Diddy vs Fox

[Cuccu Maestro]

This matchup is looking terrible. Diddy can chaingrab fox to death once he hits 40%, but before then fox can cc every single move you have besides grab. Fox is much better at grabbing onstage bananas than Diddy, and his moveset while holding a banana is ridiculously strong. A random banana throw is very likely to end up giving Fox an advantage due to his superior mobility (This isn't always happening at all currently, but that's because Foxes are terrible at banana tech atm).

Uptilt and upsmash are punished on hit below 40%
dtilt gets cc grabbed unless perfectly spaced while not sliding forwards (for 8% damage only, still one of the better options diddy has here)
Every landing aerial can be cc punished except tipper fair, rising aerials can be retreating or crossing up to avoid punishment but they are all blockable and single hit and crossing up safely will put you in the corner in many situations
Pulling a banana in neutral is almost always punisheable (cutesie b reverses are just a gimick, that **** doesn't work long term), as is shooting a peanut in neutral

Grabbing, tipper dtilt out of a wavedash or standing (not out of a run), tipper fair, retreating and crossup aerials are the only options I see as viable vs sub 40% fox, other than punishing huge dumb mistakes which any character can do. The other option is airdodging into your own aerial peanuts and using them as thrown items, which is cool and actually has a place in this matchup since banana pulls require a knockdown or knockaway to achieve and you aren't going to do that to sub 40% fox.

Retreating fair is good for beating nair approaches luckily! Well, trading with them moreso but it's still in diddy's favour. Bair is also very good with wavelands and doublejump instant bair again, and RAR to help maintain a bit of control here.
I don't want to give up this character but this matchup is killing me (the best players in my region and the regions that surround me all play fox in PM, this matchup is a serious problem).

What have I missed? What can diddy do to fox at the start of a fox stock that isn't just punishing fox for being stupid?

 

[Soft Serve]

Nothing, it's a 70/30 mu.

I'll post more thoughts on the mu tonight, diddy has tools but it's all through tech chasing, corner carying, and not dropping an edge guard

 

[Cuccu Maestro]

The main thing is grounded foxes at that low %. Most of the success I see Diddys have is when the Fox decides to leave the ground. This is made much worse by Diddys taking Fox to green hill zone and FD, where fox has even less of a reason to leave the ground. Intercepting fox as he maneuvers around platforms is good. 3 platform stages are good I'm thinking.

 

[Soft Serve]

Okay, on the chaingrab, I havent gotten To test DIs, but with no di the earliest you can regrab is 28%. At 25% you can pummel and up throw, with no di you can regrab. DI like you said makes it start around 40, I think it starts at like 37% if they DI out (you have too dash jc grab ) and if they DI in it's around 34%, but you can't do a turn because the animation is too long, you have to do a dash >pivot grab, marth style.

honestly this mu is one I don't think we should pull the banana out for. I don't think it helps at all. All it does is remove our best convertion tool, grab,and take away our best anti airs. Running shine approaches just **** on diddy if he has banana in hand.

our main hope is to get a knock down of any kind and take a stock off it. Tech chase like we are falcon, gimp like we are marth. If we drop a conversion we have to go back to neutral which is a hell hole for us. Throws/dtilts/dsmashes for tech chasing and corner carry. Upthrow combos if we can get them, just make sure we end the combos with s horizontal move. Get fox off stage, work hard on the edge guard.

I spent a lot of time practicing edgeguarding fox, and the main solution is to just not be afraid. Ideally you want to hard read his up b path and fair it, but that's ****ing hard. My solution so far is to sort of flow chart it. If I have time, I shoot peanuts at him to try to force ahim to recover low. I sh out and drop just below the ledge as he approaches the ranges of recovery. then I react to his option. If he side bs, I just and intercept with upair, if you positioned you self correctly off stage you should be Able to up b to ledge and hold it for the gimp. If he starts upb within range of hitting him, you can go for it. If he is out of range, side b back to ledge and react to his angle. If he goes for ledge roll, if he goes straight up air/nair/bair it, if he goes high try to intercept and call his drift path. If I force him low, I just grab ledge and bair/reverse hit upair until he can't make it past the ledge, then it's a simple edge guard.

