cisyphus
Smash Ace
Just playing around a little bit and had a bit of an epiphany with Cypher as a valuable positioning tool. There are four key factors here:
1. It cancels dash momentum
2. It is cancelable at a height lower than Snake's short hop
3. It is reversible
4. It creates hitboxes whereas short hop does not
Essentially what I'm getting at is that it's a highly effective RAR replacement as well as an important SH parallel in general.
The first point is easy enough to see but it's what got me started: dash and do a SHFFL nair, just for example. you'll see you drift slightly. Try and compensate for it all you want, but it's extremely difficult to do a nair without having some drift on it from you dash momentum. Now try it again, but instead of short hop, use Cypher: you'll stop all momentum and nair precisely where you took off from. I can see this helping with techchase jab resets via nair.
But I noticed the second point while doing that first experiment: when you nair on cypher on the earliest frame, only the first two hitboxes ever come out. Compare that with SH nair where you have to fast fall to do the same thing. Based on my training room testing, the Cypher puts snake at half the height that a short hop would. This is extremely useful for hitting lower to the ground. Which got me thinking...
The third point is where this starts to look better than a RAR. With the changes to Snake's Back Air (it's strongest at the tip) there's a greater incentive than ever to get the spacing on it completely correct. The added benefit is that Snake's bair hits really far away from his body meaning that he can bair a shield, land during the shield stun, and punish their baited reaction. This is normally tough because of how high short hop puts you in addition to the drift we talked about earlier, but when you reverse up b cancel a dash, you both stay in place and stay lower to the ground, which lets you hit the farthest horizontal part of their shield much more consistently.
Moreover, the Cypher creates hitboxes on frame 5 and 6 which have a modest disjoint, making it all around safer than a short hop alone.
The only limitations I've seen so far are that you're unable to air dodge out of it (so no wavelands) and you lose your double jump after using it. It also one frame slower than a short hop on startup (5 frame jump squat = airborne on frame 6) because the SpecialHiStart sequence takes 6 frames to complete, meaning Snake is airborne on frame 7. I do think that the overall benefits outweigh those disadvantages. The "Cypher Hop" (Is that a good name?) is a lot more consistent at putting a hitbox where you want it to be. It provides a lot of mixups (Tomahawk Cypher grab is the sickest mindgame I've ever seen).
1. It cancels dash momentum
2. It is cancelable at a height lower than Snake's short hop
3. It is reversible
4. It creates hitboxes whereas short hop does not
Essentially what I'm getting at is that it's a highly effective RAR replacement as well as an important SH parallel in general.
The first point is easy enough to see but it's what got me started: dash and do a SHFFL nair, just for example. you'll see you drift slightly. Try and compensate for it all you want, but it's extremely difficult to do a nair without having some drift on it from you dash momentum. Now try it again, but instead of short hop, use Cypher: you'll stop all momentum and nair precisely where you took off from. I can see this helping with techchase jab resets via nair.
But I noticed the second point while doing that first experiment: when you nair on cypher on the earliest frame, only the first two hitboxes ever come out. Compare that with SH nair where you have to fast fall to do the same thing. Based on my training room testing, the Cypher puts snake at half the height that a short hop would. This is extremely useful for hitting lower to the ground. Which got me thinking...
The third point is where this starts to look better than a RAR. With the changes to Snake's Back Air (it's strongest at the tip) there's a greater incentive than ever to get the spacing on it completely correct. The added benefit is that Snake's bair hits really far away from his body meaning that he can bair a shield, land during the shield stun, and punish their baited reaction. This is normally tough because of how high short hop puts you in addition to the drift we talked about earlier, but when you reverse up b cancel a dash, you both stay in place and stay lower to the ground, which lets you hit the farthest horizontal part of their shield much more consistently.
Moreover, the Cypher creates hitboxes on frame 5 and 6 which have a modest disjoint, making it all around safer than a short hop alone.
The only limitations I've seen so far are that you're unable to air dodge out of it (so no wavelands) and you lose your double jump after using it. It also one frame slower than a short hop on startup (5 frame jump squat = airborne on frame 6) because the SpecialHiStart sequence takes 6 frames to complete, meaning Snake is airborne on frame 7. I do think that the overall benefits outweigh those disadvantages. The "Cypher Hop" (Is that a good name?) is a lot more consistent at putting a hitbox where you want it to be. It provides a lot of mixups (Tomahawk Cypher grab is the sickest mindgame I've ever seen).
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