Umbreon said: fox operates in the neutral game based on his movement. due to the nature of his initial dash, full run speed, jump speed, and jump height, fox has the ability to move faster than most characters have the ability to cover options when neither character has the ability to punish prior to a conversion (the neutral game). the strategic element to fox's neutral game is therefore basic exploitation of the opponent's inability to cover his options prior to fox dedicating/over-extending on his own error. unlike other characters, fox's core strategy is based fundamentally on his movement and not his moves.



shine does not aid in this functionality. shine is an option for punishment or conversion into punishment only. to complain about fox's shine is to complain about his punishment game. your argument is an inability to deal with his strategic movement with attribution error. if you really wanted to make fox worse or less broken, you would remove his ability to choose when to attack by making his jumps and dash less effective in some way. removing shine does not solve the problem at all, and actually may aid fox by giving the player less incentive to over-extend and reducing poor decision-making on the part of the fox player. Click to expand...

Spoiler Ado said: MVP said: IMO, falcon is a very technical/momentum character in melee. Combos are started when you are in the zone and can feel him. (Same with all characters i know, but ESPECIALLY falcon). Click to expand... I think that that is a wrong and bad mentality for Falcon players to have. Combos are started when you grab at the correct percent or land one of his decent combo starters. Lucky for me, as a fairly new player, I was able to harass Umbreon enough to get him to explain to me some of his views while I was still in my game-theory infancy. Here is a post of his, it is about why Fox is a broken character:



Umbreon said: oh, so you're going to play stupid. or you are stupid. okay, let's do this.



fox operates in the neutral game based on his movement. due to the nature of his initial dash, full run speed, jump speed, and jump height, fox has the ability to move faster than most characters have the ability to cover options when neither character has the ability to punish prior to a conversion (the neutral game). the strategic element to fox's neutral game is therefore basic exploitation of the opponent's inability to cover his options prior to fox dedicating/over-extending on his own error. unlike other characters, fox's core strategy is based fundamentally on his movement and not his moves.



shine does not aid in this functionality. shine is an option for punishment or conversion into punishment only. to complain about fox's shine is to complain about his punishment game. your argument is an inability to deal with his strategic movement with attribution error. if you really wanted to make fox worse or less broken, you would remove his ability to choose when to attack by making his jumps and dash less effective in some way. removing shine does not solve the problem at all, and actually may aid fox by giving the player less incentive to over-extend and reducing poor decision-making on the part of the fox player.



if you're implying that shine is strategic for fox because it encourages the player to play worse when he need not do so, then congratulations, you're just better than me. Click to expand... Wasn't that utterly delicious? Here is my opinion now, applying this to Falcon. With a better dash dance, more horizontal air speed, and a falling speed that isn't too far off, Falcon effectively is similar to Fox with some differences of course. In a realm of perfection even when considering the flaws of the character, Falcon is a pretty great character due to reasons mentioned above as they can be applied to him. However in the realm of a tournament, sub-optimal play, and "play styles" (having a play style [i.e. "I go for a lot of stomps" or "I play really aggressively"] that involves anything other than correct decision making is degenerative) Falcon beings to struggle and that only gets compounded with his comparatively (relative to the rest of the cast) flawed design.



Falcons instead need to learn optimal play and stick to it. For example you can uthrow Marth into a knee at 68% (if that number is wrong, which I don't think it is, that's not the point, just bare with me). At 68% there is no more chaotic neutral game to flirt in where you can make mistakes and get punished and all the variance becomes negligible because you just knee'd him and he's either going to die or be put in a position to be edge guarded or abused while he tries to fall. All of those situations are very advantageous and if you want Falcon to be good you need to create as many of those situations as possible. When you grab Fox, downthrow him into a tech chase regrab. Do not raptor boost, do not stomp, do not try to knee hoping he missed his tech. Master that sequence and perform it over, over, and then one more time again. Be as lame as possible. However I will say when calling a roll is fairly safe it is okay (i.e. they are by the ledge and they always roll in, then go ahead and try to call it sometimes because if they don't roll into center stage, you still have stage control). Falcon's strengths are his speed, his low kill percents, decent edge guarding, and his grab game.



It does not matter how hard (and easily) Fox can punish you when you are punishing him. But it matters a ton when you start making mistakes, making guesses, and doing other bad things. It is MUCH easier to win the space animal MU has a spacie (because they can play much less perfectly than you and still win) but he has what it takes to do it. When you grab Falco, uthrow him, position yourself correctly and tech chase regrab him. Don't let him pillar you and do 100% before you can reestablish neutral because you grabbed him and decided to stomp in place as a guess and missed your punishment then you got put into a reversal situation. All that being said, Falcon is forever going to have a hard time with Fox and especially Falco simply due to the structure of the game but he is not as flawed as people think.