I think it's 70/30 fox. I think it's the only mu that pulling the banana out doesn't just not help, but hurt our neutral vs fox because he just doesn't care about it. We have to be on point with our punish game and make every little hit convert into a stock. It's possible, every knock down should be a stock if we play optimal. Getting g the knock down is hard as balls though.


Once I get mywii back and dig up throw angle release stuff for upthrow, I'll go into debug and map out to the best of my ability upthrow and the tech chase/regrab/combo tree that stems from it, % and stuff. I'm going to need help optimizing the neutral game vs fox, because Between our dash dance, bairs, and instant up airs we have the ability to punish/stop/covert off of bad approaches. It's very doable but hard. Like you said grounded foxes are our worst enemy, I can't think of what to do vs just DD>running shine centered foxes.

 

[Chesstiger2612]

The thing Diddy has going for him are his disjointed aerials. The strategy of a fake-approach->WD back/real approach mixup seems to work better than relying on projectiles, Fox is fast enough to punish using bananas and in some situations even peanuts. Down-tilt is an important neutral tool because you could space it in a way you can't get shieldgrabbed and you are CCing if Fox does an aerial. Retreating fairs can sometimes catch them offguard after dashing in.
Still, it is a bad matchup.

 

[Cuccu Maestro]

Did some experimenting last night and found that diddy can upthrow tech chase on reaction vs Fox starting at 0%. You can upthrow instant jab to cover missed tech and then tech chase from there. If he DIs out then you can dash in after jab for sure, because a single dash dance trot back will perfectly cover roll in. If he DI's in it is harder, depending on % he can go too far behind you for jab's hind-most hitbox to reset him and I haven't done frame by frame to see if pivot jab is as effective for letting you still tech chase on reaction afterwards. If you upthrow tech chase on reaction from 0,fox is a lot more likely to DI the 30% upthrow so it is safer to go for a jab reset into tech chase than a regrab or a jab before he lands.

I also found you can tech chase him off of any of diddy's other throws (they all knock down at 0%,and don't put him on a platform until mid %) but I'm not sure if there is an easy way to cover missed tech and roll out/in all at once off of say, a dthrow. It is decently likely for Fox to miss the tech too, if the weird different throw surprises him because he is used to upthrow.
I believe you actually have to use non upthrow if you are grabbing him next to the ledge, because below 40% a di offstage will give him ledge snap before you can follow up. I think you can probably just fthrow Fox in that situation into an edgeguards though.

I completely disagree that bananas shouldn't be pulled in the matchup. First of all banana pull on kill let's you circle camp Fox in the air to waste his invincibility. Tossing out bananas in a forward banana throw isn't safe at all (unless if it misses it will fly offstage which is fine besides having no banana left, much better than Fox getting banana) but zdrop and agts where you move diddy horizontal and throw the banana straight down are very good for counterapproach and to mix Fox up. Aerial approaches where you zdrop into fair or Nair are very good. Also good old fashioned grounded glide toss downwards banana throw through, away or if you are ballsy towards Fox is very good as a mixup, covering his options in weird ways that Fox is much more comfortable not having to deal with.
vs Fox the importance of iagts off of grounded bananas really comes out. He can punish hanging out with a banana in hand as you said (though you really should be hyper mobile with bananas in hand considering they give you a third omni directional jump) but iagts of grounded bananas let's you full threaten banana approaches and anti approaches while still retaining all of your non banana options (retreating fair if he tries to Nair in, for example), AND it is already covering tech chase options if you get a random tick hit aerial knockdown. You want hardly any spring resistance on your triggers to iagt grounded bananas though, at least it makes it way easier to get that hard press.

Its important to use bananas and even regular throw them at fox's face sometimes in the matchup though, to keep Fox honest more than anything. He can approach you any way he likes if he isn't the slightest bit scared that you'll actually throw the banana at him. If it hits it's often a kill too. The problem is how punishable a banana pull is when you need it most, at the low % where grounded Fox is so potent.

