Because I'm still in high school and often am unable to find time or transportation to get places to play against competitive players or play in tournaments, I've found myself looking for ways to improve without other people to play against or against people who are at lower skill levels than I am. This thread will talk about a few things that I do to help myself get better even when I don't have the opportunities for competition that I want and hopefully lead to discussion on other methods. Let me first say though that the best way to get better for tournaments is to go to tournaments. There is no substitute for this. My greatest progress has come from participating in tournaments.
Learning to use all of your arsenal
It's really easy to get caught in a pattern with Lucas and use the same strategies and specific moves too much. A way that I've found to expand your use of all of Lucas's moves is to practice doing matches in which you predominantly use just one or two moves. This is something you can do in friendlies as well as against computers.
For example, try playing a match using nothing but dash attacks. This will force you to learn the spacing as well as some tricks to get this difficult to use move to actually hit. Another one of my favorites is doing a match using nothing but PK Fire (or atleast until they're at a good kill percentage if you're impatient.) Excersises like these can be expanded to doing entire matches using only ground moves, only smash attacks, only aerials, only projectiles etc. and are great in friendlies against less experienced or equal experience players. Again, this is something you can practice on CPU's as well if you don't have good humans to play against available.
Juggle Traps
Computers are great for learning how to juggle trap. The AI is actually decent enough that they will do different things to avoid being juggled and you can work on your prediction and aerial spacing to punish. Granted you're still missing out on some tricks humans will use such as B reversing nades and C4 with Snake, but you can still get a ton of practice out on this and juggle trapping is one of the most effective tools in Brawl. I really encourage you to try this one out if you haven't. It's great practice.
Recovering
Just spend some time recovering to different stages especially with PKT2. Test the distances you can make it back from. Learn where blastzones will ruin your recovery etc. Way too many people get gimped when using PKT2 and it shouldn't happen. Spend some time learning your trajectories. It may be kind of boring but it'll help you a ton. A good Lucas player will rarely or never get gimped. His recovery is very underrated. This is another thing you can easily do on your own.
Learning matchups by learning other characters
Learning new characters is fun. Look on their boards and learn some of the things they do. Watch videos of them to see some of their common strategies. Sometimes it's really fun to just pick up a new character and learn them for fun even if you don't plan on using them in tournaments. Playing with a bunch of scrubby players? Main random. You might learn a thing or two you didn't know before and get some basic matchup knowledge on a character you've otherwise not encountered so that when you do you atleast have a cursory knowledge of what they can do.
Watch videos of other Lucas players
Playstyles for Lucas are surprisingly diverse. Watch some other Lucas players. You might learn some mixups you can add to the way you play. I'd suggest watching the more frequent posters here more as well as members of the OBR rather than just random Lucas's. Look up Okin, Noraa, APC, Oats, Tyr, Galeon, and Seanson. I'm sure I forgot a few with videos out right now, those are just the ones that I thought of at the moment.
Just felt like contributing something again. Peace.
-Tyr
Learning to use all of your arsenal
It's really easy to get caught in a pattern with Lucas and use the same strategies and specific moves too much. A way that I've found to expand your use of all of Lucas's moves is to practice doing matches in which you predominantly use just one or two moves. This is something you can do in friendlies as well as against computers.
For example, try playing a match using nothing but dash attacks. This will force you to learn the spacing as well as some tricks to get this difficult to use move to actually hit. Another one of my favorites is doing a match using nothing but PK Fire (or atleast until they're at a good kill percentage if you're impatient.) Excersises like these can be expanded to doing entire matches using only ground moves, only smash attacks, only aerials, only projectiles etc. and are great in friendlies against less experienced or equal experience players. Again, this is something you can practice on CPU's as well if you don't have good humans to play against available.
Juggle Traps
Computers are great for learning how to juggle trap. The AI is actually decent enough that they will do different things to avoid being juggled and you can work on your prediction and aerial spacing to punish. Granted you're still missing out on some tricks humans will use such as B reversing nades and C4 with Snake, but you can still get a ton of practice out on this and juggle trapping is one of the most effective tools in Brawl. I really encourage you to try this one out if you haven't. It's great practice.
Recovering
Just spend some time recovering to different stages especially with PKT2. Test the distances you can make it back from. Learn where blastzones will ruin your recovery etc. Way too many people get gimped when using PKT2 and it shouldn't happen. Spend some time learning your trajectories. It may be kind of boring but it'll help you a ton. A good Lucas player will rarely or never get gimped. His recovery is very underrated. This is another thing you can easily do on your own.
Learning matchups by learning other characters
Learning new characters is fun. Look on their boards and learn some of the things they do. Watch videos of them to see some of their common strategies. Sometimes it's really fun to just pick up a new character and learn them for fun even if you don't plan on using them in tournaments. Playing with a bunch of scrubby players? Main random. You might learn a thing or two you didn't know before and get some basic matchup knowledge on a character you've otherwise not encountered so that when you do you atleast have a cursory knowledge of what they can do.
Watch videos of other Lucas players
Playstyles for Lucas are surprisingly diverse. Watch some other Lucas players. You might learn some mixups you can add to the way you play. I'd suggest watching the more frequent posters here more as well as members of the OBR rather than just random Lucas's. Look up Okin, Noraa, APC, Oats, Tyr, Galeon, and Seanson. I'm sure I forgot a few with videos out right now, those are just the ones that I thought of at the moment.
Just felt like contributing something again. Peace.
-Tyr
