EmptySky00
Banned via Warnings
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2012
- Messages
- 804
- 3DS FC
- 1263-6981-9999
It's generally understood that Sheik is a very difficult matchup for Link. The thing that makes it feel particularly horrendous for me is that the only good Sheik I’ve ever had to play against is Umbreon—currently one of the best at the character. I’d been playing against him frequently a year or so ago until he moved to Texas to meme it up and **** PM Roy. I’d practiced a lot since then, and he returned for a visit this summer. I sat down to play against him with grim anticipation and gave it my all only to get immediately and savagely slaughtered. There was a crushing realization that my entire year of practice had yielded no margin against him.
I believe the main issue was that I didn’t really have a theory for how to beat Sheik. I understood some of the weaknesses of her character, but didn’t figure out how to apply my character’s tools to overcome the matchup. However, as the night went on I began to gain more and more margin until some of our matches were much closer (think occasional last stock last hit with relatively frequent 2 stocks with moderate damage—not exactly a winning record, but far better than I’d ever performed against him in my life). From this, I fine-tuned my strategy and put together a theory of how I’m supposed to play the matchup and I want to write down my thoughts so I can push the information further in the hopes of beating this guy someday. So basically I’m going to delineate why I think the matchup is difficult and what specific areas I think I need to aim towards to win.
Sheik’s Weaknesses
1. Sheik lacks a good approach option to traverse neutral. She can throw needles to try and circumvent this by forcing her opponent to approach into her defender’s advantage, but her air speed is incredibly poor and she completely lacks a dash dance so her neutral is limited to that degree. On the other side, she does have an extended range of threat due to boost grab, and her moves are relatively fast and safe (generally being around frame 5).
2. Sheik’s recovery is pretty exploitable if you know how to edge guard it. A lot of the kills you will be getting off of her are going to be from edge hogs and the like. However, after frame 18 or so she’s invincible and if she uses survival DI well and can employ the explosion hitbox at the beginning to threaten you off of the ledge if you don’t refresh your invincibility properly. Good sheik players will get tricky with their recovery, but exploiting this is a large key to beating her.
3. Sheik doesn’t really do a lot of damage. She basically isn’t trying to play the damage game with you, but rather get you offstage and kill you at 30%. This makes her punishment game very devastating, but also means she doesn’t really want to trade with you or be forced to kill you outright at 150%. She doesn’t get hard Marthritis since she has X into Fair to get kills, but this is still relevant.
4. Sheik is generally soft to crouch cancel. Her moves don’t have a lot of knockback and break crouch cancel fairly late. If you exploit CC it knocks her out of position and basically acts as a trade. This is also useful for getting her out of CC range so you can start getting stronger conversions.
5. Sheik’s combo weight is not very good. I was routinely comboing Umbreon for 90% or more off of a grab. One thing he says repeatedly that I try to apply as much as possible is “When you get her you have to kill her.” Opportunities are hard to leverage, and if you drop a single opportunity for a kill you could be forfeiting the entire game. Optimize your punishment and hit as hard as you possible can.
This ties into the previous one, but Sheik’s aerial mobility is among the worst in the game. Link also has the Uair Forever Combo wherein he Uairs Sheik forever because she keeps wanting to get to the ground but there’s always a Master Sword in the way.
Where Link Can Struggle
1. Sheik can punish Link really hard. Her grabs are amazing against his weight since they’re weight independent and don’t slow down when throwing heavier characters such as Link, and her edgeguarding can absolutely annihilate him and drop stocks like nobody’s business. This was especially hard to overcome because Umbreon’s ledge game is outright absurd and I quickly lost any marginal lead I was able to gain.
2. Sheik’s moves generally have a faster startup than Link’s, so when she’s on top of you it can be hard to throw her off. This might be an Umbreon-specific thing (his reaction time is stupid), but I had the issue of him beating out my attacks by challenging the startup.
