Usually I try to play zard's neutral similar to marth. Dash dance a lot and have good platform movement with wavelands. Go for a lot of grabs, since his grab range and combo ability are really good, and make sure you get lots of mileage of those grabs with tech chases and combos. To approach, you can use RAR nair, RAR bair, running downtilt, and side-b to poke. None are really safe on shield so you have to space them well and not get predictable. You can also use jab or ftilt but they are very unsafe on shield so you cannot spam them. You can also try using flamethrower to pressure their shield if you can guarantee that it will hit. It will do some damage but unfortunately it's easy to escape and punish.
You can also take a more "to-the-skies" approach and wall them out with jumping aerials and side-b, and use glide to change direction and move between platforms as you do this. I find this not as effective but often necessary to deal with some characters, especially ones with projectiles.
