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Are there any truly unwinnable matches?

LancerStaff

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I was in a discussion about if outside rules are necessary in Smash, (Don't ask. Please.) and it came down to if completely unwinnable situations exist or not. Any ideas?

I thought up MK vs. Gannondorf on Temple with coin mode, but it hinges on if it's possible for Ganny to dodge all of MK's attacks. Can he?
 

CeLL

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Ganondorf vs. Falco on FD I'd imagine is very near impossible given that the Falco knows the matchup. Ganon doesn't really have an answer to laser/phantasm camping, and you can just camp until phantasm star KOs him.
 

SuperCosmicSmash

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Ganondorf vs IC's is the only unwinnable matchup. (0-100) Ice Climbers' favor.

Ganon has SHDair, which can get grabbed or juggled by double uair.

Ganon has SHUair, same as above.

Ganon has flamechoke, there are 2 characters.

Ganon has down b, which is very easy to punish.

Ganon has up b, which is heavily punished.

Ganon has jab, which is near useless.

Ice Climbers will Desync and throw out ice blocks and blizzards (transparent priority).

Ganon is terrible against projectiles.

Ganon is slow.

Ganon's neutral B is just...bad

Ganon's up tilt is very easy to stop.

Ganon's smashes are slow and can be shield grabbed.

Ganon has a bad recovery.

Ganon is a defensive character, forced to go aggressive against two desynced characters hurling ice blocks, blizzards, and 0-death grab combos.
 

LancerStaff

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Ganondorf vs IC's is the only unwinnable matchup. (0-100) Ice Climbers' favor.

Ganon has SHDair, which can get grabbed or juggled by double uair.

Ganon has SHUair, same as above.

Ganon has flamechoke, there are 2 characters.

Ganon has down b, which is very easy to punish.

Ganon has up b, which is heavily punished.

Ganon has jab, which is near useless.

Ice Climbers will Desync and throw out ice blocks and blizzards (transparent priority).

Ganon is terrible against projectiles.

Ganon is slow.

Ganon's neutral B is just...bad

Ganon's up tilt is very easy to stop.

Ganon's smashes are slow and can be shield grabbed.

Ganon has a bad recovery.

Ganon is a defensive character, forced to go aggressive against two desynced characters hurling ice blocks, blizzards, and 0-death grab combos.
I'm surprised that there's a completely unwinnable matchup even within competitive rules...
 

SuperCosmicSmash

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Ganon is a defensive character, who has 3 tools : Uair, Dair, Side B.

All of which are very slow, and Ganon is a fast faller. He has no way to stay in the air, and Ice Climbers do 0-death grab combos. When they aren't grabbing they are separately hurling projectiles and making a wall with their down b.

For Ganon (who cannot deal with projectiles) : impassable wall, no way to hit them without being grabbed, projectiles, bad recovery.

Keep in mind Ganon is the worst character, and Ice Climbers are second best.
 
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smashkng

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Low tiers are terrible in Brawl. Realistically most of their top tier matchups are pretty much unwinnable. TECHNICALLY not unwinnable but realistically you can't really expect to win a -3 matchup against a good player who know the matchups at least decently well. The difference in ability to punish can be really huge: Link probably has to punish an estimate seven times the amount of times MK has to KO him, which means the matchup is really bad for Link due to the massive risk-reward difference between the characters. I'd say that most of the top tier vs low tier matchups are like low risk huge reward vs huge risk low reward. Ganon hits the hardest out of the low tiers, but he can get severely punished for doing almost anything and it's so hard for him to land a hit in the first place. Good luck with such kinds of matchups.
Falcon has limited approach options and too doesn't punish hard enough. Samus and Mario also have problems with too weak punishing and to a lesser extent, even Link can have problems KOing. Samus is probably the best low tier when it comes to racking damage, though it's still only decent at best and she has very poor KO options.

Characters like for example Falco, Marth or Meta Knight can pressure Link far too easily due to his sluggishness, no reliable GTFO moves and poor OoS options. The same problem with Ganon, Falcon, Zelda and to a bit lesser extent, Samus and Mario. Mario gets zoned out too easily by characters with good range, which nearly all of the top tiers have, because of his very poor range and only average mobility. He can't really afford trading hits either most of the time. Easy to pressure means it's really easy to combo them for very heavy damge and force them offstage, which also happens to be one of their weaknesses for most of the low tiers, especially when it comes to Ganon and Link.
 

SuperCosmicSmash

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The Ganon vs IC's is impossible.

Assuming the Ice Climbers know desyncing and chain grabbing, Ganon is doomed. Ganon hits hard, but how can he hit them when he is camped by Ice Climbers and being chain grabbed to death?
 

Luco

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The Ganon vs IC's is impossible.

Assuming the Ice Climbers know desyncing and chain grabbing, Ganon is doomed. Ganon hits hard, but how can he hit them when he is camped by Ice Climbers and being chain grabbed to death?
The ganon ICs MU wouldn't be 100:0, that's terribly unrealistic. I'd say somewhere between 90:10 and 99:1 but I have no idea where.

In Brawl, there's no actual 'unwinnable' MU by direct definition of the word. There are, however, a huge amount of match-ups that are so incredibly difficult to win that it borders on ridiculousness. For instance, Zelda vs. Olimar is a ludicrous match-up. Even from an outsider's perspective (which I am), it's pretty easy to see that Zelda just can't do anything that a good Olimar couldn't, under normal circumstances, punish or completely avoid punishment himself (ie taking damage) - his Pikmin outrange her and shield him, he out-camps her (reflect is okay but it doesn't protect against everything all the time and Oli can afford to just keep throwing more), he wins close range, his aerial ability outclasses her.... etc.

