roboticphish
Smash Cadet
- Joined
- Dec 19, 2013
- Messages
- 54
Hey Falco players.
You may know me as a player, you may not; if you've played me before you will know that I operate on a pretty intense, balls-out gameplan that, when it works and I'm playing well, is a one-way ticket to cool-guy-ville, and when it doesn't work just gets me annihilated. But this is a conscious choice I make; I run into a lot of Falco players out there who are fairly one- or two-dimensional in their approaches to the game or a particular matchup, and are engaging more with Falco the character instead of Falco the tool. What I mean by this is that more Falco players seem to be falling into a trap of thinking "This is how this matchup is played", and attempting to stick to a gameplan based on the character they're up against. Instead, that gameplan should only form the foundation or the skeleton of a matchup; it should inform broad situations on a spectrum of how safe or risky they are, and then thinking of ways to manipulate the neutral game to bend the rules of those matchups.
So let's look at this through a detailed example. In the Falco-Peach matchup on FD, you want to avoid grab. Grab leads to a long chaingrab and usually death, so it's the topmost threat in Peach's kit. Knowing this, your gameplan should start out as the bare bones of knowing that you can't attack the front of her shield unless it's spaced or tight (and then spaced), and that after a FC nair or fair on your shield, she has a basic mixup available in the form of jab to catch an out-of-shield option, and grab to punish the stay-in-shield. However, once you recognize that element of the gameplan, then you can build a playstyle around it. So let's take the second example, of avoiding the FC aerial -> jab/grab mixup. Once you recognize that Peach is floating, the mixup game has started. Her only options are to disengage via airdodge, drift or dj back, or to attack with an aerial. All of these are difficult options to challenge, and so frequently what you'll see are the less developed Falco players attempting to keep their distance and force her to burn her float. They don't recognize that there are still options Peach has to contend against in her position (even if they're risky), and so they prefer to keep their distance and shoot lasers to catch her falling down after the float. But as I mentioned earlier, avoiding the jab/grab mixup after an FC aerial begins when Peach starts her float, not when she actually aerials your shield on the way down. In fact, the mixup of Peach's jab vs grab is the last hurdle for her to overcome, it's the last chance you have to escape the punish. In reality, you can keep her on her toes long before she's able to pin down the chance for that grab.
Let's keep going with this example. If Peach is floating on FD, and she's floating just high enough that you can't hit her with the highest short hop laser, Falco still has a huge amount of choices available to him. As we mentioned before, he could run away and SH laser to catch her descent and wait out the float; this is what many players do because they feel like this is a 'losing' situation for Falco in this matchup on this stage. But the reality is that Peach is only avoiding SH lasers. Falco can full hop or double jump lasers to snipe her float and force her to come down. Given good drift, he can do this in such a way that he is out of range of a falling aerial and close enough to her when she lands that she feels like she needs to act once she gets on the ground. You can jump away from this, shield, shine, cc the followup attack, etc. It sets up a way broader mixup tree than the jab/grab on shield, which means it's harder for the Peach to convert this into a meaningful opening. You can also challenge her float directly with a SH first hit fair (if timed right this hits higher than the highest laser height), or a running SH up-air. These are relatively safe, although they will lose to a tight drift back and so you have to be ready for the counterhit if you should whiff. This can be done by ASDI'ing down and buffering roll away from bair/nair, SDI'ing up from a descending dair, or preparing a roll away tech off of a fair hit. While none of these are great (you don't want to be hit if you can help it), the point is that you don't need to win a mixup in these situations in order to avoid being killed. Based on spacing, you can react with your DI & SDI choices, and get away from a more dangerous situation. You are trying to avoid that grab mixup, because a grab is death. Given that, isn't taking a stray aerial or even a small combo preferable? That's what you get by challenging a hard position to challenge and losing. But if you succeed in the challenge, then you've turned a disadvantageous position into an advantageous one, possible even converting into a protracted punish depending on % and spacing.
But wait, there's more. Those are safe challenges; what happens if you win with a higher-risk challenge? What happens if you challenge Peach's drift back with a FH weak hit nair or bair? What about running towards her and challenging with a FH early dair? These are much riskier options, since she can react to them coming...but they're still an execution test and a mixup, which means that you are forcing her to keep more options in mind, even if they're "bad" options. And if these challenges succeed, it's not simply turning a disadvantageous position into an advantageous one; these options frequently set up for a punish and put Peach immediately into escape mode. So the risk is increased, but so is the reward. And remember, given the threat at the bare bones of this mixup (avoiding the grab), even a bad trade is fine for Falco so long as it ends up with less than a grab or a stock. When the reward is high enough that winning a single one of those challenges allows you to go into punish mode, most of the risks in this position are worth it.
