Your right. Falco honestly doesn't need a secondary. Pikachu match-up is completely doable if you can avoid that stupid grab. ICs themselves are rare picks for people and if you learn it, you can **** people who think it's an auto win vs falco. Stages themselves take only time to learn to adapt to as well.
The thing is that picking up a secondary can still help you when you are not extremely talented with your character yet. Certain match-ups often times are taxing or not as easy as you might like it. Take Falco vs MK or Snake. These are two match-ups that Falco can easily handle, but I often times feel safer going with Snake than falco. One of the major reasons is that Snake is much more able body about taking hits and dishing it out. One mistake with Falco early can really set him back and make it difficult to take the match back. Snake on the other hand might really only need a single good stock with living to high percents and deal out a few hits to really take the match back or get a good lead.
There is also the tactical advantage of using another character people might not be familiar with to help gain you the advantage. A bit of an outlier, but take armada vs hungrybox at pound 5. Young Link as a surprise counter to jiggs turned out to be pretty effective. While people have told me countless times that at higher levels of play match-up experience is rather negligible (people should have MU exp). At that low/mid level of play though, switching characters can hold a bit more power. I remember a few times where I had close matches with snake/falco, but when I went DDD, it was almost close to a blow out match.
Yeah I mostly agree with you. I just wanted to point out that in a discussion about suitable secondaries, answering 'none' was a valid option.
The thing about Pikachu though, is that people are too caught up in 'if pikachu gets the grab', but what if we get the grab? The first thing I always say to that is, does the grab kill? The answer is no. And after that I say, so what's different about our grab? Looking at the facts, the grab attributes in this match up are like so:
Pikachu
- 1 grab = 100+ %
- 1st grab must start at 21+%. (We can easily camp an edge until these percents)
- Can't start at 52+% (someone correct me)
- Doesn't kill
- Doesn't stop Falco from landing his chain grab (this is important)
Falco
- 1 grab = 60-70+% assuming correct follow up, potentially more with a hard read
- 1st grab can start at 0, no limitations beyond recklessly attacking and losing our opening
- Leads to tech chase/edge guards (honestly there's potential for kills here against a character like Pikachu)
- If landed, stop's Pikachu's chain grab. This is important because what everybody thinks makes the match up for Pikachu is his chain grab. IT IS PREVENTABLE. If we land our grab, they're OVER THE 50 ODD PERCENT THAT THEIR CHAIN GRAB STARTS. Meaning? We can use platforms to platform camp. Assuming proper planking, the chance of them landing the grab on a platform is negligible. They are forced to lose the chain grab or be timed out. And during this, we can rack up chip damage by attempting to predict/read their choices to rack up damage. Probably won't get much, but considering that the damage on us we 'give' them is less than half they'd otherwise get....
Outside of that I think Falco has it over Pikachu.
I also think that Marth/Falco is even.