Some of Falcon's flaws are as followed:

low percent game

stages can mess with his grab game

combo fodder

edge guard fodder

crouch cancel game The biggest flaw to me is his low percent game. If that can be optimized then he can become a pretty good character. Also he needs to manifest grabs versus violent characters such as space animals which currently are hard to come by. I believe proficient shield dropping will also help Falcon improve a ton versus Falco so he can platform camp him hard and more or less do what peach does with her float.



While I'm at it, I'll say that S2J and Windrose are probably the two Falcon's with the best and most efficient "play style" (while Hax obviously is the most successful and best Falcon, throw Mango in somewhere too but he does what he wants lol. Windrose obviously isn't that caliber player but I've read up on his posts, listened to his commentary, and seen him play and I think he's got the right ideas whether or not he can be a top tier Falcon is besides the point). They emphasize the correct things. Darkrain too I guess when he's active. Mango said that Darkrain is by far the lamest Falcon to play because all he'll do is dash dance grab tech chase. Those are all great things for Falcon to do coincidently, you can't lose the game if you take away all your opponent's options. Hax however recently has improved leaps and bounds and I think him playing Mew2king as often as he does helped push the character, he's starting to be a very, very player scary player. He's starting to look more like mew2king himself; he can now bait out mistakes and perform absurdly certain and ruthless punishments (i.e. when all the commentators get hype because Mew2king got a grab on FD, Hax is almost that scary now) I imagine it is the result of a character (Falcon) who get's abused so easily defensively. When he is operating in the extremely violent vs. Sheik (and mew2king's Sheik) you can see exactly what it is that Falcon can do in neutral not to mention is hard and true combos. When Hax is at his best, you can see that the character does not limit him too much within reason and coincidentally he is the most movement oriented player currently (Dr. Peepee is pretty buttery himself with his Marth). He'll get his grab or combo starter out of a bait or series of movement and go to work. This is a winning formula for Falcon. Generally speaking, being lame is playing the game optimally. (i.e. Marth, uthrow->uair juggling repeatedly, Sheik stalling the ledge, Fox platform/dashdance camping, Falco laser'ing correctly, chain grabbing in general, etc. lame styles are the best styles). Falcon has decent potential to play lame. I think that that is a wrong and bad mentality for Falcon players to have. Combos are started when you grab at the correct percent or land one of his decent combo starters. Lucky for me, as a fairly new player, I was able to harass Umbreon enough to get him to explain to me some of his views while I was still in my game-theory infancy. Here is a post of his, it is about why Fox is a broken character:Wasn't that utterly delicious? Here is my opinion now, applying this to Falcon. With a better dash dance, more horizontal air speed, and a falling speed that isn't too far off, Falcon effectively is similar to Fox with some differences of course. In a realm of perfection even when considering the flaws of the character, Falcon is a pretty great character due to reasons mentioned above as they can be applied to him. However in the realm of a tournament, sub-optimal play, and "play styles" (having a play style [i.e. "I go for a lot of stomps" or "I play really aggressively"] that involves anything other than correct decision making is degenerative) Falcon beings to struggle and that only gets compounded with his comparatively (relative to the rest of the cast) flawed design.Falcons instead need to learn optimal play and stick to it. For example you can uthrow Marth into a knee at 68% (if that number is wrong, which I don't think it is, that's not the point, just bare with me). At 68% there is no more chaotic neutral game to flirt in where you can make mistakes and get punished and all the variance becomes negligible because you just knee'd him and he's either going to die or be put in a position to be edge guarded or abused while he tries to fall. All of those situations are very advantageous and if you want Falcon to be good you need to create as many of those situations as possible. When you grab Fox, downthrow him into a tech chase regrab. Do not raptor boost, do not stomp, do not try to knee hoping he missed his tech. Master that sequence and perform it over, over, and then one more time again. Be as lame as possible. However I will say when calling a roll is fairly safe it is okay (i.e. they are by the ledge and they always roll in, then go ahead and try to call it sometimes because if they don't roll into center stage, you still have stage control). Falcon's strengths are his speed, his low kill percents, decent edge guarding, and his grab game.It does not matter how hard (and easily) Fox can punish you when you are punishing him. But it matters a ton when you start making mistakes, making guesses, and doing other bad things. It is MUCH easier to win the space animal MU has a spacie (because they can play much less perfectly than you and still win) but he has what it takes to do it. When you grab Falco, uthrow him, position yourself correctly and tech chase regrab him. Don't let him pillar you and do 100% before you can reestablish neutral because you grabbed him and decided to stomp in place as a guess and missed your punishment then you got put into a reversal situation. All that being said, Falcon is forever going to have a hard time with Fox and especially Falco simply due to the structure of the game but he is not as flawed as people think.Some of Falcon's flaws are as followed:The biggest flaw to me is his low percent game. If that can be optimized then he can become a pretty good character. Also he needs to manifest grabs versus violent characters such as space animals which currently are hard to come by. I believe proficient shield dropping will also help Falcon improve a ton versus Falco so he can platform camp him hard and more or less do what peach does with her float.While I'm at it, I'll say that S2J and Windrose are probably the two Falcon's with the best and most efficient "play style" (while Hax obviously is the most successful and best Falcon, throw Mango in somewhere too but he does what he wants lol. Windrose obviously isn't that caliber player but I've read up on his posts, listened to his commentary, and seen him play and I think he's got the right ideas whether or not he can be a top tier Falcon is besides the point). They emphasize the correct things. Darkrain too I guess when he's active. Mango said that Darkrain is by far the lamest Falcon to play because all he'll do is dash dance grab tech chase. Those are all great things for Falcon to do coincidently, you can't lose the game if you take away all your opponent's options. Hax however recently has improved leaps and bounds and I think him playing Mew2king as often as he does helped push the character, he's starting to be a very, very player scary player. He's starting to look more like mew2king himself; he can now bait out mistakes and perform absurdly certain and ruthless punishments (i.e. when all the commentators get hype because Mew2king got a grab on FD, Hax is almost that scary now) I imagine it is the result of a character (Falcon) who get's abused so easily defensively. When he is operating in the extremely violent vs. Sheik (and mew2king's Sheik) you can see exactly what it is that Falcon can do in neutral not to mention is hard and true combos. When Hax is at his best, you can see that the character does not limit him too much within reason and coincidentally he is the most movement oriented player currently (Dr. Peepee is pretty buttery himself with his Marth). He'll get his grab or combo starter out of a bait or series of movement and go to work. This is a winning formula for Falcon. Generally speaking, being lame is playing the game optimally. (i.e. Marth, uthrow->uair juggling repeatedly, Sheik stalling the ledge, Fox platform/dashdance camping, Falco laser'ing correctly, chain grabbing in general, etc. lame styles are the best styles). Falcon has decent potential to play lame. Click to expand...

