3. Canada's Wonderland (17 + 1 in 2023)

Where once the idea of Cedar Fair allowing another of its parks to overshadow Cedar Point would've been unthinkable, Canada's Wonderland has become an unexpected flagship for the company. Located in Vaughan, Ontario, the park is a unique mix of experiences and environments. That's because – like its sister parks Kings Island, Kings Dominion, and Carowinds – it was a park built by Hanna Barbera's Taft Broadcasting in the '70s & '80s, purchased by Paramount in the '90s, then sold to Cedar Fair in the 2000s. 

One of the first things Cedar Fair did was to supercharge each of the former Paramount Parks with a B&M hypercoaster, which was 2008's Behemoth at Wonderland. The company then returned to each of those parks, bestowing them with a 300-foot gigacoaster, with Wonderland's being 2012's Leviathan. 2019's B&M dive coaster Yukon Striker completes the trifecta of crowd-pleasing, marketing-friendly B&Ms that the park needed.

And from a purely coaster-centric point-of-view, they were needed. Wonderland's coaster count may be bigger than Cedar Point's, but it's not nearly as iconic. Arguably, Wonderland has a "quantity over quality" issue, with a Vekoma SLC, Zamperla Volaire, Arrow multi-looper, and Vekoma Boomerang making up the rest of the park's "big" coasters... In that way, Canada's Wonderland is perhaps our next prescient reminder that bigger doesn't always equal better, and that some parks with a half dozen coasters actually have a more quality coaster collection than some of the parks on this list...

2. Energylandia (17 + 3 in 2023)

If you've only just been hearing about Poland's Energylandia here and there, it makes sense. The park is a relative newcomer, having only opened in 2014 with three coasters (the biggest of which was a Wild Mouse). Energylandia is owned by Polish businessman Marek Goczał, who also owns the Energy 2000 energy drink and the Club Energy 2000 nightclub. Apparently, amusement parks, energy drinks, and nightclubs are good industries to be in, because in its second season, the park added three more coasters (two family installations and a Vekoma SLC); one in 2016; three in 2017; two in 2018; three in 2019, and on and on, with 3 more planned for 2023. 

So by the numbers, Energylandia has exploded onto our Coaster Count. That being said, rcdb.com ranks half of its (soon to be) 20 coasters has "family" or milder, meaning half of its coasters are relatively inexpensive, off-the-shelf, traveling-style Whacky Worms, Wild Mice, and Junior Coasters. But its headliners really are significant.

Abyssus and Formula are two of Vekoma's next generation multi-launch coasters; Hyperion is a 269-foot tall Intamin coaster, rivaling Millennium Force in stats; and Zadra (above) was the first from-scratch RMC I-Box installation (versus a rebuild of an existing wooden coaster) and – at 206 feet – stands one foot taller than its sister ride, Steel Vengeance. The park's 2023 lineup promises a Vekoma mine train, a kiddie coasters, and – most interestingly – a yet unnamed Vekoma tilt coaster. 

In any case, it's odd to consider that after duking it out for decades, Cedar Fair and Six Flags' flagships were bypassed seemingly overnight by an 8-year old Polish park. Energylandia will tie for first place in 2023, and given that it tends to add somewhere between 1 and 3 roller coasters every single year without fail, it'll almost certainly blaze past the current first place champion the very next year. Weird... Until then, though, the crown belongs to...

1. Six Flags Magic Mountain (20)

In the heat of the Coaster Wars, the only park to ever be a real contender to Cedar Point's Coaster Crown was Six Flags Magic Mountain, near Los Angeles. Year after year, discussion boards of the '90s and 2000s were alight with each park's respective fans trading blows back and forth, debating how their respective companies would retaliate and ultimately "win." Well, by the metric of quantity, we can now see that Magic Mountain went home with the gold, clearly out-building any other U.S. park and leading Cedar Point by no less than four coasters.

What's especially interesting, though, is how little overlap there is between Magic Mountain and Cedar Point. Six Flags' Valencia park houses an equally-diverse ride lineup made of some very interesting, one-of-a-kind rides. 1997's Superman: Escape from Krypton was one of Intamin's first major rides, and an experimental entry in the launched coaster story; X2 is an equally-ambitious 4th dimension landmark coaster and the final installation from classic coaster manufacturer Arrow. The park includes several B&M hits: a clone of the inverted Batman: The Ride, the stand-up Riddler's Revenge, the floorless Scream!, the flying Tatsu...

But the park's more recent, modern installations are equally as ambitious (and just as importantly, more custom and less off-the-shelf), like the terrain-following Premier launched coaster Full Throttle, the RMC single-railed Wonder Woman: Flight of Courage, and two mobius-tracked racing coasters – Premier's launched West Coast Racers and the RMC'ed remains of an old racing woodie, now Twisted Colossus (above). It's kind of cool that there's practically zero overlap in coaster models between Cedar Point and Magic Mountain!

Quality or quantity?

In the '90s and 2000s, the battle for the "Coaster Crown" was the A-Plot of many amusement park discussion boards. Year after year, operators battled it out to add more, more, more roller coasters, with accusations of cheating and lineup-loading and miscalculating running rampant on fan forums. 

Now that the dust has cleared, maybe the takeaway from our Coaster Crown Countdown is that the number of roller coasters in a park... doesn't really matter? Is a day at Magic Mountain better than a day at Cedar Point because it has 25% more coasters? Not necessarily. And in fact, a blind allegiance to roller coasters can end up with a park forgetting what else it needs – like shows, entertainment, dark rides, flat rides, landscaping, dining, and more. 

You might prefer to ride any one of Busch Gardens Williamsburg's nine coasters (each truly among the best of their type, and lovingly integrated into themed environments) than all twenty of Energylandia's, right? So as the years pass, our coaster counting will continue... but as to whether it's a primary indicator of a park's success? Well... We'll leave that to you to decide.