Here's some Pyra/Mythra insights based on lots of playing the character. Specifically, how to play neutral.
Mythra has the dream combo: she's fast with a disjoint. But some playstyles are closed off to her because of specific limitations:
- She falls too fast to play the aerial spacing game that other sword characters like Lucina and Ike can play. This limits playstyle comparisons to those employed by other fastfallers, but:
- She doesn't have the safety on shield of fellow fast swordies Roy and Chrom, so she can't run up and pressure your defense too well
- Her reward on hit is so bad sometimes that she doesn't benefit from taking risks like other fastfalling aggro characters like Fox
On the last point: characters like Fox, Roy, Chrom, ZSS, and Pikachu often rely on a concept you may have heard before called "overshooting"--in neutral, this means reading your opponent's roll, jump, or dash back and extending your approach forward or delaying your button press to react. These characters tend to overshoot because they have both good reward when they do get a hit, justifying the risk taken by entering their opponent's zone, and also because they enjoy the positional advantage created by catching an opponent retreating closer to the ledge.
Mythra enjoys positional advantage at kill percents because of Lightning Buster kills at the ledge, but otherwise, it often doesn't matter
where you win neutral, as long as you are certain to win neutral.
So, you should pick options in neutral that give you the highest chance of winning neutral, i.e., Mythra should play it safe. These are the safest options:
- pivot grab approaches. Mythra's pivot grab is huge, and this lets her win neutral more convincingly against characters who would otherwise threaten to dominate her with high-reward burst options like Meta Knight and Captain Falcon. These characters don't have projectiles, so they have to run at Mythra, and when you run at Mythra, you're susceptible to pivot grab.
- dash attack landings. Landing lag in this game is low, but Mythra both low profiles with her dash attack and has one of the fastest/best dash attacks in the game. In neutral, she can just dash back and forth and throw in some empty hops, and thanks to her huge initial dash and fastfall speed it's very hard to tell when she's going to swing or where she's going to end up. Some characters must preemptively space an attack while "guessing" her intended destination, and she can punish that guess with a dash attack on reaction.
- b-air aerials. Mythra b-air is one of the best aerials in the game at winning aerial neutral interactions because of the hurtbox compression and speed. Against characters without aerial disjoint, like Mario, you can force the opponent into the air with your movement, and then simply b-air them to win neutral cleanly.
- d-air zoning. Mythra can jump against common midrange zoning options like Belmont f-tilt and cover a diagonal angle that zoners aren't often well-equipped to cover. Mythra curls into a ball during d-air so it's very hard to punish her if this move is well spaced.
- lightning buster jumps. If an opponent with low fall speed happens to jump, or any opponent double jumps, Mythra can dash in underneath and charge a Lightning Buster, and there's nowhere for the opponent to safely go--there's a disjoint above her during the charge, and Mythra can choose left or right before the landing, so neither side is safe. (Mythra can throw out Lightning Buster in a wide variety of neutral situations, actually; jumping opponents are just particularly noteworthy)
On this list, both pivot grab and dash attack have easy counterplay. If you are giving up space to pivot grab or dashing back to prepare to dash attack the opponent's landing from a distance, the opponent can just run up and shield or take up more space as a response. As Mythra, you can then mix in dash grabs to punish this behavior.
I'm not sold on Foresight being strong in neutral outside of punishing multihits on shield and certain projectiles. It just isn't worth the risk to spotdodge or roll back as Mythra when there are less risky movement options to consider.
I don't think swap is particularly good in most grounded neutral situations, but volumes could be written about its situational applications. For example, after Mythra expends her double jump, she can swap, maintain aerial momentum, and end up spacing a safe aerial as Pyra. Many slower characters don't have non-commital options to punish this, and have to risk losing to a Mythra b-air if they try to get in position and she doesn't go for the swap. Since b-air doesn't offer much reward on its own, it's worth using this particular mixup more when your opponent is at kill percents, since you can b-air into a landing trap with Lightning Buster.