Here is a drop off in how much I can go into detail or how much I know about a character

Another Drop off

The rest of the cast gets a cluster**** post here because I don't really care about them or they won't be mentioned at all

Highest placing: Local/3rd , $5 entree feeNotable players in attendance: Hanky Panky, Abu (Prince_Abu) then less notable people/randomsYou can ask hanky panky about my credibility on game/theory knowledgeI will be the first to tell you I'm not that great yet, you know how good or bad I am Sveet and you should have us come over again. Fun times. I might be around average but I say I am horrible (but even when I win I always say I played bad) but I am methodical with my analysis and I think I have an understanding of the game disproportional to my experience. I hope you can appreciate that I thought long and hard about this. I'm willing to defend my list too.Eh, for some sort of reference I am notably worse than Hanky Panky. I've never beaten his Peach in a million friendlies but I've beaten his other characters/secondaries various times. Same for Abu, Abu sucks. I'm better than some random people in Columbus that are actual players.I'm almost convinced that either Hanky or Abu is the 3rd/4th best in Midwest lol.Ignoring all that, I want my list and explanations to supersede all semantics.FalcoFoxSheik/Marth (tie)PuffPeachFalconIce ClimbersDocPikachuMarioGanonSamusYoung Link/Luigi (tie)G&WYoshiDonkey KongLinkRoyNessMewtwoZeldaKirbyBowserPichuExplanations:This list is sort of a combination of theory and practice/results.Fox:On paper Fox is clearly the best character in the game and I don't think anyone can argue otherwise, at least no one is going to convince me. However, placing him at #1 is counter intuitive when you look at recent tournament results which have been dominated by Falco (and obviously Peach with some Sheik). It is becoming more and more evident that Fox naturally has a high variance style and not only does he rely too much more on precision than every other character, he get can easily get his momentum and situation reversed with each technical or small error (i.e. attempting to drill peach but she jumps into you at the last moment and now you got dsmashed etc.) On a macro scale, Falco does not have as big of an issue with this because of his better tech rolls, longer jump squat, the relative ease of laser controller, and his best move (Falco's dair) being entirely stupid. Needless to say Fox also gets punished extremely hard and has the most developed anti-meta which hurts his viability. While he is still excellent, he is not as likely to perform as Falco is in a tournament setting.Let me stress how excellent Fox is though with an excerpt from Umbreon.etc. for context, that was a response explaining why Fox is perceived to be, and actually is, broken.Sheik:Sheik is where she is because she is disproportionally "easy" to play when compared to other characters and that goes well with her disproportionally hard punishes and edge guarding. This actually matters in a tournament setting. For example the Fox vs Falco MU on paper is probably even or even possibly in Fox's favor but Fox has to work so much harder than Falco does to kill and combo him. Falco can get 60% off a shine and it's not all that difficult. Apply that to Sheik now in her MUs. She "Falco's" a lot of characters (i.e. she punishes them with less effort and sometimes more severity than other characters do her). She can also plank stupidly well that really really plays into her favor when you want to play lame. However, while Sheik as a whole is better than Marth with her overall MU spread being much better versus the worse characters, Marth deals with space animals and Puff better than Sheik does. Marth players also no longer have an excuse to lose helplessly to Sheik as Dr. PP provided Marths with a very strong formula with a strong emphasis on movement, poking, and zoning with fair.Marth:This is where things get saucyTheCrimonBlur said some of what I want to express here:Essentially I feel like movement oriented characters are superior in design. That is just a blanket statement.the rest:Marth gets extremely hard punishes with his uair chains on pretty much everyone but Puff once you buy into what Umbreon talks about. Also, the punishment/ease of punishment scale is tipped in his favor vs space animals although they can do so some very bad things to him and edge guard him almost equally well. Really, Marth just needs to abuse his