I actually quit Diddy in the new year due to how bad this matchup is, having played diddy since October 2013 in pm and mained him in brawl back in 2010-11. I've kept revisiting the matchup hoping to find something I could do to swing the tide in my favour, and this tech chase on reaction thing is it I believe (and retreating fair to beat Nair, I didn't do that before Xd). Before I would just try to hard read tech chase, and often get 10% damage and a reset to neutral for my grab. Knowing that grab at 0 should still lead to more grabs guaranteed really helps me here.

M2K said on fb he believes the matchup is actually bad for Fox, for what it's worth. Maybe we just have to take our punish strings farther?

Some things that help me you probably already do are to always double check % on grab lest you drop your opportunity to take a full stock, always go for Waveland regrab if you can when you upthrow onto a platform (diddy's big shield can take quite a few getup attacks). When tech chasing take the moment to make sure they don't tech in place FIRST, before dashing (I don't believe diddy is fast enough to dash dance cover tech in place and tech roll, while still jabbing to cover missed tech) to cover tech roll. Dash attack off platform fast fall into instant grab or dtilt is so helpful. Try to stay grounded except to meet Fox air to air. When edgeguarding far recoveries, dash attack offstage into upair or fair is quote good.

Can anyone explain to me when you should bthrow offstage and when you should dthrow? I mostly just dthrow, but beyond the slightly lower trajectory arc I'm not clear on why I should do which one, and if there are sometimes where the other one is better (bthrow is faster animation so harder to DI maybe??)

It feels good to be back on Diddy

 

[Chesstiger2612]

If you get the opportunity to use the down-B (on KO mostly), then it is fine. I always find it hard to pull the banana against Fox without getting punished.

It can sometimes be very important to make most out of that free one banana per stock, because every extra one can bes risky or costly.

After a back-glide down-toss, if you hold forward after the glide toss, you can instantly pick the banana up again. It provides walling options that take very little banana duration time.

Also, I don't think Mew2King is an authority at evaluating matchups, despite all his skill as a player.

 

[Soft Serve]

Yeah I agree the banana definitely has uses, and should be pulled between stocks because it can start the tech chases that you need to get stocks, etc. Although there are almost no situations where you could pull it out without getting punished or giving up stage control. Also if the fox takes the banana and knows the item play, the mu gets that much worse. Running shine>jc item toss, no thanks.

Bair walls can be used well to maintain your position on stage and stuff out some bad approaches, as well as coverting into tech chases once you reach a certain % (which I will find what % it knocks down later this week). Our dash dance game is only a bit worse than foxes, and dtilt is very good for netting grabs and knocking down. However be careful because if he catches onto it fox can cc shine our dtilt until high %s.

Neutral is really rough, the punish games are very strong on both sides, although we need to rack up some % until it becomes incredibly potent. Both characters can edge guard each other very well, and have all the tools to cover all options on reaction if they position well and control ledge correctly.

I think fox is our worst MU, followed by peach. 70/30 could be a stretch but it's definitely worse than 60/40. Fox runs us down, and his shield pressure is so hard for us to deal with, expecially because if we glide toss OoS to get away, and throw towards him, he can just hold shine and he gets a tech chase plus banana control, and if we don't throw it towards him, it's reacting to a quicker roll for the most part. If fox wasn't faster than us, and shine bair edgeguarding (waveland upsmash punish our landing lag if we upb high, on reaction ) wasn't so free, the mu wouldn't be so bad.


I'm not going to turn this into a "man **** fox, character is so stupid" Post. We have tools to win games vs fox and we should maximize how to use them. I'm going to try to get more practice vs good foxes, we only have a few smart foxes and they don't really like pm too much. Learning the mu vs a braindead fox doesn't help me at all lol.

 

[Soft Serve]

Also dtilting/dsmashing/fsmashes with banana in hand is very very important in this mu, as well as jump z drop bair and have it auto cancel (if you're frame perfect you can sh z drop bair wl) to have banana and still access to our good neutral tools while still having banana In hand.

Dtilt/smash you crawl and then do the moves, fsmash you hold a Button set to attack and then flick cstick horizontaly. Not sure how well known the fsmash one is