So far we've only been talking about challenging an attempt to disengage by Peach, to keep her advantageous position by staying out of the way of your neutral threats. Most Falco players will try to disengage, but it's just as bad of an idea to always challenge her disengagement too. Sometimes you want to do neither; you want to stand your ground and not run away, but you don't want to challenge her disengagement either. There's a third option here: Standing your ground and making her commit to her option. Running away to snipe a landing and wait out her descent isn't forcing a commitment, it just allows her to shift the position of the neutral closer to your being closer to the ledge. She can still choose to disengage or commit as long as you haven't forced her to do so. Likewise, her disengagement can be tough to challenge; all the challenges I mentioned earlier are not 'winning' propositions, they're simply higher risk and higher reward. If the Falco is always challenging, then the Peach can always choose to disengage, and if you lose 9 out of 10 challenges, it's going to be really difficult to make that 1 out of 10 count enough to be worth it. So by standing your ground or either dash dancing or performing waveland/shine turnaround tricks, you can implicitly put a lot of pressure on the Peach to choose the right option at the right time. For example, you can just try running underneath Peach as she's floating; if she doesn't back away, then you're behind her and in a much better position (and FC bair doesn't lead to the jab/grab mixup). You can try simply standing in place with your back turned to her. You won't need to snipe her descent, because you're telling her loud and clear that she has to beat you to come down safely. If you even trade with up-tilt (nevermind winning outright), you'll have knocked her back into the air, where she now has to find a way to come down without a float. You can dash dance and read her descent with a JC up-smash; at a high % this will kill outright, even off a trade. You can also just dash dance and prepare a crouch cancel counter; if she nairs early expecting you to jump towards her, she'll hit you with a weak hit which you can turn into a shine, grab, or other cc punish. (beware that FC fair will generally win here).
So let's bring it all together. When you look at the 'bare bones' of a matchup, these are the situations that you have to break down. Peach will frequently find herself floating above Falco's SH laser height to remove their oppressive presence in neutral and give herself an advantage. She'll be able to take space, she can threaten a descent, and keeps the threat of that descent present when you know that she's looking for a grab. But Falco players too often see this situation and get frustrated with Peach players for 'playing lame'; they feel that because this situation puts her into an advantaged state too easily, they have to disengage and wait for the situation to return to a place where they have the advantage again. This is not the case; it is equally important to know how to play from disadvantage and know how to turn a situation around into your favor with a surprise attack or a read. Falco has a huge wealth of options, and you can take advantage of all of them to keep the opponent constantly guessing. If they never know what you're going to do next, whether that's challenge them outright, back off, or bait out a commitment and then challenge or disengage, then each option they choose is going to create an inherent amount of uncertainty. And the more uncertain a player is about their actions or about the state of play they find themselves in, the more diminished their reaction times will be, and thus the easier it becomes to win the execution tests you're putting them through. This is the case in every matchup and for every 'lame' tactic: Puff's bair, Samus' wd back Dsmash/Dtilt, Sheik's wd back grab at the ledge, Marth's dash dance grab, Fox's full hop drill, Falco's lasers, Falcon's spaced nairs, you name it. Furthermore, the more you challenge 'lame' play, the more holes you'll start to see in your opponent's gameplan. How many of you Falco's out there have a habit of turnaround uptilting at every chance in the ditto? How many of you, when you're at a SH Laser distance away from your opponent and they're just standing there, will do a habit SH laser? How many of you will commit to an attack on an enemy who is dash dancing in the corner? All of these are player habits that are very common, because it's rare for someone to outright challenge their ability to work. Turnaround uptilt is great in the ditto...until you're up against someone who is ready for it. SH laser from approaching distance is a good tool to win neutral....unless the opponent is waiting for you to do just that. Attacking someone who's stuck in the corner is a great way to get a kill....except that, well you get it by now. The point is that 'lame' play takes two people; it requires one person to gain an advantage, and another person unwilling to challenge it. But by forcing yourself to challenge and engage with that play instead of disengaging and trying to reset, you can develop a monstrous neutral game where your opponent's habits and holes show themselves to you, and then you can put together Falco's insane punish game to make them pay every time you catch them.
