Someday Ill make a post about pika stuff. For now heres a response to recent posts that are meant moreso to elaborate on pika. This is customs off, too hard to judge customs atm.
Sakurai has given Pika an extremely toxic + shallow design boon in the form of 90% of the cast not having moves that hit Pika in most of his animations
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I think a lot of people are attracted to Pikachu's very low skill floor to play (smash fundamentals/understandings + abuse is 3/5ths or more of the character) but is rarely seen in tournament play for those aforementioned reasons. I guess there's enough good low hitting tilts + [dash] grabs and invincible (or gdlk huge) up smashes to put a huge halt on what efforts Pika puts in being worth it.
I think this isnt fair. There's a lot of strategy to using size to your advantage and the fact that "random move X" will kill him in bad circumstances adds plenty of balance to the design. Missing an autopilot punish isnt shallow design, it means players have to adjust to handle the character theyre fighting and exploit the weakness that goes with it. Players may find it frustrating to hit pika, but actually using him competitively its easier understand the nuances and difficulties of handling pikachus size and weight. Honestly people make a bigger deal out of this on its own then it is out of shell shock IMO (which I think you've implied) and it also prevents them from looking at his better traits.
The problem with "just use a low hitting move" is that pikachus ground game is heads and heels above most of the cast, and potentially best in the game. Limit your opponents options to those that only work on the ground by staying on the ground, and combat their limited options with pikachus powerful ground game and you have a scary character. I've mentioned his ground game in the past. Since customs have sort of given cover for vanilla character balance changes I feel more comfortable elaborating on this and other things later in the post.
+small size
+outstanding roll and options out of roll
+above average (maybe best?) spot dodge
+Outstanding Ground Mobility
++Quick Attack (addendum to previous point, and for reasons Ive mentioned before)
+outstanding ground normals
++strong
and safe grounded spacing moves (addendum to previous point)
+multiple air to ground aerials [nair, dair, bair] (aerials that hit along the ground prior to falling from SH peak).
+powerful grab game
+mediocre projectile (better then none)
Not to mention having several moves that lead to forced knockdowns, his strong ability to tech chase, and punish powerfully off techs. His only shortcomings are his jab, which is mediocre but not bad, and his dsmash which is bad. "what about range?" On the ground pikachu is safer and outranges most of the "viable" cast, but more on that later.
Compare this to a character like shiek, who's smash's are comparatively mediocre, has no range on her grounded moves, and is one-dimensional on air to ground game. Sheik has a good roll but can't capitalize off of it half as well as pika, her grab game is weaker, and to round it all off she doesnt have anything comparable to pikachu's anti-commitment Quick Attack. Her only raw advantage on the ground is her projectile. Her ground game might not be terrible but its not on the level of pikachu's so just using low hitting moves isnt going to cut it. In contrast, characters that do have legit ground games like olimar and MK actually are more difficult for pika.
Sheik outdamages, outcamps, outranges and outrecovers, and that's irrespective of the match up which every time I watch it played it seems like it gets worse and worse.
Sheik is better at camping and spacing out opponents, which on their own can allow her to be more dominant in many MUs. Her greater strengths lean defensively even if she has a formidable offense. Still, Pikachu is better at starting offense and maintaining pressure. I HIGHLY doubt sheik outdamages pikachu, at best its even but pikachu is more well rounded when it comes to grabs and tilts while still being extremely reliable with aerials. Outrecover dunno, theyre both good for different reasons but theyre both too good for the difference to be relevant.
And Pikachus killing options are more solid, sheik kills better in the air but has less she can do to set up kills unless theres something I dont know. Her raw kill power is overall lower as well. As far as Im aware her only guaranteed kill set-up is offstage needles > bouncing fish. I dont know if she has any knockdown > tech chase killing ability but Id think her options out of dash wouldnt allow her to KO from a tech chase reliably. Pika has Dtilt > forced knockdown > (tech chase if applicable) > usmash around 90-120% and leads to reliable early KOs; Fair > Dash Attack is reliable wth no rage at 145%; Utilt > Thunder/QA, and as a last resort Uthrow kills between 150-190 depending on rage (while not optimal a kill throw is not an option Sheik has and is very relevant in clutch situations). Maybe other stuff Im forgetting.