ridiculous dash dance and grab range then uair chain. Additionally, he has a very strong and safe poking game with dtilt (and fair) that deliciously gets better with his dashdance. Play styles with a bigger focus on that are now becoming popular and have proven to be effective (PP vs Armada, PP vs M2k, PPU improving etc.) He still has his tippers and edge guarding of course. His gimping rival's that of Sheik's. Really once Marth's other than PP start subscribing to Umbreon's methodology (and they stop nair'ing all the time) I think you'll see Marth placing higher or functioning very well at the highest level. Not to mention PP proved the Marth vs Sheik MU isn't holding him back as a character. Seriously Umbreon and PP are the two (and of course M2k although he's never been one to focus on a ground game, throw in Cactuar too) to look to for Marth methodology. I think TheCrimonBlur gets it too although he is a tad more radical with his opinion. A good mindset to have is to make the game unplayable for your opponent and Marth can do this very well with his uthrow, uair, and they way he commands large amounts of space with his dashdance and range in general. I wish I could convey this better but essentially my opinion of Marth is identical to Umbreon's and has then been influenced positively by TheCrimsonBlur, Cactuar, and Dr. PP.Falco:Now Falco. While he does not posses the movement prowess of Fox he is great in very similar ways. Namely, offensively, similar to Fox he has absolutely great options. However Falco begins to edge him out for reasons stated above and the ease at which he can manifest advantageous situations via lasers and appropriate pressure strings. Falco makes up for his lack of horizontal speed (both on the ground and in the air) with lasers but operates in a way comparable to Fox in neutral through a different vehicle. I will say, however, that in the future if this game's meta is going to be developed further, proficient shield dropping will make Falco a worse character as he will not be able to demand an entire horizontal plane as easily. At that point, I could see Fox returning to #1 but who knows when or if that day will come. On the other hand, even that is questionable because Falco beats worse characters by a larger margin than Fox does (similar to Marth's low tier MUs versus Sheik's) so he may forever be "better" overall. I am having a hard time articulating this opinion because I feel like I am beating a dead horse at this point, Falco wins tournaments and Falco has been great for years already.Falcon:Don't feel like regurating my post, so here it is verbatim. Basically, I think Falcon is pretty solid. He should be exactly where he is.Puff/Peach:Not extremely educated on these characters but Puff fits the movement bill (sort of) and she has her x factor which isn't going anywhere. Her zoning game is still ridiculous and she can give every character in the game an extremely hard time. We all know what Peach can do, if Peach could beat Puff then I would put Peach above Puff on my list. Not too adamant about either character but I feel I got the placement right as I am not reinventing the wheel here.IC's:Wobbling helps them out, obviously not quite as good without wobbling because their stupidly hard grab/punish game is now affected by the stage and is easier to escape or for the grabber mess up the execution. (i.e. instead of 4 grabs being game [four wobbles = four stocks], say 6 grabs will be game because your opponent SDI'd out or you dropped a handoff once, or you got a grab on a platform/by the ledge etc. IC's only get so many chances to grab in a match and meta based around not getting grabbed.)Pikachu:What cast member can Pikachu completely not deal with other than Sheik? People even think he beats Marth (although I don't think that's true at all, but apparently he can do some good things) so he deserves this spot. He's had better results than the characters worse than him and even better than Ganon and Samus. He has a strong movement game, recovery, and edge guard game.Rest of list:Doc/Mario: pretty solidGanon: will always be a factor because he isn't THAT slow for how strong he isYL: gives floaties a hard time, probably has some more metagaming to doYoshi: see yoshi players, apparently he isn't god awful. Just not good at allRoy: has a that great dash dance, dtilt, and ground gameG&W: go play a serious G&W and tell me his fair and nair aren't the stupidest things ever. His dash dance is pretty solid as well.