Q&A -Fox Advice/Questions Topic-

[Brookman]

I thought tink played marth still.

 

[trahhSTEEZY]

bad stage control + goes off the stage and gets gimped often

 

[Fortress | Sveet]

Tink mains fox and marth and has like every character in the game for a secondary.

 

[Winston]

there are infinite mindgames in this game, you can't really list mindgames off, that would be defeating the purpose of a mindgame.

I think this is a sophism. Of course you can describe mindgames/list them/teach them/etc. You can also in a lot of ways describe playing smart overall. Having a lot of different "mindgames"/situation-specific tricks in your repetoire can be positive for your game.

The important skill is applying them in game organically though, and usually the best way to achieve this is to learn them yourself through experience, so if that's your point then I agree.

 

[trahhSTEEZY]

I think this is a sophism. Of course you can describe mindgames/list them/teach them/etc. You can also in a lot of ways describe playing smart overall. Having a lot of different "mindgames"/situation-specific tricks in your repetoire can be positive for your game.

The important skill is applying them in game organically though, and usually the best way to achieve this is to learn them yourself through experience, so if that's your point then I agree.

i just felt that listing off mind games could be kinda hard , since they involve manipulating a player specifically, rather than combos that are considered for the most part, consistent.

 

[Tero.]

professor pro looks good,but fuzz looks better..hope they come to a us tourny soon

fuzzy is legit
pro is just a trash talker

 

[trahhSTEEZY]

fuzzy is legit
pro is just a trash talker

he's not 'just' a trash talker lol, he's like one of the best foxes in the UK.

not sure about lately, but last time i was playing with pro in the uk a few months back, pro said he knocked fuzzy outta tourny. fuzzy's getting better but i wouldn't say he's noticeably better than prof.

 

[Reptar]

I was told by one KevinM that if I get good with spacies than my smash game will get much better, and I agree. so my question is, where do i start to learn Fox, i know the game so you dont have to take it easy, a fox synopsis if you will

 

[Tero.]

he's not 'just' a trash talker lol, he's like one of the best foxes in the UK.

not sure about lately, but last time i was playing with pro in the uk a few months back, pro said he knocked fuzzy outta tourny. fuzzy's getting better but i wouldn't say he's noticeably better than prof.

yeah cuz beeing the best fox in uk actually means something, lol

 

[trahhSTEEZY]

yeah cuz beeing the best fox in uk actually means something, lol

Lol, it means more than fuzzy being the best falcon in the UK, considering the ratio of fox's to falcons there.

I was told by one KevinM that if I get good with spacies than my smash game will get much better, and I agree. so my question is, where do i start to learn Fox, i know the game so you dont have to take it easy, a fox synopsis if you will

learn to SHFFL consistently with him, it's not that easy. produce a solid grab game. learn to waveshine -> whatever properly.

i'd say learn shinegrabs also. being able to grab immediately after you know they're gonna shield your shine is great. i feel it'll be a standard in spacie play pretty soon.

 

[Tomacawk]

I thought tink played marth still.

Tink plays whoever he mariwannas.

 

[TemPesT-]

I was told by one KevinM that if I get good with spacies than my smash game will get much better, and I agree. so my question is, where do i start to learn Fox, i know the game so you dont have to take it easy, a fox synopsis if you will

just emulate what you see pro's do if you actually know the game. you see a fox shffl a nair on a specific char and it works? try it out yourself. everyone knows what makes fox good, its just hard doing it.

otherwise why not just look at the fox guides?

sorry i'm so unhelpful

 

[Reptar]

just emulate what you see pro's do if you actually know the game. you see a fox shffl a nair on a specific char and it works? try it out yourself. everyone knows what makes fox good, its just hard doing it.

otherwise why not just look at the fox guides?

sorry i'm so unhelpful

to tell you the truth the advice wasnt unhelpful, but ill start surfing the fox vids, its kind of habit to just ask the boards when im starting a new project

 

[Winston]

I was told by one KevinM that if I get good with spacies than my smash game will get much better, and I agree. so my question is, where do i start to learn Fox, i know the game so you dont have to take it easy, a fox synopsis if you will

combo stuff:

-drill -> waveshine -> grab/usmash on characters that don't fall over from shine. Don't try to do nair -> waveshine as a standard option since it doesn't combo usually and they can hit you with something.
-grab combos on spacies - uthrow CG on FD, and on flat ground if you want. Uthrow utilt/nair/weak bair/etc. when the cg ends, and just follow up with what you can. If they land on platforms uair/drill/waveland/bair/etc. depending on percent and what tech option you think they'll do.
-techchasing spacies/falcon on reaction. lets you consistently follow up uthrow usmashes and nairs when they DI away.
-juggle combos on semi-floaties, mostly marth. Just be quick about your aerials and follow up. Work in utilts when appropriate.
-uthrow uair on floaties

other stuff:

-learn how to get around simple dd camping vs your short hop approaches by aiming farther back, running shine, baiting it and forcing them to retreat, etc.

There are a lot of fox styles that work so it's pretty hard to give a "synopsis" haha. But the bread and butter combos are a necessity.

 

[ChivalRuse]

Nair/weak bair -> JC'ed up-smash on non-fastfallers is definitely a bread and butter Fox combo.

 

[Tero.]

