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. The past two articles have analyzed the data for Captain Falcon and Marth. The next character in this series, decided by a community vote on our twitter, is Sheik!

Match-up data only analyzed if 40 or more games were reported.

For Sheik, there were 1657 games reported and I reviewed the data for 1293 of them. Unlike previous entries, Samus was not able to be included due to having less than 40 games reported in that match-up. However, there was just enough for Pikachu to take her spot!

Unsurprisingly, Sheik’s best match-up according to the data is Captain Falcon. I believe that most of the community agrees that Sheik vs. Falcon is very much in Sheik’s favor. However, I was not expecting her win-rate versus Marth to be so high. Even after doing the Marth article I knew that Marth was weak in the match-up, but I was not expecting it to be one of Sheik’s best.

I wanted to get more insight into why Marth struggles against Sheik, so I asked the best Sheik player I know: Plup. I asked him why he thought Sheik does so well against Marth, and whether or not he agreed with the data.

Sheik’s strengths vs Marth are pretty simple. Her recovery is objectively bad, but Marth is probably the only top tier that has a hard time guaranteeing the kill from edge guarding. Sheik has simple combos that almost always leave Marth in a bad spot, for instance: down throw up air, down tilt up air dash attack up air. Marth has a hard time landing vs Sheik, so any combo that leads into up air can potentially lead into more damage. Another plus Sheik has in the match-up is when Marth is at high percent Sheik just needs to find a grab or a down tilt to secure the kill, whereas Marth doesn’t have a reliable way to kill her at high percents.

Even though Sheik has tools that give her an advantage, Plup thinks the data doesn’t accurately represent how close the match-up really is.