Everything wrong.
I honestly think Lucas is MUCH easier than most Mario players think he is, just if you use fireballs the same way as you would against Snake, that sucks. However you compete well enough with his spacing with B-airs really which more than makes up for it imo.
Spaced bairs from Mario would eat pkfire's from Lucas. And don't bother caping those pk fire's cause it does nothing for Mario, except leaves you open to be punished. There are pretty much 3 things to do, run away for a stalemate.. power shield for another stalemate... or read the pk fire, air dodge through, and punish the Lucas during his lag. Reason why power shielding is a stalemate is because Lucas would wave bounce away, and you'd be standing still from the power shielding, hence leaving the Lucas further away to be punished. And on top of that, if we just space bair's, other than pkfires, Lucas can also space fair's, which has a disjoint I believe, which makes it harder for us.
The key thing about Lucas that I think we don't take advantage of enough of are his HORRIBLE kill setups. Lucas is for the most part terrible at landing kills. You have to screw up about as badly against him as you do against Snake to get killed in that matchup, except he's weaker than Snake, his kill moves are less safe, and his kill moves are all easy to react to in general.
Lucas has plenty of kill set ups, I don't know which Lucas you are playing. There's the generic dair -> dtilt(lock) -> kill. I don't know the exact percentage that this works, but it's very generic.. all you can really do is tech the spike. However, if you tech the spike, careful of the tech chase. Pretty much what I do when I'm at high percentages is try my best not to be under Lucas.. which gets a bit hard cause he can full hop dair you. You can read this and punish him from the sides however. Other than this, there are other set ups as well.. his fsmash is fast for a kill move x.x
Two things Lucas happens to be bad at are hitting things above him, and hitting things that roll away from him. Just keep that in mind, because those are positions where you are generally very safe from him. He can't really juggle you unless you get lazy. And especially since his DA, U-smash, and dashgrab are all slow, he can't really do much to punish you hard if you simply roll backwards from him. He's also deceptively bad at punishing spotdodge. His grab duration is only 1 frame. His N-air while decent does little damage unless he lands a lot of hits. His D-smash also is much weaker on the late hits.
If you're above Lucas, all he has to do is utilt or uair.. These have pretty nice range.... and if Lucas reads the air dodge, he can just usmash... so let's not say it's safe to be above Lucas pl0x :[ It doesn't matter if he can't juggle you when he also puts up a lot of percentage per hit... There are also pk thunder shenanigans. Lucas' pivot grabs are a lot faster than dash grabs... if they dash grab, they're doing something wrong. Rolling backwards is bad as well, Lucas can just pk fire. Lucas nair auto cancels and can combo into itself, or ftilt(which can also kill). And I have no idea why you think Lucas is bad at punishing spot dodges, his dsmash stays out forever and hurts o.O
Honestly learn to use your normals better, and just be really patient. You don't need fireballs to come out ahead against Lucas because his normals aren't THAT spectacular. His aerials and F-tilt give him an okay spacing game, but he sucks at capitalizing quite a bit. I do think Ness is more difficult than Lucas for the simple fact that Ness's WAY superior grab lets him capitalize far better, even if Mario generally doesn't have trouble competing with their normals.
For once, I agree with you a LITTLE bit. If you can get in side Lucas, Mario's normal moves can destroy Lucas, until he gets away. However, although Lucas can absorb fireballs, you can still use it to get in.. just be smart about it, don't spam it like an idiot just trying to heal him. If you DO fireball and he absorbs.. if you're on the ground, IMO the best way to deal with it is run up, power shield the PSI magnet(a lot of people forget there's a hit box here), and punish. If you're in the air, Lucas can jump cancel the absorb.. just hope for a good read.
A few random crap:
- At low percent, Lucas can dthrow -> utilt.
- Lucas dsmash goes through pretty far, noticeably on Battlefield's lower platforms, and Smashville's platform.
- Lucas usmash from the ground reaches to the top of the platform of Battlefield.
- Fludd ***** Lucas' recovery.
- Most of the time when Lucas is trying to recover high, and you hear "pk fire", line up the horizontal trajectory and just nair... most of the time the Lucas is magnet pulling, and your nair would eat him.
- Grab Lucas, pummel, grab release, run and regrab... not a true combo but a lot of Lucas fear grab releases from various characters this will work once or twice xD Grab release to ftilt works based on the Lucas DI as well
- If you're near the edge, and manage to grab Lucas.. just grab release him into a fireball, a few things will happen(these are not guarantees, just what I noticed):
*Lucas will try to zair and the fireball will hit him forcing him to PK thunder(if you read this, run off bair works better)
*Lucas will panic and pk thunder.. fireball will cancel out pk thunder.
*Lucas will get hit by the fireball... extra 2-3% is always nice :D
*Lucas will absorb the fireball... just try to read his reaction from here.
*Lucas will double jump, fireball will cancel out the jump, and will force to PK thunder(FLUDD!!)
*Lucas will DI away, double jump away and try to PK thunder (FLUDD!!)
That's all I can really think of right now... Lucas does beat Mario in the match up, I like playing the edge game against Lucas though cause his options gets limited. Lucas CAN gimp Mario, but it's a gamble on the Lucas part(on ours too, but more over Lucas)
TL;DR - A2Z doesn't know what he's talking about.
