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, Sheik, Samus, Peach, and Falco. The last character in this series is Fox!

Fox had the most reported data points to analyze by far. There were 2484 games analyzed in these match-ups. Similar to Falco, Fox doesn’t have match-ups that are largely in his favor. While Samus appears to be Fox’s best match-up, his win percent is only at 55%. However, while it appears that Fox doesn’t have any match-ups that he wins by a large margin, he also doesn’t have a match-up where he is at a huge disadvantage as well. The data implies that Falco is his hardest match-up, but a 47% win-rate suggests that the match-up is closer to even.

I asked 12-year veteran Fox main Colbol what his thoughts were on the data, and if these stats are truly reflective for the best character in Melee.

I think Fox is the best character in the game and his character data is pretty interesting.

In both the overall and Top-100-only data sets, Samus is one of his highest win-rates. This is surprising to me because I think Samus is one of the more tricky match-ups for Fox. She is relatively uncommon and has a few gimmicks that Fox players need to know how to deal with to truly be successful against her, such as her up+B out of shield option and her effectiveness at crouch canceling (thanks to how heavy she is). It’s because of these great defensive options that you can’t be as aggressive against Samus as you would be against someone like Falco or Captain Falcon.

Marth is another interesting character in this data. In the overall data, he is Fox’s 2nd highest win-rate. This drops to his worst match-up when we look at only the Top 100 players. For as long as I can remember I’ve thought that this was an even match-up, not to mention one of the most fun to play. At all levels of play, Fox takes a 55/45 win-rate, but once we get to Top 100 players only, it gets reversed to be in Marth’s favor. I think this comes down to a recurring truth in Melee, which I will elaborate on. Fox is the most commonly played character, probably because he is the best. This means that he is also the most played against character. So more people are good against Fox compared to how the Foxes are against x, where x is Marth in this scenario. So, it’s a great match up with lots of intricacies. But at the top 100 level, the Marths know the Fox match-up more than the Foxes know the Marth match-up.

Jigglypuff and Peach are two more floaty, defensive characters (similar to Samus) that can be hard for Fox players to deal with, so I’m not super surprised that they have pretty good winrates against Fox. I was expecting the data for Samus to be more like that of Jigglypuff and Peach. They all require the Fox player to be much more patient and defensive, and while he can play this role well, it’s usually his speed and aggression that attracts players to want to main him, so they have to change how they play completely to better combat these characters.

Last, but not least, is Falco. When I think of Falco, I think of one of his most defining features: his outstanding combo game. Who can he combo the hardest? Fastfallers. Fastfallers are also more likely to approach or fight more, on average. Because of things like this I think that, for most Falcos, their best match-ups are the fastfallers. Falco’s combos on fastfallers are relatively straightforward, easy to execute, and devastating. Fox has equally devastating punishes on Falco, but they aren’t as straightforward or obvious as Falco’s. I feel that’s something that Fox players need to get better at in order to compete with Falco’s punish game. Falco also has his laser which is one of the the best projectiles in the game, if not the best. There are definitely ways to beat laser or get around it, but it’s hard for newer players to get a grasp on, and a huge hurdle in their journeys to getting good that they must overcome.