The 2021 Smash MX Census

words & maps by José “Toon” Laguna @toonLaguna

Back in 2020, there was a trend of creating national maps that located the players who mained certain characters. Zelda, Byleth, Marth, etc, if you mained the character yougot to appear on said map. The trend showed that there wasan interest in knowing where each player was competing andwhat character they represented.

However, when the online meta started, it seemed as if entire countries played as a single region instead of having separate states. Some tournaments had region locks in place to prevent connectivity issues, further pushing the narrative that there was now a single tag we were all competing under: “Mexico”.

I took the idea of character maps and turned them into something different to reignite the regional pride.What if people could know where everyone played?

The online meta brought many new players to the mix and it was close to impossible to know where theywere. Locals weren’t back yet, PRs were on pause and the whole community aspect seemed kinda lostoffline.

I gathered information to know who played Rivals of Aether in Mexico and made a map of the entire competitive community. The research was simple, I just needed a tag, state of residence and a main character. This first experiment was successful, and I made other maps for NASB, Strive, SFV and more. The biggest one was Melee, 308 players across all but 2 states. But there was one task lurking in the distance: creating a map for Ultimate.

I made a form asking for the same information as before, adding the municipality of residence. Designinga single map would be impossible as there were 3000+ answers, so I had to create one for each individualstate, making a total of 32, plus a joke map and the one you can see in the article.

They received a lot of love, people shared them all over twitter and among their local groups. Some even reignited competition, like Acapulco, and other players found people near them to play friendlies and hang out. I’ve updated them monthly, too, as the first versions would always be missing some people, prompting them to fill up the form as fast as possible so they could appear in the next one.

The data also gave us some interesting findings. Baja California was the state with the biggest player base, 276 total, followed by Nuevo León with 237 and Mexico City with 200, whereas the smallest ones were Colima with 10 and Tlaxcala with 19. We also found out that Joker is the most used character in Mexico with 104 representatives, followed by Mario with 81 and Link with 73, Mii Swordfighter was the least used with only 4 representatives.

For Melee, Nuevo León has the biggest player base with 44, followed by Baja California with 39 and Jaliscowith 37. Colima and Tlaxcala have no players. The most used characters were Fox (64), Falco (56) andC.Falcon (37). Nobody uses Young Link, DK or Mewtwo.

What I love about this is that it’s really easy to replicate, and other countries have started doing this, likePeru and El Salvador.

Making a census can help you get an overview of the competitive scenes in your country, find familiar facesthat you didn’t know were still competing, or even use them as a tool to find new people to challenge.

In 2021 there were a total of 2,993 players in the Ultimate maps and 308 in Melee. The Mexican communitywill continue growing, and the monthly updates will keep happening.

What if YOU made a census for Smash in your country?