So I was watching this old
Ultrachen video for fun about matchups, and it got me thinking a good deal about how we talk about and approach the idea of matchups in Smash 4. The video is specifically about SFIV, and Zangief in particular, but I think it applies here, so forgive me that it isn't going to be getting to Smash specifically until the very end.
There are a few things to take away from the video. First, matchups change. We like to think that matchups are more about figuring out the "truth," but they're more organic than that. Each time one side starts to lose, they work to figure something out. There's an ebb and flow and change over time in matchups, and just because it looks bad now doesn't mean it will look the same in two years. Heck, it might still be a bad matchup, but it could be bad in a completely different way. And remember, SF as a series is older than just about any other fighting game, including Melee. I sometimes see people say that we can figure out the shape of a matchup in no time because of all of the experience playing Melee and Brawl, and that's somewhat true, but TIME will always be an important factor.
Second, sometimes the solution to a matchup might just be a complete change of style. In the video, the example given is Zangief vs. Abel. Zangief players felt like they lost to Abel, until a notable Zangief player started playing Zangief more defensively in the matchup. This went against the notion of Zangief as this in-your-face character, but it worked. As a Mewtwo player, I really take this to heart because I often feel like you NEED to play a lot of matchups very differently in order to win. When I see people complaining about Kirby, I ask, "Why aren't you just running the hell away the entire time?"
Third, even when characters have very bad matchups, people will at least still lab all of them out. Sagat destroys Zangief, but that didn't stop Zangiefs from developing their meta against Sagat or the rest of the roster.
Now, taking all of this, I want to look at the recent Capcom Cup. Snake Eyez, a Zangief player, got 5th at what might arguably be the hardest Street Fighter tournament ever. Recently, he had picked up Evil Ryu as well because of some of those bad matchups. However, in some cases
he still went Zangief against players who attempted to counterpick Sagat against him, because his experience in the matchup trumped their pocket Sagats. That's not a "tiers don't matter" argument, but rather a "you can't truly separate the tier list from the players, even if we all love trying to do so." That's also not discouraging theorycrafting, etc.. It's just that when it comes down to match time, there's no sitting there thinking, "Well if my opponent was of theoretically equal skill to me at a high level, this would happen!"
In the end, Snake Eyez lost to Daigo really badly, 3-0. Daigo plays Evil Ryu in Ultra SFIV, and none of the matches were close. Evil Ryu is a bad matchup for Zangief, but what really shone through was that Daigo was simply better than Snake Eyez at his own strengths (footsies, mind games). Now, Snake Eyez could have switched to Evil Ryu but he didn't, and that's likely because he would have been in an even worse situation. He would have been playing the mirror match against the BEST Evil Ryu in the WORLD, and all of those advantages Daigo had vs. Snake Eyez in terms of play style, skill, etc., would have not gone away.
Compare this to fighting ZeRo. ZeRo is the best Smash 4 player in the world. ZeRo has a deadly Diddy Kong and an even more devastating Sheik. If you lose to his Sheik, is he beating you because he's using Sheik, or because Sheik amplifies his superior skills that much more? If you pick Sheik to fight him, will you have a better chance of winning? Maybe if you're really good and dedicated to Sheik, like Void or Mr. R, but if you think it's just a matter of "I got the better character," then you might just get dunked on not just by ZeRo but by everyone else.