Thanks for reading, as always comments, questions, concerns are welcome.
You may know me as a player, you may not; if you've played me before you will know that I operate on a pretty intense, balls-out gameplan that, when it works and I'm playing well, is a one-way ticket to cool-guy-ville, and when it doesn't work just gets me annihilated. But this is a conscious choice I make; I run into a lot of Falco players out there who are fairly one- or two-dimensional in their approaches to the game or a particular matchup, and are engaging more with Falco the character instead of Falco the tool. What I mean by this is that more Falco players seem to be falling into a trap of thinking "This is how this matchup is played", and attempting to stick to a gameplan based on the character they're up against. Instead, that gameplan should only form the foundation or the skeleton of a matchup; it should inform broad situations on a spectrum of how safe or risky they are, and then thinking of ways to manipulate the neutral game to bend the rules of those matchups.
So let's look at this through a detailed example. In the Falco-Peach matchup on FD, you want to avoid grab. Grab leads to a long chaingrab and usually death, so it's the topmost threat in Peach's kit. Knowing this, your gameplan should start out as the bare bones of knowing that you can't attack the front of her shield unless it's spaced or tight (and then spaced), and that after a FC nair or fair on your shield, she has a basic mixup available in the form of jab to catch an out-of-shield option, and grab to punish the stay-in-shield. However, once you recognize that element of the gameplan, then you can build a playstyle around it. So let's take the second example, of avoiding the FC aerial -> jab/grab mixup. Once you recognize that Peach is floating, the mixup game has started. Her only options are to disengage via airdodge, drift or dj back, or to attack with an aerial. All of these are difficult options to challenge, and so frequently what you'll see are the less developed Falco players attempting to keep their distance and force her to burn her float. They don't recognize that there are still options Peach has to contend against in her position (even if they're risky), and so they prefer to keep their distance and shoot lasers to catch her falling down after the float. But as I mentioned earlier, avoiding the jab/grab mixup after an FC aerial begins when Peach starts her float, not when she actually aerials your shield on the way down. In fact, the mixup of Peach's jab vs grab is the last hurdle for her to overcome, it's the last chance you have to escape the punish. In reality, you can keep her on her toes long before she's able to pin down the chance for that grab.
Let's keep going with this example. If Peach is floating on FD, and she's floating just high enough that you can't hit her with the highest short hop laser, Falco still has a huge amount of choices available to him. As we mentioned before, he could run away and SH laser to catch her descent and wait out the float; this is what many players do because they feel like this is a 'losing' situation for Falco in this matchup on this stage. But the reality is that Peach is only avoiding SH lasers. Falco can full hop or double jump lasers to snipe her float and force her to come down. Given good drift, he can do this in such a way that he is out of range of a falling aerial and close enough to her when she lands that she feels like she needs to act once she gets on the ground. You can jump away from this, shield, shine, cc the followup attack, etc. It sets up a way broader mixup tree than the jab/grab on shield, which means it's harder for the Peach to convert this into a meaningful opening. You can also challenge her float directly with a SH first hit fair (if timed right this hits higher than the highest laser height), or a running SH up-air. These are relatively safe, although they will lose to a tight drift back and so you have to be ready for the counterhit if you should whiff. This can be done by ASDI'ing down and buffering roll away from bair/nair, SDI'ing up from a descending dair, or preparing a roll away tech off of a fair hit. While none of these are great (you don't want to be hit if you can help it), the point is that you don't need to win a mixup in these situations in order to avoid being killed. Based on spacing, you can react with your DI & SDI choices, and get away from a more dangerous situation. You are trying to avoid that grab mixup, because a grab is death. Given that, isn't taking a stray aerial or even a small combo preferable? That's what you get by challenging a hard position to challenge and losing. But if you succeed in the challenge, then you've turned a disadvantageous position into an advantageous one, possible even converting into a protracted punish depending on % and spacing.
But wait, there's more. Those are safe challenges; what happens if you win with a higher-risk challenge? What happens if you challenge Peach's drift back with a FH weak hit nair or bair? What about running towards her and challenging with a FH early dair? These are much riskier options, since she can react to them coming...but they're still an execution test and a mixup, which means that you are forcing her to keep more options in mind, even if they're "bad" options. And if these challenges succeed, it's not simply turning a disadvantageous position into an advantageous one; these options frequently set up for a punish and put Peach immediately into escape mode. So the risk is increased, but so is the reward. And remember, given the threat at the bare bones of this mixup (avoiding the grab), even a bad trade is fine for Falco so long as it ends up with less than a grab or a stock. When the reward is high enough that winning a single one of those challenges allows you to go into punish mode, most of the risks in this position are worth it.
