Edge-Cancelled Turnips: A comprehensive guide on an unexplored Peach technique

[eatthischair]

What are Edge-cancelled turnips?

Edge-cancelled turnips were first mentioned in 2006 by Quetzalcoatl's extensive turnip guide[1]

Here's what he said: “Off-the-edge turnip: Run towards the edge of the stage or a platform and pull a turnip, if you did it correctly, you pulled a turnip in midair and can follow up with the edge guard.”

Although this was the first mention of them, it seems there has been very little frame data published on this, or any extensive research at all.

In this post, I will explain how to perform them, their uses, and what this means for Peach as a character.

How do you perform them?

There are four ways to pull turnips:

• The first one can be done during a fast walk. You can enter fast walk 12 frames after pressing lightly on the control stick. (Meleeheads please confirm). You can not pull turnips out of WalkSlow or WalkMiddle because you do not carry enough momentum from your walk for it to be edge-cancelled. This technique is a one frame window.

FastWalk Turnips should generally be used if you are too close to the edge of the platform to enter Run.

You can also pull a turnips out of a run. Although this is a 3 frame window, each frame will carry over a different amount of momentum. For consistency, I used the left battlefield platform and performed a backwards roll from the right side, so peach would become airborne on the 25th frame
[Note: the names in themselves have no significance]

• Type A If you pull the turnip on frame 23, or two frames before you become airborne, you land a bit left of the center of battlefield.
• Type B If you pull the turnip on frame 24, you land almost exactly in the center

• Type C If you pull the turnip on frame 25, when you should technically be entering Fall, you land to the right of the center.

It appears that your input on the control stick during her animation does not affect how far she will go.

Peach can also float before she hits the ground after any turnip on any stage except yoshis, where she can float only if she does a type A turnip.

• Retaining turnips:
  The grounded turnip animation is 29 frames long. As most people know, if peach is hit before the animation ends, she will not keep the turnip.
  
  However, if Peach edge cancels the turnip, she has a chance to retain it. The formula for retaining items after getting hit if HitboxDamage/60[7] However, the animation will still be 29 frames long
  
  For each test, I continued to have peach 25 frames away from the right edge of the platform, with Marth starting his up tilt on frame 19
  
  [I apologize if the editing appears choppy, I have no clue how to do TAS so I had to hold two controllers to perform these tests.]
  
  It seems she keeps the turnip if she is hit when she is airborne, not necessarily the frame in the animation. This means she can keep the turnip on frame 2 if she pulls it on frame 25.
  but can only keep the turnip on frame 3 if she pulls it on frame 24

Application: [note: take all examples with a grain of salt]

There are a few uses that I thought of immediately, but I am positive we will find more.

• The first one is following up after hitting the opponent
• You can also use this to pull a turnip while you are escaping pressure
• Speculation You could also use this to punish turnip challenges at low percent such as a Marth’s non-tippered fair, Falcon’s first hit of nair (not positive about this one) or a fox’s weak nair while they are still in lag either through z-drops or throws. It is also possible you could z-drop the turnip, aerial them into the turnip, then aerial again.

What this means: Although this may seem like a gimmick at first, you can force a sort of rock, paper, scissors with Type A, B or C turnips and non edge-cancelled turnips. Meaning if your opponent thinks you will pull a Type C turnip, you can pull a regular turnip and avoid the punish. This can also reduce the reactability of turnip pulls. However, some moves such as Falcon’s upair can cover all 3 main types of turnip pulls as well as the stationary turnip. Since it puts out no hitbox, and leaves you in lag, you would generally only do this when you would otherwise be moving toward or away from your opponent. This helps [but doesn’t get rid of] the vulnerability of turnip pulls, and means she has a bit more frame leniency when following up at mid-high percents. This also means falco’s lasers have to be extremely well timed in order to challenge the turnip pull.

The main problem with edge-cancelled turnips is their difficulty. It’s fairly easy when you are looking at yourself, but during a match you will have to use your peripheral vision, making it much harder. However these are not impossible in the slightest, and I truly believe any Peach player worth their salt nopunintended will try to incorporate this in their game.

Tl;dr Peach top fox /s

Thoughts? Questions? Let me know in the comments!

 

[Vestboy_Myst]

nice work eatthischair