I had three realization today

Melee (or Smash, rather) is one of the few fighting games where the stage plays a large role Stage Striking is pretty predictable Even very good players use random stage select when “training”

These, together, don’t add up. The frequency of tournament matches between Fox and Jigglypuff is either Battlefield, Final Destination or Dream Land more than double that of Pokemon Stadium or Fountain of Dreams — and therefore you shouldn’t practice them evenly! Skill on particular matchups on particular stages can give you a marginal advantage.

West getting a free stock based on stage knowledge

I didn’t find a good tool out there that would give you breakdown of tournament matches between characters so I went ahead and made one. The proof of concept can be found here:

There are many things I’d like to add to it (more on that below) but the main drawback to it now is raw data. I added three data’s top eights (Norcal Regionals 2015, Apex 2014, Apex 2015) but that is not nearly enough to base a training regiment on. Using the form below you can add data yourself — all I ask is you indicate which tournament it is from (so I can removed redundancies) and only add it from tournaments with skilled players from 2013 on (to reflect a current meta).

Notes on the data entry form

Order doesn’t matter for player one to player two

There is not a good way to indicate that a player did a runback on a stage. You have submit another form to select a stage twice (sorry)

Notes on the use of this

In a near-20XX perspective this may force more stage diversity among top players

This gets worse as you get into Bo5 sets — but it is a fair representation of the tournament as a whole

To actually implement this I’d try to get a “rhythm” of stages. Something like BF, BF, PS, PS, DL, DL, FD, YS, FoD or what have you