Need some advice in the Sheik MU.

[jkenney1]

Sup folks? Name's Jack, falco player from Illinois. Nice to meet y'all.

Unfortunately, I feel like I don't have as many tools to win the Sheik MU as I do vs Fox, Marth, and Falcon. I end up shooting an ass-bunch of lasers, and using plain shine combos till I get her offstage. Then, I'll do a shine turnaround dair from the ledge if she up Bs to the ledge, and punish with bair if she goes to a side platform.

Now that's all well and good, and I can usually get by, but I still feel almost helpless in this matchup. I've read the matchup thread in the stickies, but I feel like I wasn't able to glean much useful information from it.

Grab punishes don't feel ideal. I'm able to land laser->grab, and from there I'll usually upthrow bair, or maybe upthrow shine instant nair at lower %s to get stage control. Still, this just feels like my regular falco stuff.

Now, I'd like to hear any advice you guys have in this matchup. I've been eliminated by Sheiks in my last few tournaments (albeit as falcon, facepalm). So now I'm going back to falco, and I'm itching to exact my revenge.

Thanks!

EDIT: oh yeah, I didn't include anything about stages. Honesty, I have no ideas here. I just want to go to the stages I'm comfortable on. My preferences would probably be FD and Dream Land, then battlefield. I'm aware that PS is good for falco in this matchup, but I wouldn't feel as confident. And yoshis and FoD would probably just be bad news for me.

 

[Oskurito]

This is all about who gets the most momentun, sheik will try to tech chase you, and combo with f-tilt, fair, dash attack and whatnot, on the other hand, you should combo her to high% and or setup and edgeguard and go for the kill.

Bait her with a lots of dash dancing, wavedashing, I think your mobility is one of the most important things in this game, this is the way you can create oppenings for combos. Also, don't forget to shoot her, make sure to use f-tilt and jabs to mess up her grab approaches.

Basically if you can bait an attack or grab via dash dance then you can punish with delayed nair/dair shine and combo from there. Is all about getting those combos; seriously, if your combos suck you're not going to make it in this match up, and by that I mean, stop looking for upthrow setups and start looking for more ways to bait her so you can start more combos with shine, nair/dair an up-tilt. I think if she's around 40-60% you can juggle her with nairs so that really is a simple combo or you can just go in with delayed dair or nair and if you get a solid hit you can up-tilt instead of shine, in a stage with platforms this can lead to more extended combos.

Setting that a side, sheik is not a character you can destroy, she really doesn't have awful matchups (maybe except jigglypuff?) at the end of day it comes down to the particular players skill.

 

[jkenney1]

Thanks Oskurito. I'll keep those things in mind.

Do you know of any videos of a falco playing this matchup well? I need some material to study. I'm gonna check the video thread now.

 

[Oskurito]

Watch Dr pp vs m2k at apex 2014