Top 10.

Those states in particular have quite a few icons in there, so let's take a closer look at the metas in these Top 10 states:

This chart includes every character to win at least 2 locals in each of the Top 10 most active states in the US. Some metas are dominated by single characters -- there's Ness in Utah, powered by Scend's dominance, Bayonetta in Ohio thanks to Geist, and Peach in Texas thanks to the combination of Orex and MuteAce.

Others are little more balanced. California has stiff competition between Peach, Palutena, Mario and Wolf; New York has a bunch of characters contending for second place behind Falco (powered by Tilde); Illinois has seven different characters with between 5 and 10 wins, and Massachusetts has six characters between 4 and 6 wins.

Who took home the most first places this year?

As mentioned above, Scend

powered Ness to the second-most wins all year, and his 27 tournament wins, all with Ness, were by far the most in the nation.

ZD

took advantage of one of the most active scenes in the country in MDVA to compile 19 wins, primarily with his Fox, but a couple with his Wolf as well. Lui$'s

seven character wins (counting random as only one character) was by far the most of the dataset; Zomba

comes in second at four. Lui$ was utterly dominant in the NorCal scene whenever Kurama

wasn't present. And even then, he still won most of the time. Geist

rounds out the tie for second at 19, with 18 coming from the Bayonetta.

Zomba and Glutonny

tie for fifth at 18 wins apiece, with both bringing in the occasional secondary flavor. Zomba took tournaments with his Cloud, Falco and Link, while Glutonny took tournaments with his Lucina and Joker.

Razo was one of the specialists driving Peach's success, as he took 15 tournaments with the Princesses and one with the Aegis across Southern California to tie for seventh. Doorstop

is a bit more of a dual main than this data would suggest, as his Pokemon Trainer is quite strong and has been his go-to at a couple out-of-region events, but 15 of his 16 local wins, primarily in Ohio, came with the Zero Suit, the most wins of any player with the character this year.

Lima

could have been much higher on the list had he started competing seriously earlier than September. Regardless, his 14 wins with Bayonetta, primarily coming in Texas, were second to only Geist with the Umbra Witch, and he added a Palutena win to finish 9th on the leaderboard with 15 total.

Loaf

dominated the Minnesota local scene, picking up 13 of his 14 wins in-state. His 14 Wario wins were second only to Glutonny's 16. He ties for 10th on the overall wins leaderboard with Goblin

, who did it all with Roy thanks partially to strong performances in his local Florida scene as well as consistent traveling out-of-region over the summer.

It sure feels like somebody is missing though, doesn't it? Let's take a look at this through another lens. Let's see whose tournament wins came over the most cumulative entrants. That is, if you win a tournament with 500 entrants, for this analysis, it counts for 500 points. Who comes out on top in this metric?

MkLeo

only won seven tournaments this year, but they were pretty big ones. Despite Scend winning nearly four times as many events, his cumulative entrant total of 2,451 barely eclipses half of MkLeo, who came out on top of a cumulative 4,392 players at his seven tournament wins. Glutonny was the only other player to even break the 2,000 mark.

Besides MkLeo, two other new players join this list from the last one. Kola

, thanks largely to his CEO win, reached 1,651 cumulative entrants at tournament wins despite just 10 victories, good for fifth most. Cosmos

, who won a number of large regionals around his home base of Ohio, reached 1,309 cumulative entrants despite just 10 wins himself.

No character took home more large tournaments this year than ROB

, who won 79 tournaments powered by 29 players, with Zomba's 15 the highest win total for any individual ROB. Next, perhaps a little more surprisingly, was Ness

, at 75 wins. That's in large part due to Scend's 27 wins, a combination of his local dominance in Utah and his travels to regionals in places like Nevada and Kansas. But even without Scend, Ness still would have had 48 wins, which would have put him sixth in the game behind Bayonetta

.

Roy

, Wolf

and Palutena

round out the characters with the top five most local wins. The Princesses Peach and Daisy combined for 49 wins, good for seventh behind the aforementioned Bayo. These are fascinating results, suggesting that both characters benefit from a few incredibly dedicated and talented mains, such as Lima and Mistake for Bayonetta and MuteAce and Orex for Peach. I'm also curious if these are characters that benefit from local play as opposed to major play, where the top tiers that can stop bracket runs in their tracks might be less likely to block their paths.

Joker and Wario sit tied for eighth, despite radically different player base sizes. Just 11 Warios contributed to the 45 victories, primarily Glutonny (16) and Loaf (14), but 28 Joker players combined for the 45 victories the Persona protagonist produced this year. Tied for 10th are Snake

and Fox

, a couple of characters whose stock has undoubtedly fallen since 2019 but remain forces in the local tournament scene.

The bottom left corner of that graph is a little bunched up, isn't it? Let's take a closer look at what I call The Zone Of Limited Relevancy:

Here, we have characters separated by individual tournament winners on the X-axis, and total tournament wins on the Y-axis. Perhaps the truest line of irrelevancy is right in the middle of this graph. Random won five tournaments thanks to three different players this year (Lui$, Puppeh

and Stroder Ame

). If your character didn't do that... they might be irrelevant.

That's it for our wrapup of the Smash Ultimate metagame in 2021. We'll be doing more of the same here at PGstats.com in 2022, so follow us on @PGstats to keep up with everything we're working on next year!

Mural designs courtesy @ElevenZM and @MuralAltDrive.

Jackie Peanuts is the Director of PGstats. A sportswriter and statistician, Jackie's work has appeared on ESPN, CBS, Vice, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and others.