gogogo theorycraft:
Ness is better than Lucas imo. Fair is good for destroying shields, and spacing. His dair is very strong, hits through platforms and it cancels on landing. Uair is also very strong and cancels on landing. His nair is very strong and stays out a while, it feels like a melee sex kick. His bair is also quite strong. All his aerials other than dair come out very fast, and all of them when performed near the ground have no lag. Ness’s fair beats Ike’s counter 
His ground game isn’t that great, bat hits hard, yoyos are okay, his tilts hit well but they have low range. Dtilt is nice though, it procs a trip roughly 1/3 of the time. His ground game might even be good with that new tech, boost smashing.
His neutral b and over b specials are worse than Lucas’s in that they aren’t spammable. Neutral b hits like a truck when you do land it, which isn’t that hard to do if they’re off the stage. If it’s highly charged and sweetspotted it kills midweights around 80%. His down b is fast enough to heal with and it pushes objects away when it ends.
His up b, is much better than Lucas’s though. It moves faster, is spammable, it’s safer to use as an attack and they both hit multiple times (use the tail). Because it moves so much faster, it’s good for koing off the top. When Ness pk thunders himself it actually hurts, unlike Lucas’s.
Lucas is less gimpable on his recovery, but that’s not because his pk thunder goes through him, it’s because he has a tether and his pk thunder turns faster so he’s vulnerable for less time. However, you can still gimp his recovery by attack Lucas’s pk thunder, it’s just that you need to do more than merely run into it.
Basically I view it as Ness having a strong offensive game, and Lucas being mostly defensive, as Lucas lacks an approach, and his ranged moves are more spammable. The only things Lucas has going for him offensively are his usmash, and his bair. If Lucas had an approach maybe things would be different, but as far as I can tell his best approach is rar which is rather slow.
I also think that there are too many tiers for a game this young, I would limit it to 3 tiers, high, middle and low. There’s just too much we don’t know to accurately have 5 tiers. (Not that 3 tiers would be that accurate either…)
Finally, I’m in agreement with UltraDavid that Ganon isn’t that bad. He’s the only character than can really tech-chase which has to count for something. It feels like he has favorable matchups against game and watch, wario, bowser, samus, link, captain falcon and sonic. He does have trouble against people with a good zoning game, but he’s not bad enough to be bottom tier. Ganon does fairly well against characters without a good zoning game, who also aren’t extremely disjointed like Marth.