However, when I say 'normal circumstances', you have to realise that these are actually very rare. To have totally normal circumstances, the player has to be thinking logically and quickly and has to be in the right position to counteract the moves made by the opposite player without confusion and nerves. In tournaments, heck, even in friendlies, this just isn't the case. People get nervous which affects their ability to play the game effectively and just having your fingers in the wrong place on the controller can mean you screw up a defensive or offensive option you were planning to use. For instance, a good example here is the Marth vs. PK kids match-ups. I'm not sure how long you've been here or whether you've had ample opportunity to learn a bit more about a variety of characters in the game, but to clarify, this MU is a -3 for both PK kids (which is a large disadvantage). There's a lot behind it but one of the biggest reasons it's not at least -2 or lower is the chaingrab. Lucas and Ness both suffer from an extra 10 frames of grab release, meaning they can get grabbed again by certain characters before they literally have a chance to do anything. Marth is one character that can heavily abuse that fact. However, even though in theory it's a near-infinite chain grab, plenty of times a Lucas or Ness player will manage their way out of the process because the Marth messed up his timing due to nerves and the opposing player capitalised on it. This type of situation (nerves) has quite possibly the biggest effect on the Ice Climbers because they can chain-grab everyone in the game from 0-death (using a different method) if they input the commands correctly. But even 9B and Vinnie (two of the best ICs players in the world) regularly drop chaingrabs halfway through due to incorrect inputs and nerves. It's just how tournaments and things work.

So no, in my opinion there is no truly unwinnable match-up because player control is a variability and will always be one (I don't see an instance where anyone would ever become good enough to mirror a TAS CPU), so theory can be different from the reality. It's just that even with player variability, the disadvantages do exist and can be capitalised on and as a result that character will usually find it very difficult to win against a player that can abuse at least some of his advantages.
 

Luco

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I saw 0:100 on a matchup thread somewhere, check the Ganon boards or IC boards.
I can't find it on either board. A truly 0:100 MU would mean that even mid or lower level players would find that MU nigh on impossible and I can beat my brother's ice climbers as ganondorf, lol. It just happens to be terrible for ganon due to the CG to death and ganon's relative bad ability to be anywhere vs them (far away gets camped, close in gets grabbed and he has very little say in the matter). I would actually say that in the air, if he's in a few select positions it's not too bad for him.
 

infiniteV115

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I think Fox vs Ganon on Temple is unwinnable. Fox will eventually either get him with an aerial laser, or he can just safely camp grounded lasers from a certain distance (which is under his control seeing as how there are 8 minutes and Fox is way more mobile than Ganon) and then run away once he gets a laser to connect.
 

Osennecho

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I think Fox vs Ganon on Temple is unwinnable. Fox will eventually either get him with an aerial laser, or he can just safely camp grounded lasers from a certain distance (which is under his control seeing as how there are 8 minutes and Fox is way more mobile than Ganon) and then run away once he gets a laser to connect.
inb4 100 trips.
 

Radical Larry

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Ganondorf may not be good against desynching ICs...he's not going to win against them. But somehow, he manages to do better against Meta Knight, which doesn't even make the least bit of sense.

Now to another character, if Link gets them with F-Smash and targets Nana, then that's a whole other story there. There are practically many ways to devastate an IC with Link; F-Smash > Spin Attack/F-Smash will work at times, but then there's also F-Smash > Jab Jab > F-Tilt. These, for me, sends Nana away from Popo and gives me a good window of time to completely separate the two to where Nana cannot recover. Of course, I'm not fully sure that this would be the same result with other players; this usually works better in Melee.
 

Thor

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Luco said:
A truly 0:100 MU would mean that even mid or lower level players would find that MU nigh on impossible and I can beat my brother's ice climbers as ganondorf, lol.
No.

Keep in mind that the MU assumes players at the top level of each character's metagame using all techniques and strategies known to them. The fact that I can regularly destroy ICs players at school with Ganondorf means nothing, except that they can't chaingrab, don't get how to desync, and my Ganon likes cheesing them. A truly 0:100 MU is an MU that someone of M2K or Nairo-like skill (or Will, DEHF, Ally, etc. for a respective character) can't win in versus another similar caliber player.

Maybe they want to call me out on this (The Ganondorf mains I'll mention), but if 9B or Vinnie played DLA or Vermanubis, they would lose pretty much every single time, assuming Vinnie or 9B has practiced the MU at all. If you watch videos of Ganons beating semi-usable ICs on Youtube, the ICs mains drop grabs and it's clear they're not sure how to approach or they fall for stuff frequently that the highest level players won't fall for multiple times. They also don't do all the stuff mentioned above for making the MU as bad as possible for Ganon.

And it makes sense he fares marginally better against MK (that's not 100:0 I don't think, but still pretty terrible) because Ganondorf isn't dead if he's grabbed, so the fact that he's not the best at avoiding getting grabbed doesn't matter as much. He's still very very much going to lose much of the time, but Ganon can win because he does hit hard and KO early, and getting grabbed =/= death, so that MK actually has to put damage on him, not grab him and just do silly stuff.
 

DLA

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As I've always said, a 0:100 matchup means that it rounds up to 100%. In other words, if a Ganon loses 199 out of 200 matches (99.5%) or more, then it can be accurately considered 0:100 matchup. Not that it's relevant from anything but an academic point of view, since there's no way of measuring this anyways.

In fact, I'm incredibly saddened that I've ever had to make this observation for a character I've called a main, which is why you'll probably find me stomping ICs in the face in PM instead.
 
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Nixernator

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correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't the sheik ganon matchup as equally as busted? I vaguely remember someone saying ganon can't get past the chain used correctly.
 
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