Stage legality

Stage legality refers to the playable status of various stages in mainstream tournaments.

Categories
In general, all stages fall into one of three categories:

Neutral stages may be chosen in any game of a set, including the first game. These are also referred to as starter stages (not to be confused with the term for stages that do not need to be unlocked to be used in-game).

Counterpick stages may be chosen only after the first game of a set, such as games 2 and 3 of a best-of-3 set. Stages in this category tend to give a slight, though not overwhelming, advantage for certain characters over others, such that it would not be fair to include them in the neutral list. These stages may often (though not always) be chosen for counterpicking purposes, hence the name of the category.

Banned stages cannot be chosen at all. Stages can be banned for several reasons, common reasons including but not limited to:
 * Especially poor matchup balance by providing a rather extreme advantage for certain characters (such as allowing the character to utilise excessive, gamebreaking camping, or utilise infinite chain throws, as in the case of in Temple for the former, or  in Shadow Moses Island for the latter).
 * Intrusive stage hazards that can easily KO players who are knocked into them, or force players to give up an advantage to avoid them. An extreme example of this is Gamer.
 * Allowing players to abuse glitches in the game.
 * Possessing one or more "caves of life," allowing characters to survive much longer than feasibly possible under usual circumstances, and creating a general over-centralisation on the ability to tech.
 * Possessing permanent walk-off blast lines and walls; the former creates unreasonably powerful camping positions and allows for potential easy zero-deaths that wouldn't occur normally, as well as marginalizing or completely eliminating offstage play (nullifying the value of a good recovery), while the latter also creates powerful camping positions and allow for zero-death or otherwise heavily damaging combos that wouldn't be possible otherwise. Walk-offs and walls that occur only temporarily on a stage are considered detrimental, but acceptable enough to usually not result in a stage's banning by themselves.
 * Drastically altering gameplay and the strategies needed to win (such as Icicle Mountain and Mario Bros.).
 * Possessing elements that causes the stage to be too strenuous on the system's CPU and thus being capable of reducing the game's frame rate mid-match (such as Fountain of Dreams in Melee doubles play).

The term legal stage can also be used to describe any neutral or counterpick stage, or equivalently, any non-banned stage.

In general, due to the wide variety between stages and stage types and the series as a whole not necessarily being designed with serious competitive play in mind, very few stages are balanced enough to be legal for professional competitive play, which is why a majority of stages in all games end up being banned.

Despite the banned stages list, most tournaments feature some variation of the "gentleman rule", a rule that allows players to choose any stage they want, including banned stages, if all players in the match agree to it. This is usually the only way for banned stages to see serious tournament play. However, even with this rule in effect, it rarely sees use to play on banned stages outside a much higher-skilled player letting an opposing more casual or very young player choose any stage they want, as most competitive players never want to willingly play on the banned stages for the same reasons the ruleset had them banned. Even with the rule in effect, TOs may still ban some stages from being played on via the gentleman rule, if the stage has a propensity to delay the tournament by causing much longer matches (such as Temple, New Pork City, and The Great Cave Offensive).

Major differences in communities
There are many community preferences in terms of stage choices, with there being no agreed-upon standard across all regions on what exactly constitutes a "legal stage", so a stage's legality can be dependent on the region the tournament is in; this is especially true in Brawl and Smash 4, due to a lack of an officially standardized stage list. Pokémon Stadium 2 in Brawl, for instance, was generally banned in the Tristate Area, while tournaments in Texas usually allowed the stage to be a legal counterpick choice.

The commonality of characters can also play a role in what stages are legal or banned. Again in Brawl, the rising prominence of in the metagame led to stage lists in most regions becoming more restrictive. In the Tristate region, Meta Knight was not banned from tournaments, and as a result, the Tristate tournament scene banned or otherwise restricted stages such as Delfino Plaza, Halberd, and Rainbow Cruise due to Meta Knight's overwhelming power on such stages. In some regions, however, Meta Knight was not as widely used as the Tristate Area; as such, some of the aforementioned stages have differing legalities, with Halberd sometimes being a starter stage and Frigate Orpheon going from a banned stage to a counterpick. WHOBO 4, the first American MK-banned major, featured an expansive stagelist that included Delfino Plaza, Halberd, Rainbow Cruise, and Brinstar as counterpicks, even though most of these stages were banned in MK-legal tournaments at the time.

Stage legality in Smash 64
The following is Smash 64's banlist for stages in tournaments. Until mid-2015, four stages — Dream Land, Hyrule Castle, Congo Jungle, and Peach's Castle — were legal. Currently, Dream Land is the only stage that can be used in tournaments. However, with tournaments switching from the vanilla version of the game to the 19XX mod, in some tournaments like or, the stages Duel Zone and , which weren't available without hacking, have seen some tournament presence in doubles, though this is generally rare.

More recently, Smash Remix has allowed for certain hacked stages in tournaments, such as Zebes Landing (a version of Dream Land without wind), and even stages with a different layout, like 64 versions of Smashville, Yoshi's Story, Pokémon Stadium and others.

Stage legality in Melee
In the current Smash Back Room rule set, all stages are listed definitively as a starter, counterpick, or banned stage, as follows:

In the past, the following stages have been legal counterpicks, but are now banned: The following stages have never been legal in competitive Melee history:
 * Big Blue, Brinstar, Corneria, Green Greens, Jungle Japes, Kongo Jungle, Kongo Jungle (N64),, Mushroom Kingdom II, Mute City, Onett, Poké Floats, Princess Peach's Castle, Rainbow Cruise,
 * Brinstar Depths, Flat Zone, Fourside, Great Bay, Icicle Mountain, Temple, Venom, Yoshi's Island (N64)

Stage legality in Brawl

 * ''For finer-grained status descriptions, see Tournament legal (SSBB).

Brawl had a highly fragmented and argumentative community when it came to which stages should be legal. As a result, the stage legality list is significantly messier than the previous two games, with most stages being disputed in one way or another. Additionally, a stage's legal status was heavily influenced by 's legality, as he tends to gain even more drastic advantages on many fringe stages. Thus tournaments that banned Meta Knight tend to allow more stages than tournaments that kept him legal.

Additionally, the community at large has never considered the sample stages in the Stage Builder as official stages, and as a result, they are all considered banned. Despite this, none of the three stages would be theoretically legal in any ruleset: Hole has no grabbable ledges from the outside and contains a powerful camping location in the lower-left spikes; Bath frequently lacks the lower blast line and has walls that block the horizontal blast lines and allow for infinites; and Maze's irregular design promotes camping, circle-camping, and stalling, and the stage's architecture creates caves of life. Arguably, a large number of setups also often lack the stages, as they interfere with the loading of mods via the Smash Stack.

Stage legality in Project M
The following stages are legal in the PMBR 2018 Full Recommended Ruleset

For counterpicks, the winner of the previous game strikes 2 legal stages after character selection and the loser picks one of the remaining ones.

Stage legality in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS
Since the release of its home console counterpart, has had minimal tournament presence. The following stage list is used by Anther's Ladder for 3DS netplay and most online 3DS tournaments:

Stage legality in
Like Brawl, there is no uniform stagelist for, with some differences and disagreements on stage categories between areas. The table below generally uses the most commonly accepted legality for each stage.

Stage legality in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, having the most stages in the series and the option to turn stage hazards off, has the most potentially legal stages of any Smash game. Since the stage list and hazard toggle were revealed, players and TOs have been debating the stage list for the game, and have yet to come up with a definitive answer. Major tournaments have largely erred on the side of having relatively large (eight to ten) stage lists, but some regional tournaments have already cut back to four to six legal stages.