Why I Think Diddy Goes Even With Marth
I've had a pretty quiet competitive year so far in 2009 as far as tournaments go, but I've been spending a great deal of time looking at alternate routes to advance the meta-game. I've been logging a lot of time at Smash-fests both big and small, experimenting with different facets of the game and getting my *** kicked with them until I make them work for me.
The latest avenue that I have been exploring with Diddy Kong is his mid-range game. I touched on the idea a bit before in the most recent thread discussing the ROB match-up, but discovering the strength of Diddy's ability to safely zone many characters from a defensive posture while still being able to apply offensive pressure at the drop of a dime has been personally groundbreaking to me.
The idea here is that you essentially remain far enough outside of the reach of your opponent's go-to attacks, but just close enough to where you are still able to harass and provoke your opponent, bait specific attacks and accordingly punish his or her cool-down. As your opponent inches closer, you readjust your spacing to still remain outside of his range, until you have prepped your setups and are ready to bait an attack, draw out a mistake, deal the maximum damage possible, and retreat.
This is different from traditional camping in a number of ways:
- you are still engaging your opponent
- you are not posting up on the opposite side of the stage aimlessly trying to force an approach with popgun
- you are not manipulating stage-specific terrain to actually discourage engagement
- you are still in close enough proximity where your opponent will always feel, for one reason or another, mentally compelled to approach
- even your method of retreat in order to reset your spacing can be deployed as bait
I feel that the fourth point is especially crucial to my argument in favor of the strength of Diddy's mid-range game. As long as you are the one forcing the other character's approach, you will almost always be the one who is in positional control and advantage.
I recorded exactly seven friendlies against KOS-MOS' Marth a couple of weeks ago, and they are all linked in chronological order. I feel that my performance against his Marth gradually improved as the night wore on as I experimented with the rigors and limits of Diddy's mid-range game. Here are some free-association thoughts that I had about that night (i.e. more bullets!):
- Marth is most effective in the match-up against Diddy Kong when he is inside of our space while we are unarmed. Even when we are armed with a banana peel, his aerial attacks have very large grab ranges and are actually quite proficient at snatching them out of the air. My renewed focus in this match-up deals with, obviously, staying just beyond this range until it is safe to attack.
- When proper mid-range bait games and retreats are applied, Marth literally has no other option but to approach. It is well-documented that Marth usually has a decently high success rate with being able to approach characters who force his hand despite not having a projectile of his own, but if he is zoned correctly, his options can limited solely to his safest and sometimes only choice: F-air.
- Marth's F-air, for all intents and purposes, is a relatively reliable method of approach. It has instantaneous start-up and is virtually unobservable cool-down, especially when it is fast-fallen. It is not, however, 100% safe against Diddy's shield. SHed F-airs require a really precise degree of both horizontal and vertical spacing in order for it to be unpunishable against a grounded opponent. In many cases, this isn't even the type of F-air that you wll have to deal with. F-airing is generally an attack that is the cornerstone of great and mediocre Marth players alike, and it can be baited and punished with surprising ease.
Actually expecting Marth to SH F-air and prepping a method of counterattacking long before hand makes containing and thwarting his approaches much, much simpler – if if you don't have a banana peel.
- Although Marth's rush-down game is quite effective, its utility is diminished somewhat against Diddy Kong. Banana peels are amazing at buying a few precious moments of time in temporarily discouraging his approach or pursuit, and these traps can even be set up while Diddy is running away. My go-to method for retreat is usually a smashed Monkey Flip over my opponent whenever I'm cornered with a banana peel, and then I will cross up with either a Z-dropped banana peel or a thrown peel in the opposite direction after I have baited an approach.
Additionally, Diddy has a handful of great options to punish Marth's pursuit during feint retreats: his foxtrot, canceling your dash with shield, reversed dash attack and reversed Diddy Kick or Diddy Hump all allow him to change directions and reverse his momentum at the drop of a hat. Even well-spaced F-tilts in the opposite direction while you are in the middle of walking or running away becomes a viable resource for stuffing Marth's F-air approach.
- ADHD has popularized in recent months an advanced, über-gay camping tactic with Diddy, involving firing off the Peanut Popgun in one hand and holding a banana peel in the other...while standing behind your second banana peel. In this position, Diddy Kong is almost completely safe, and is actually quite instrumental in forcing opponents to disengage from his or her aggression, and resetting positions back to neutral. This works quite well as a tempo breaker if you feel you have temporarily lost control of a match.
I find, however, that you are not armed with a banana peel, opponents generally feel that is actually safer to be aggressive. Simply standing behind a banana peel while charging or shooting the popgun will, more often than not, compel a number of characters to take to the air, try to jump over the banana peel, knock the peanut out of its trajectory and try to stab you with an aerial. All that needs to be done in order to turn this into a bait tactic is to simply cancel your popgun charge and shield, or shield in-between peanut blasts. From here, you can shield-grab your opponent, or simply let them slip on the banana peel on the ground in front of you.
Sometimes, opponents will just simply try and walk up to the banana peel in front of you, try to pick it up, and slip. LOL. Either way, they will immediately lose positional advantage.
Other banana-less tactics I use to draw out attacks are running shields. Marths in general will most likely try to F-air you or even use Dolphin Slash. *shrug* There's just something about a Diddy that doesn't have a banana peel that looks so enticing for people to want to attack without thinking.
These are all tactics that I started to cook up against Roy_R at WHOBO, and they were actually mostly refined in my *ss-beat sessions against KOS-MOS' Peach over the course of the last several weeks. All of these mid-range baiting tactics revolved around punishing any cool-down on Peach's attacks that I might have been able to expose. My efforts were only modestly successful in the regard that I kept me from being three-stocked twice.
Moving from the Peach match-up and applying these newly revised tactics against KM's Marth, however, yielded a high degree of success. I found myself in significantly less bad situations where I was caught unarmed and zoned by Marth's dominant aerial game, and I found quickly that I even actually had a great deal more mobility than Marth whenever I manipulated certain scenarios to arise. Best of all,
I was actually able to punish cool-down on virtually every single one of his moves once I baited them. This was the key difference between why I currently do so badly against KM's Peach as opposed to his Marth: Marth actually has just enough cool-down animations on most of his moves for me to capitalize on.
How ironic is it that I have to get wrecked at a Peach to realize that Marth actually isn't bad...at all?
This series of seven matches are the best recorded performances I have ever had against a high-level Marth in general, and I think that's saying a lot, considering I used to get routinely 2- and 3-stocked by both Roy and KM.
Does this mean that the match-up is actually easy? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. Recovering can still be a bit of a hassle, and I generally still have to approach Marths with a cautionary poise; otherwise I will be eating steel for the majority of the match. I'm still working out which aspects of my mid-range camping game actually works, since my attempts usually got stuffed if I stayed in one spot too long. Oh yeah, and I still occasionally eat sweet-spotted F-smashes.
None of these tactics are necessarily fool-proof in the Marth match-up, and there are certainly things I can still iron out. At the moment though, it feels good to be able to consistently roll out victories against a character I considered one of my worst match-ups, once upon a time.
I think it's safe to say that Marth no longer strikes fear in my heart. There really isn't anything to be afraid of, frankly.