3. When Sheik has you pinned, it can be very hard to escape, and keeping her out in the first place can be difficult.
4. Sheik can duck under Link's grab. Have fun.
My Strategy For The Matchup
Overall, I want to try and play the long game against Sheik. Link is pretty heavy and he can take raw hits very well. As I’ve established, Sheik is very good at edgeguarding Link, so she can drop stocks really easily and bypass his weight in a way. I specifically try to avoid situations where she can easily edgeguard me, and if I’m being edgeguarded I try to recover in a way where even if she hits me I’ll get another chance to get her to mess up her edgeguard so I can reset to neutral. This essentially entails avoiding being in the line of sight for needles, and not getting Fair’d or sweetspot Bair’d. Sometimes this entails recovering low and hugging the stage, or coming in higher and trying to get onto the stage. It’s generally incredibly hard to recover against a good Sheik and the correct answer is hard for me to grasp even when I manage to find it. Overall, figuring out how to recover against her is integral to not quickly losing the margin you gain from punishing her.
I've also found that one of the hardest moves for Sheik to challenge is perfect Fair. It's +1 on block, and it forces her to respect your moves afterwards if you space it properly. On the other side of the coin, Link doesn't really have anything to beat Sheik's perfect Fair either which is also +Unpunishable on block. My Link generally uses perfect Fair a lot for zoning and pressure, and Umbreon specifically says he has trouble dealing with it.
In general, going back to the long game, Link deals a lot more damage than Sheik does. If you can trade hits with her (by crouch cancel or other means) or beat out her moves with disjoint, She gets close to dying very quickly. Your neutral early on should probably be geared towards chipping out damage safely to get her out of CC range. You don’t want her to CC you into a grab or something else, and it’s obviously a lot harder to get conversions via launchers into Uair if she can CC you. Boomerang can be used to cut off movement and make it harder for her to win neutral and obviously bombs can be used in a similar way. The obvious advice here is to limit your use when she can threaten you and only use these attacks safely. This is basically just good practice, but I often fell into the trap of desperately wanting to keep her away from me by putting boomerangs and bombs betwixt me and her, and that repeatedly got me killed.
Sheik is pretty soft to CC herself, as I previously stated, and exploiting this well forces her to funnel her punishment game into grabs and makes it even harder for her to get conversions. To exploit this, you want to limit jumping as much as possible and generally hold down while you’re in the middle of an animation to incur ASDI and avoid getting launched from a whiff punish. Also, you want to be aware that a lot of her moves have very low endlag so sometimes I found CC Dsmash to be difficult to land since it’s frame 7.
If Sheik manages to get in on you in neutral, I suggest exercising patience and focusing on resetting to neutral more than anything. She has a lot of frame traps on shield, such as AC Fair into jab or whatever. Link’s OoS game isn’t very good so you want to be very selective with your counter-attacks. Messing up in your defense such as trying to shield grab her Fair or something gives her free grabs and free opportunities to kill you, which again she is very good at.
But what happens when you come out of your turtle shell and actually get her back? Well, in short, you want to Uair a lot. You want to know how your throws work against her, such as when to Dthrow or Uthrow. Uthrow can briefly at very low percents (but not 0%) combo into Utilt into Uair into etc. You can Empty Combo (Dthrow Dair) Sheik at roughly 110-120%. With this in mind, grabs are very good punishment tools--if you grab Sheik, she’s definitely not going to be at CC percents afterwards. That being said, Link’s grab is pretty bad and his conversions into it are dubious at best (Bair - Grab, Jab - Grab, etc.) and are thwarted by proper defensive play (CC, buffer dodge) but you can more or less cheese them out sometimes. The biggest issue with this is if you miss Sheik gets a free grab or whatever else she wants. My recurring method for getting a grab is baiting out a spot dodge and then grabbing on reaction. Occasionally if I see that Sheik doesn’t crouch my jab, I feel confident enough that I can get go for it, but against Umbreon that’s a big if since all that asshole does is hold down.
This part is obvious, but you want to refine your edgeguarding against Sheik. A lot of the kills you’re going to be getting on her are going to be from gimps. Sheik’s up B has invincibility from frame 18 onward until she reappears. This means that unless you can hit her on startup, you usually just want to grab the ledge. If she’s close enough to hit you with the explosion, you need to time your ledge invincibility and getup accordingly, and since she can ledge snap with the beginning this can be a little bit tricky. In most situations, you want to make sure you stay on the ledge. Going for a hard read predicting her to go onstage will lose you far more kills than it will gain you. Hold the ledge and react to where she goes. She has 30 frames of landing lag not including the time it takes her to fall to stage if she isn’t level. You have tons of time to react to that. Your standard response to that will be ledgehop Dair or Fair if they recover further onto the stage.