Photon Edge catches opponents who favor jumps, but the risk-reward is just not there to use this move unless you're trapping a landing. Thoroughly mediocre neutral tool, imo; Mythra simply has better options for doing similar things, but with additional precision requirements. If you're maining Mythra, you should have the precision needed to use those better tools.
I think the common pattern with everything I've said about Mythra is: attack only in super favorable conditions. She's a patience character. Optimally played, she exerts psychological pressure on opponents and says, "do something, because I won't--but bewarned, no matter what you do, I'm going to punish you for it."
I think this makes Mythra particularly good at killing, too. Mythra's smashes are all good, and running up with up-smash, d-smash, and f-smash to punish an opponent who acted a hair too early should be the source of many of your kills (the rest come from Lightning Buster setups at the ledge, which are outside of the scope of this post).
But now let's talk about Pyra, who seems much more limited in neutral but still plays an important part.
First, I don't think that Pyra is particularly good for killing opponents from neutral. If you have a lead, you can space retreating b-airs and most characters struggle to approach through Pyra's large active hitboxes. But if you don't, it's hard to land a hit that will actually kill an opponent. Pyra needs to be close to the ledge to kill due to her high base knockback and limited knockback growth, but she doesn't have the mobility to put opponents there or get there by herself in neutral. From center stage, Pyra f-air won't be killing a jumping Mario, for example. You'd much rather use Mythra here, give up some stage control to f-throw Mario toward the edge, and try to ledgetrap/edgeguard/read an airdodge.
So when do you use Pyra in neutral? It depends on two things.
First, Blazing End. This is a strong neutral tool that you can use out of swap too, but its mileage varies a lot based on the matchup. It's not always worth playing Pyra against zoners even with Blazing End because Mythra already has strong tools (dash + Foresight) to deal with projectile zoning, but some specific styles of zoning make it work. The Snake matchup comes to mind as a noteworthy case where Blazing End actually makes playing Pyra more comfortable than playing Mythra in the neutral. Despite pocket, I also think the same goes for Villager/Isabelle, who rely on jumping to start their zoning.
Second, the opponent's OOS game. When your opponent has really good, punishing options OOS, but is generally too slow to get to a good position to use OOS against you unless you approach, Pyra is the best bet. Game and Watch comes to mind here. You don't want to risk getting confirmed into smashes or 10000000% damage from Game and Watch up-b because you tried to dash grab him with Mythra, so you can just space safe aerials with Pyra instead. d-tilt and f-tilt are really good in matchups like these too. Luigi, Dr. Mario, etc. seem to be matchups where you would rather play Pyra in neutral.
Outside of that, Pyra is also significantly stronger on platform stages, so sometimes you can swap to Pyra for the mixups there. You can use Blazing End to cover platform mixups (think of Roy/Chrom alternating rising and falling aerials on platforms), while using the platforms to cover lots of space yourself. d-air is the best move for a wide variety of platform-related situations, but Pyra's other aerials are good last-second mixups when an opponent is anticipating d-air spacing.
If you feel more comfortable using Pyra in a particular matchup for whatever reason, you can try to play the Lucina game of delaying the decision of which aerial to use until the last possible moment. Jump, possibly double jump, use air speed to position, evaluate opponent's position, then use the correct aerial. If an opponent is right below, tomahawk grab is also pretty good and you can often land at a safe space to use it since Pyra's grab is big.
Overall, though, I think neutral is mostly the Mythra show with a little bit of judicious Pyra use sprinkled in. In advantage, of course, Pyra is much stronger at low- and mid-percent ledgetrapping, as well as trapping landings with active hitboxes, but that's a topic for a different day.
They're a very strong character, and if the neutral play is optimized I could see them being top 5, though I think top 25 is a safer bet for now. It's been really fun to try to optimize the neutral for this one.
