Stage legality
Banned stages are stages that are banned from most official tournaments. These stages can be banned for several reasons, including:
- Providing an unfair advantage for certain characters (such as excessive camping)
- Allowing players to abuse glitches in the game
- Completely re-vamping the strategies needed to win (such as Temple and Icicle Mountain)
- Having a significant amount of slow-down during a match
Banned stages in SSB
Banned stages in SSBM
Banned in both singles and doubles
- Brinstar Depths
- Flat Zone
- Great Bay
- Icicle Mountain
- Hyrule Temple
- Yoshi's Island N64
- Yoshi's Island (Pipes)
- Venom
- Fourside
- Mushroom Kingdom I
- Big Blue
Banned for Singles Only
Banned for Doubles Only
Varies
Incorrect Bannings
Some smaller tournaments use the erroneous criterion "if you can stand still and die, the stage is banned" to determine which stages are allowed. This is an inherently flawed criterion for numerous reasons. First, if you actually did stand still long enough in a game for this to matter, your opponent would kill you long before the stage would. Second, it says nothing about where on the stage one must stand. For example, standing on the turtle in Great Bay would cause you to die, but standing on the middle platform would be perfectly fine. Third, this technically rules out stages such as Kongo Jungle and Princess Peach's Castle, the first due to the small chance that a Klaptrap jumps on the stage and the second because of the Bullet Bills. However, these are such rare occurrences that they do not in and of themselves merit banning the stage. Finally, and possibly most importantly, this criterion does nothing about stages that provide opportunities for broken gameplay. Under this criterion, Poké Floats would be right out, while Temple would be allowed. This is the exact opposite of what should be. While Poké Floats does move, it follows a set pattern and does not overly advantage or disadvantage any one character. Temple on the other hand, completely breaks the gameplay, but its lack of motion would make it allowable under the above criterion.
Tournament organizers are strongly advised NOT to use the simple 'if you can stand still and die, the stage is banned" criterion for determining which stages are allowed. While some banned and allowed stages may anger some competitors, using the professional tournaments standard has always been found to be the most fair and agreeable to participants.