I believe the main issue was that I didn’t really have a theory for how to beat Sheik. I understood some of the weaknesses of her character, but didn’t figure out how to apply my character’s tools to overcome the matchup. However, as the night went on I began to gain more and more margin until some of our matches were much closer (think occasional last stock last hit with relatively frequent 2 stocks with moderate damage—not exactly a winning record, but far better than I’d ever performed against him in my life). From this, I fine-tuned my strategy and put together a theory of how I’m supposed to play the matchup and I want to write down my thoughts so I can push the information further in the hopes of beating this guy someday. So basically I’m going to delineate why I think the matchup is difficult and what specific areas I think I need to aim towards to win.
Sheik’s Weaknesses
1. Sheik lacks a good approach option to traverse neutral. She can throw needles to try and circumvent this by forcing her opponent to approach into her defender’s advantage, but her air speed is incredibly poor and she completely lacks a dash dance so her neutral is limited to that degree. On the other side, she does have an extended range of threat due to boost grab, and her moves are relatively fast and safe (generally being around frame 5).
2. Sheik’s recovery is pretty exploitable if you know how to edge guard it. A lot of the kills you will be getting off of her are going to be from edge hogs and the like. However, after frame 18 or so she’s invincible and if she uses survival DI well and can employ the explosion hitbox at the beginning to threaten you off of the ledge if you don’t refresh your invincibility properly. Good sheik players will get tricky with their recovery, but exploiting this is a large key to beating her.
3. Sheik doesn’t really do a lot of damage. She basically isn’t trying to play the damage game with you, but rather get you offstage and kill you at 30%. This makes her punishment game very devastating, but also means she doesn’t really want to trade with you or be forced to kill you outright at 150%. She doesn’t get hard Marthritis since she has X into Fair to get kills, but this is still relevant.
4. Sheik is generally soft to crouch cancel. Her moves don’t have a lot of knockback and break crouch cancel fairly late. If you exploit CC it knocks her out of position and basically acts as a trade. This is also useful for getting her out of CC range so you can start getting stronger conversions.
5. Sheik’s combo weight is not very good. I was routinely comboing Umbreon for 90% or more off of a grab. One thing he says repeatedly that I try to apply as much as possible is “When you get her you have to kill her.” Opportunities are hard to leverage, and if you drop a single opportunity for a kill you could be forfeiting the entire game. Optimize your punishment and hit as hard as you possible can.
This ties into the previous one, but Sheik’s aerial mobility is among the worst in the game. Link also has the Uair Forever Combo wherein he Uairs Sheik forever because she keeps wanting to get to the ground but there’s always a Master Sword in the way.
Where Link Can Struggle
1. Sheik can punish Link really hard. Her grabs are amazing against his weight since they’re weight independent and don’t slow down when throwing heavier characters such as Link, and her edgeguarding can absolutely annihilate him and drop stocks like nobody’s business. This was especially hard to overcome because Umbreon’s ledge game is outright absurd and I quickly lost any marginal lead I was able to gain.
2. Sheik’s moves generally have a faster startup than Link’s, so when she’s on top of you it can be hard to throw her off. This might be an Umbreon-specific thing (his reaction time is stupid), but I had the issue of him beating out my attacks by challenging the startup.
3. When Sheik has you pinned, it can be very hard to escape, and keeping her out in the first place can be difficult.
4. Sheik can duck under Link's grab. Have fun.
My Strategy For The Matchup
Overall, I want to try and play the long game against Sheik. Link is pretty heavy and he can take raw hits very well. As I’ve established, Sheik is very good at edgeguarding Link, so she can drop stocks really easily and bypass his weight in a way. I specifically try to avoid situations where she can easily edgeguard me, and if I’m being edgeguarded I try to recover in a way where even if she hits me I’ll get another chance to get her to mess up her edgeguard so I can reset to neutral. This essentially entails avoiding being in the line of sight for needles, and not getting Fair’d or sweetspot Bair’d. Sometimes this entails recovering low and hugging the stage, or coming in higher and trying to get onto the stage. It’s generally incredibly hard to recover against a good Sheik and the correct answer is hard for me to grasp even when I manage to find it. Overall, figuring out how to recover against her is integral to not quickly losing the margin you gain from punishing her.
