There's effectively two phases to a given round in Melty Blood. The first is in what is commonly called neutral, where neither player is either directly forcing a situation or is forced into one. There is a lot of maneuvering for position, trying to get into spaces and vectors that are advantageous for your character. This is due to how any single hit in the ground or in the air can possibly lead to a full combo followed by a knockdown, where the advantageous player then has additional leverage. In particular, any counter hit in the air results in a stun that is unrecoverable until you touch the ground -- it doesn't matter how weak the attack that hit you is. So you need to be careful in regards to your attack selection, but at the same time you have to get aggressive in order to get those hits in the first place. Remember, you have a lot of air movement options -- a forwards or backwards dash, a jump, and Crescent and Half can also dodge in the air. These, plus some more subtle things (such as momentum conservation in dashes, air attacks slowing down momentum, directional influence in neutral jumps) can give you a lot of possible approaches. You can get from nearly anywhere on the screen to nearly anywhere on the screen at any point in time -- you just need to know where you want to go and have the skill to put yourself in exactly the right position.Lets take a look at this in a more practical example. You are going to spend a lot of time in the air moving around, but most characters have relatively few air attacks -- so you really should learn the properties of them. For an example, we are going to look at C-Kohakus air normals. Here these are the three air attacks, right before they start hitting and their first active frame. Green boxes are where you can get hit and red boxes are where you can hit other people (and the white box is for character collisions, so that people just dont pass through each other constantly).Jump A (j.A):Jump B (j.B):Jump C (j.C):j.A is her fastest attack, but it clearly has the least amount of range. Its generally something you dont want to throw out unless the opponent is close, but it is cancellable into itself so it is somewhat spammable (whereas if you miss with the other moves, theres going to be a fair amount of recovery). Its practical range is extended a bit if you are using it for counter-poking, though (take a look at the extended hurtboxes on the other moves -- more on that in a bit). j.B has a sweet spot about two character widths away and above her, where the latter half of the broom and broomhead are. See all of that red with no hurtbox? If you can put yourself in a position where that is where your opponent is and you use that attack, you will win nearly every time. However, if the opponent is directly parallel to you, its possible to lose if they stick an attack out first, or if they have an attack with a disjoint enough hitbox to hit her without getting hit themselves. Her j.C looks like it would be good for hitting people below her -- and it is. However, the hitbox actually travels along the lower half of the brooms arc, from her hip to the broomhead. So while its intended to hit below her,Ultimately, its about learning the properties of your attacks and what the best positions are for them -- and then being able to put yourself in the correct position. Heres one example:This looks like it would have been a good position to user a j.B for the Kohaku on the left. And thats understandable! However, it turns out shes just a hair far away and because of thatThe extended hurtbox becomes a problem and Kohaku on the left here ends up getting counter-hit. Welp. One other thing to notice is that the hurtbox is extended here a fair bit -- if she does absolutely nothing here, the other Kohakus j.C is not even going to come close to hitting her. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to really do nothing.