So far we've only been talking about challenging an attempt to disengage by Peach, to keep her advantageous position by staying out of the way of your neutral threats. Most Falco players will try to disengage, but it's just as bad of an idea to always challenge her disengagement too. Sometimes you want to do neither; you want to stand your ground and not run away, but you don't want to challenge her disengagement either. There's a third option here: Standing your ground and making her commit to her option. Running away to snipe a landing and wait out her descent isn't forcing a commitment, it just allows her to shift the position of the neutral closer to your being closer to the ledge. She can still choose to disengage or commit as long as you haven't forced her to do so. Likewise, her disengagement can be tough to challenge; all the challenges I mentioned earlier are not 'winning' propositions, they're simply higher risk and higher reward. If the Falco is always challenging, then the Peach can always choose to disengage, and if you lose 9 out of 10 challenges, it's going to be really difficult to make that 1 out of 10 count enough to be worth it. So by standing your ground or either dash dancing or performing waveland/shine turnaround tricks, you can implicitly put a lot of pressure on the Peach to choose the right option at the right time. For example, you can just try running underneath Peach as she's floating; if she doesn't back away, then you're behind her and in a much better position (and FC bair doesn't lead to the jab/grab mixup). You can try simply standing in place with your back turned to her. You won't need to snipe her descent, because you're telling her loud and clear that she has to beat you to come down safely. If you even trade with up-tilt (nevermind winning outright), you'll have knocked her back into the air, where she now has to find a way to come down without a float. You can dash dance and read her descent with a JC up-smash; at a high % this will kill outright, even off a trade. You can also just dash dance and prepare a crouch cancel counter; if she nairs early expecting you to jump towards her, she'll hit you with a weak hit which you can turn into a shine, grab, or other cc punish. (beware that FC fair will generally win here).
So let's bring it all together. When you look at the 'bare bones' of a matchup, these are the situations that you have to break down. Peach will frequently find herself floating above Falco's SH laser height to remove their oppressive presence in neutral and give herself an advantage. She'll be able to take space, she can threaten a descent, and keeps the threat of that descent present when you know that she's looking for a grab. But Falco players too often see this situation and get frustrated with Peach players for 'playing lame'; they feel that because this situation puts her into an advantaged state too easily, they have to disengage and wait for the situation to return to a place where they have the advantage again. This is not the case; it is equally important to know how to play from disadvantage and know how to turn a situation around into your favor with a surprise attack or a read. Falco has a huge wealth of options, and you can take advantage of all of them to keep the opponent constantly guessing. If they never know what you're going to do next, whether that's challenge them outright, back off, or bait out a commitment and then challenge or disengage, then each option they choose is going to create an inherent amount of uncertainty. And the more uncertain a player is about their actions or about the state of play they find themselves in, the more diminished their reaction times will be, and thus the easier it becomes to win the execution tests you're putting them through. This is the case in every matchup and for every 'lame' tactic: Puff's bair, Samus' wd back Dsmash/Dtilt, Sheik's wd back grab at the ledge, Marth's dash dance grab, Fox's full hop drill, Falco's lasers, Falcon's spaced nairs, you name it. Furthermore, the more you challenge 'lame' play, the more holes you'll start to see in your opponent's gameplan. How many of you Falco's out there have a habit of turnaround uptilting at every chance in the ditto? How many of you, when you're at a SH Laser distance away from your opponent and they're just standing there, will do a habit SH laser? How many of you will commit to an attack on an enemy who is dash dancing in the corner? All of these are player habits that are very common, because it's rare for someone to outright challenge their ability to work. Turnaround uptilt is great in the ditto...until you're up against someone who is ready for it. SH laser from approaching distance is a good tool to win neutral....unless the opponent is waiting for you to do just that. Attacking someone who's stuck in the corner is a great way to get a kill....except that, well you get it by now. The point is that 'lame' play takes two people; it requires one person to gain an advantage, and another person unwilling to challenge it. But by forcing yourself to challenge and engage with that play instead of disengaging and trying to reset, you can develop a monstrous neutral game where your opponent's habits and holes show themselves to you, and then you can put together Falco's insane punish game to make them pay every time you catch them.
Thanks for reading, as always comments, questions, concerns are welcome.