I've also found that one of the hardest moves for Sheik to challenge is perfect Fair. It's +1 on block, and it forces her to respect your moves afterwards if you space it properly. On the other side of the coin, Link doesn't really have anything to beat Sheik's perfect Fair either which is also +Unpunishable on block. My Link generally uses perfect Fair a lot for zoning and pressure, and Umbreon specifically says he has trouble dealing with it.
In general, going back to the long game, Link deals a lot more damage than Sheik does. If you can trade hits with her (by crouch cancel or other means) or beat out her moves with disjoint, She gets close to dying very quickly. Your neutral early on should probably be geared towards chipping out damage safely to get her out of CC range. You don’t want her to CC you into a grab or something else, and it’s obviously a lot harder to get conversions via launchers into Uair if she can CC you. Boomerang can be used to cut off movement and make it harder for her to win neutral and obviously bombs can be used in a similar way. The obvious advice here is to limit your use when she can threaten you and only use these attacks safely. This is basically just good practice, but I often fell into the trap of desperately wanting to keep her away from me by putting boomerangs and bombs betwixt me and her, and that repeatedly got me killed.
Sheik is pretty soft to CC herself, as I previously stated, and exploiting this well forces her to funnel her punishment game into grabs and makes it even harder for her to get conversions. To exploit this, you want to limit jumping as much as possible and generally hold down while you’re in the middle of an animation to incur ASDI and avoid getting launched from a whiff punish. Also, you want to be aware that a lot of her moves have very low endlag so sometimes I found CC Dsmash to be difficult to land since it’s frame 7.
If Sheik manages to get in on you in neutral, I suggest exercising patience and focusing on resetting to neutral more than anything. She has a lot of frame traps on shield, such as AC Fair into jab or whatever. Link’s OoS game isn’t very good so you want to be very selective with your counter-attacks. Messing up in your defense such as trying to shield grab her Fair or something gives her free grabs and free opportunities to kill you, which again she is very good at.
But what happens when you come out of your turtle shell and actually get her back? Well, in short, you want to Uair a lot. You want to know how your throws work against her, such as when to Dthrow or Uthrow. Uthrow can briefly at very low percents (but not 0%) combo into Utilt into Uair into etc. You can Empty Combo (Dthrow Dair) Sheik at roughly 110-120%. With this in mind, grabs are very good punishment tools--if you grab Sheik, she’s definitely not going to be at CC percents afterwards. That being said, Link’s grab is pretty bad and his conversions into it are dubious at best (Bair - Grab, Jab - Grab, etc.) and are thwarted by proper defensive play (CC, buffer dodge) but you can more or less cheese them out sometimes. The biggest issue with this is if you miss Sheik gets a free grab or whatever else she wants. My recurring method for getting a grab is baiting out a spot dodge and then grabbing on reaction. Occasionally if I see that Sheik doesn’t crouch my jab, I feel confident enough that I can get go for it, but against Umbreon that’s a big if since all that asshole does is hold down.
This part is obvious, but you want to refine your edgeguarding against Sheik. A lot of the kills you’re going to be getting on her are going to be from gimps. Sheik’s up B has invincibility from frame 18 onward until she reappears. This means that unless you can hit her on startup, you usually just want to grab the ledge. If she’s close enough to hit you with the explosion, you need to time your ledge invincibility and getup accordingly, and since she can ledge snap with the beginning this can be a little bit tricky. In most situations, you want to make sure you stay on the ledge. Going for a hard read predicting her to go onstage will lose you far more kills than it will gain you. Hold the ledge and react to where she goes. She has 30 frames of landing lag not including the time it takes her to fall to stage if she isn’t level. You have tons of time to react to that. Your standard response to that will be ledgehop Dair or Fair if they recover further onto the stage.
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