This article has been translated into french, you can read it here!

When tournaments are hosted on smash.gg, organizers have the ability to save data such as characters and stages for sets. Over 6000 games were reported with character data in 2016. We have previously analyzed the data for Captain Falcon, Marth and Sheik. The next character in this series, decided by a community vote on our twitter, is Samus!

Samus had a bit less data than the other characters we have looked at, so I reduced the minimum number of games reported to 25 (just so that Ice Climbers can squeeze in there). Even after lowering the minimum, Jigglypuff was still booted from analysis with only 18 total games reported for the match-up.

The data makes quite the statement regarding the Falco match-up for Samus. With a 63% win-rate, Samus appears to have quite the advantage. I’m mostly curious as to why she does so well against Falco, but not against Fox. While not the same character, they do share quite a few traits. What does Falco lack that Fox has for this match-up?

I asked Samus main Duck why he thinks the Fox match-up may be more difficult than Falco.

Samus does worse against Fox compared to Falco simply because he’s more survivable and he has multiple guaranteed kill setups at high percents. Fox’s neutral is completely different but just as oppressive since he has the ability to hit samus off of any missed or shielded move due to shine, upsmash, his running speed, and his amazing out of shield options. Samus has to play significantly more carefully at higher percents and can take less risks due to risk of death, so there are less opportunities to outplay Fox compared to Falco. Samus does have more guaranteed combos and kill setups against Fox however, since Fox’s tech roll doesn’t go as far as Falco’s. This makes it so that in specific situations Samus can almost guarantee death or at least an edgeguard opportunity. It’s another balancing act between how survivable Samus is vs how many times Fox has to hit Samus. I would say that this matchup is currently 60–40 solidly in Fox’s favor.

I wanted to get more detail on the Falco match-up specifically, and why he thinks Samus does so well against Falco. He actually mentioned that he was surprised that the data was in Samus’s favor, so I asked him his thoughts on the match-up.