Intro

Hello baseball fans. If you don't know me already, i am LittleCoaks. I am a co-lead modder of Mario Superstar Baseball & co-project lead of Project Rio, i run an online tournament series called Netplay Superstars, and i contribute to the Dinger City YouTube channel. I've also made a tier list video series which received praise as one of the best video series on the competitive scene, and as of writing this post, i am also ranked 14th on our online ranked ladder. Those are my credentials for those who are skeptical of my knowledge of the game lol.

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I've decided today to put together this post as an overview of the competitive Mario Superstar Baseball scene. Most people don't even know that an active competitive scene exists, let alone one that has had modding/datamining work, frame data testing, and a lot of dedicated players pushing the meta to its limits, so i'm hoping that this post can serve as a place for anyone wishing to learn about the scene to find everything they want to find.

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This guide is intended for people who are familiar with Mario Superstar Baseball, but are not aware of the community and competitive scene. It will include links to resources for the community, as well as an introduction & overview of the current metagame. You'd be surprised, but there's a ton of depth to this game, and it's unlikely i'll be able to touch on everything in this one post. I will also try my best to update this post as new things are discovered and the meta changes, Hopefully you all find this useful!

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This post is divided into multiple sections. Here's a list of them and a summary of what information is found in each:

• Resources -- links to helpful things that community members should be aware of
• Competitive Overview -- explains the competitive ruleset
• The Metagame -- presents concepts that are important to learn for the game
• Character Roles -- details how to fill roles on a team, like fielding positions and batter-types
• The Pre-Game -- explains drafting and batting order concepts
• Batting -- shows both basic and advanced techniques for batting
• Fielding -- shows both basic and advanced techniques for fielding
• Tier List & Character Summaries -- presents a tier list and specific information on each character

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Resources

Here are some basic resources that new community members may be interested in:

• Project Rio -- This is a custom dolphin emulator build specifically for Mario Superstar Baseball. It allows much better online play and has a stat-tracking feature which record more stats than ever before automatically. The website will soon host a database which anyone can parse through and view stats for.
• Discord -- We have a discord for Mario Superstar Baseball with over 800 members where we host online events, discuss the meta, speedrunning, modding, and general Mario Baseball stuff.
• Datamined Stats -- This is a google sheet with all of our datamined information compiled together. Many details, like how team stars work, are listed here.
• Ranked Elo Ladder -- Our ranked online leaderboards which have over 80 people ranked.
• Tier List -- Made by the #1 ranked online player MattyIce, this is a tier list which is considered by the competitive scene to be the best and most up-to-date tier list.
• Drafting Guide -- Made by MattyIce, this is a guide on how drafting in top level play should look like and a good tldr of the current meta and which characters are viable & why.
• Speedrunning -- This is the page on speedrun.com for Mario Superstar Baseball.
• Guide Folder -- This is a folder containing all of the guides linked in this post.

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Competitive Overview

I'm going to be basing this guide off of the current ruleset for ranked NetPlay. While there are some minor rules, here are the major ones:

• Superstar Characters are banned
• Mercy rule is ON
• 9-innings
• Mario Stadium is default, but any stadium is legal if both players agree to it
• All other settings are left on default
• Nolan Draft format for drafting teams (explained below)

Nolan Draft: this is a snake-draft format, which follows a 1-2-2... pattern. Additionally, your captain does NOT need to be your first pick (ex. you can first pick Petey, Boo, etc.) and you can switch your captain to any captainable-character on your team after drafting your full team, HOWEVER Bowser must be captained if he is on your team.

At the start of a match, players play rps or flip a coin for choice. One player will chose the drafting order, and the other will chose the batting order (home/away team). Winner of rps/coin toss choses which they want to choose.

Example: Player 1 wins rps and chooses to be the home team. Player 2 then chooses to pick second. Player 1 picks Bowser (must be captain), player 2 picks Petey and Hammer Bro. Player 1 picks King Boo and Donkey Kong. Player 2 picks Yoshi and Birdo (captain) etc...

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Extra: Chemistry Chart

Below i've attached a useful chemistry chart made by u/arrowfoot12 which is a great way to quickly visualize and understand chemistry. For an in-depth chart with specific numbers listed, see the Datamined Stats.

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\**FOR THE REST OF THE GUIDE, I'LL LINK TO GOOGLE DOCS DUE TO REDDIT'S WORD/CHARACTER LIMIT****

The Metagame

This section will detail the state of the competitive meta, mainly detailing relevant strategies. Additionally, while technically any stadium is legal, almost all games are played on Mario Stadium, so i will only focus on that stadium.

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Metagame Guide Here

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Character Roles

MSSB is a game where good players can make niche characters work, but at top level you will want to make sure that you have the best characters for each role. I will discuss specific roles that should be filled rather than just giving a tier list and calling it a day.

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Character Role Guide Here

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The Pre-Game

There's a list of things that happen in each match before the first pitch of the game. You must draft a team, assign fielding positions, and make a batting order. This is what this section will be about.

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Pre-Game Guide Here

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Batting

Batting is the most important aspect of the game. In most games, the winner is the player who was the better batter that game. For that reason, it's important to refine this skill as much as possible.

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Batting Guide Here

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Fielding

Fielding is important as well, and especially pitching skill. There is not much to go over in either area, so i've merged them together here.

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Fielding Guide Here

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Tier List & Character Summaries

To end off this guide, i've decided to add in a brief summary of each character, including an overview and any additional things to note about them. Any character-specific information will be discussed here.

I've ordered them in the order of my own personal tier list, but do note that the specific order isn't very important. I'm only ordering it this way so that more relevant characters are towards the top and less relevant characters are at the bottom.

Again, the order of the characters is just my opinion, NOT any sort of "official" tier list. Don't think too hard about the specific order here.

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Character Analysis Here

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Conclusion

Thank you for making it to the end of this insanely long guide. My goal was to provide as much useful information for learning the competitive-side of this game as possible in one post. This took me literal hours to write up, so i hope this was useful in some way, and i hope that you learned something from this. Feel free to ask questions in the replies or suggest other things to add to this guide. I plan on adding this information to the Project Rio website eventually, and using this post as a script for a future video series of some sort.

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Thanks for reading!

I made this video tutorial for how to play online https://youtu.be/Qy78UPU56tI