Head to head sheik has a strong reliance on her SH (F)aerial game to maintain distance from pikas offensive pressure. For awhile this mightve been considered enough for sheik to do well in this MU regardless of its linearity based on its strength, but somewhat recently discovered that pikachu could roll past sheik's short hop
on reaction into a reverse uptilt (or grab, dtilt, etc.) and she has no options to cover this. Worse, utilt is probably pikachus most devastating move against sheik due to her weight. Not sure if sheik will find another way to combat pika that doesnt rely so much on short hops, but after finding out pika had a diddy kong roll, in conjunction with the ground game comparisons I mentioned earlier the MU seems to favor pika. (also gonna take the time to reemphasize how good forward roll to reverse utilt is in general <3).
Kinda of glossed over a lot of things, i.e. all the QA shenanigans ive mentioned before, or dthrow > fair working forever on most the cast and setting up a frame trap afterwards being a major part of pikas good grab game. But I guess thats for another post.
Im sure Im going to get flack for this in here but my honest assessment of these top tier/good character MUs.
Pikachu Beats: Sheik, Diddy, Rosalina, ZSS
Pikachu Maybe beats: Sonic, Yoshi
Pikachu Maybe even with: Ness, Luigi, Mario
If Im being honest I think pikachu wins all these MU's except maybe ness, but Id need to see how things develop more. The MU's that "feel" hard tend to be more odd then popular.
On that note as far as tough MUs, Ive mentioned Oli and MK already. I honestly think characters like Marth and Shulk have a lot of potential against pika as well since they have some of the best air to ground aerials in the game and other strong tools that make the MU annoying for pika.
I don't know who is generally agreeing Pikachu beats Rosalina and Sonic; I would consider both to probably beat Pikachu and would say Diddy almost definitely beats Pikachu too. I could believe Pikachu beating ZSS (it makes a lot of sense), but ZSS isn't really a top character so I don't know why we'd be looking at ZSS and not other characters honestly about as good as her that would be more likely to be positive match-ups for Yoshi (characters like Mario and Ness). I also don't believe we can boil this game down to just top tier match-ups or even say with confidence what a full list of the top tiers are, and I'm not sure we can really have a match-up discussion in the first place since I don't see how our match-up disagreements here can go much beyond us just asserting our opinions about which characters beat which characters (neither of us can possibly present solid evidence these match-ups go one way or another). I also don't really see Pikachu as a top character in the first place, but that's a whole other can of worms...
Experience and understanding can help illuminate some MUs in the current metagame. I dont know much about yoshi's MUs so I wont comment on that, but feel free to explain your reasoning on Pikas.
Rosalina is one of the MU's Im most sure about pika winning. Dabuz and ESAM (before he quit) have both stated Rosalina loses to pikachu, and early impressions from playing my friend falln who is perhaps the second best Rosalina in the country lead me to believe Pikachu has a strong MU against Rosalina as well. Her defense doesnt hold up well against pika, and her size is a big part of that problem. She's also relatively easy to KO in terms of % and ability to land KO hits. A lot of her strengths tend to end up being suffering while pika's become even more powerful.
Pikachu beats diddy for the same reason he does well vs sheik, hes formidable in the SH aerial game but when hes forced to use his grounded tools he becomes a much more limited character compared to pikachu. You can compare their tools on the ground to see this.
Sonic is more murky, but on paper the MU functions very similar to Brawl. Just replace a 0-40 chaingrab with 0-40 grab combos. The MU is very similar to Falcon v Pika in melee in that who ever commits to something first tends to lose, though jolt helps to alleviate the campiest aspects of "sit in spindash and wait".
