Minecraft’s Steve Is Finally Being Banned In Major Smash Bros. Tournaments

It’s fair to say that Steve from Minecraft has been considered a controversial character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate since he was added in late 2020. Now, however, as noted by Kotaku, a number of major tournaments are outright banning the character, thanks to the discovery of a meta-destroying glitch that’s brought Steve back to the forefront.

To be clear, Steve haters have called the character overpowered for years now. A recent tierlist put together by UltRank that tallied votes from 71 pro Ultimate players ranked Steve in the top tier of characters in the game, along with Joker and Pyra/Mythra. However, Steve isn’t getting banned because he’s just too good, but because he can use a certain exploit to essentially break the game.

Over the past few weeks, Steve players have discovered that they can use a glitch to recover more quickly than every other character in the game, meaning that he can break combos, react to animations before they even finish, and generally undermine the game’s rules at a basic level. Influential Smash player Hungrybox recently announced that this glitch will result in Steve being banned at his Coinbox events, and it seems that a number of major tournaments have followed suit.

This has resulted in the above hodgepodge of tournament rules that resembles the beginnings of an interstate war. While organizers may choose to ban the new exploit instead of Steve as a character, that would require them to moderate every match featuring a Steve in-depth to make sure that it’s not being used. That would require a large time commitment that some organizers simply cannot swing, and that’s why they’re outright banning Steve instead. And unfortunately for Smash fans, Nintendo has repeatedly stated that it will no longer update Smash Ultimate, so a fix for the issue is unlikely.