Lol, it means more than fuzzy being the best falcon in the UK, considering the ratio of fox's to falcons there.

dude, you know like ... nothing

Fuzzy is best in the UK by a large margin
va might be ok, haven't played him yet, but the rest sucks

UK is bad, even though they're steppin it up lately

 

[Brookman]

im too tired

 

[omgwtfToph]

my ***** noobking beat fuzzyness in a $20 falcon ditto money match sooooooooooooo whatever 8D

edit: otto if you see this, i have like 15 minutes of free time at work, get on fb lol (no aim)

 

[KirbyKaze]

Mostly Chexr's stuck on the ground and sidestepping / rolling / shielding out of fear / panic and Tink responds by grabbing or throwing sword moves at him. Which, conveniently enough, beat all the things Chexr is doing.

He fails to punish a lot of consistent recovery choices by Tink after he's thrown him offstage.

Second game is better but he's still almost always trying to go in with grab or shine --> grab. Or with a full jump / double jump aerial. I think he's trying to avoid Marth's move and then come down on him.

He U-smashes when he could hit Tink offstage and try for an edgeguard. U-smash unless it's at combo percent or kill percent isn't that good.

 

[FoxLisk]

you can't enumerate mindgames because 'mindgames' is the label given to when you predict your opponent and pull off some punish that you could not have done without a hard read.

you can enumerate many little tricks that will catch players off guard a lot of the time. like tomahawk grab. that's not a mindgame unless you know a habit of your opponent's; it's just another trick to try sometimes. people tend to call these kinds of things mindgames, but really it's just trying something unorthodox to see if your opponent falls for it. it's only a mindgame once you're deliberately punishing a specific habit of your opponent's.

for example: in falco vs marth, marths tend to be grab happy, so against a marth player i'll laser towards them, then jump in and waveland back to fake them out and them fsmash if I was right and they whiffed the grab. this isn't a mindgame, it's just knowledge of how most people play the matchup.

today I kept losing to my friend's marth that I haven't played in a while. I realized that he was playing way too aggressively and I was playing a style that works against campy marths but is too cautious for an aggressive marth. I picked up on a few situations where he would run in and just grab me and started punishing this. Like if I was coming in from high (off a platform or a FH) he kept expecting me to land with an aerial so he'd either dash attack me out of it or wait and then grab me. so i started just wavelanding (either towards him into shine or away into fsmash) and caught him a bunch of times. that was a mindgame because I had caught on to one of his specific habits, faked the action he was used to punishing me for, and punished his attempted punish.

 

[Brookman]

bad /10

 

[JPOBS]

it's only a mindgame once you're deliberately punishing a specific habit of your opponent's.

i disagree.

pretty much anything can be a mindgame, and it doesnt just have to be you punishing a specific habit or anything. Just messing with their head by DD outside their shield for example.

almost anything you do can be a mindgame. not that I really care lol

 

[FoxLisk]

eh, i dont think so. that's only a mindgame if it's going to work against your opponent. otherwise it's just silliness.

in any case, my point is really that mindgames is a tremendously overused word with no clear definition.

 

[Winston]

To the rest of the fox boards: sorry for cluttering your thread with this nonsense... I like debating about stuff

in any case, my point is really that mindgames is a tremendously overused word with no clear definition.

This is true, but that doesn't prevent mindgames from being described, even with your definition. It just adds more to the description required.

For example, if you consider "tomahawk grab" not a mindgame, then under your definition "if you notice that they tend to sit in shield and wait for you to hit their shield before acting a lot, then tomahawk grab sometimes" would be.

But yeah, "mindgames" used to be such a terrible overused term. Nobody uses it that way anymore though. I don't see the problem with it having a definition similar to "situation-specific trick that works because it plays on the opponents' expectations and/or by using misleading visual cues". That gives it a separate and still descriptive/applicable definition from "reads/punishing habits".

 

[ChivalRuse]

I mindgame people by being bad.

 

[mers]

I mindgame people by being bad.

Joking aside, doing dumb **** is often really smart.

You know how playing against really really bad players is frustrating because all of the cool **** you know doesn't work on them? Try to be that way against your opponent, in specific little ways.

I guess this can be better stated by "being unorthodox" but it's something to think about.

I remember s2j saying something about Mango's tech patterns being nooby as hell, which is another good example of what I mean.

 

[JPOBS]

Mindgames son!

 

[Brookman]

Joking aside, doing dumb **** is often really smart.

You know how playing against really really bad players is frustrating because all of the cool **** you know doesn't work on them?

...I play the same way against bad kids as I do against good kids.

Running around in the game like your head is missing isn't good/cool. Take a lesson from this and you might find yourself able to compete with m2k ;]

 

[mers]

...I play the same way against bad kids as I do against good kids.

Running around in the game like your head is missing isn't good/cool. Take a lesson from this and you might find yourself able to compete with m2k ;]

I'm not trying to say "LOL PLAY BAD ITS 2 GUD LOL!"

Just that doing the most logical or seemingly safest thing is sometimes worse than doing something unorthodox or bad.

I remember some really really old interview where some pro (maybe Ken?) was talking about Azen. He said something to the effect of "Azen always does the best thing for any situation, which makes him easy to predict." Obviously, this worked for Azen most of the time, and generally it's good to play smart. However, playing intentionally "dumb" can sometimes get you results that you wouldn't have otherwise attained.

Another example: some YouTube video where an extremely unconventional Fox get whipped by M2K. At one point, the Fox player kills M2K with fall off platform > waveland > utilt, and according to the comments M2K's reaction was "waveland to uptilt? Who does that?"

 

[ZoSo]

It was M2K who said that about Azen.

 

[FoxLisk]

This is true, but that doesn't prevent mindgames from being described, even with your definition. It just adds more to the description required.

For example, if you consider "tomahawk grab" not a mindgame, then under your definition "if you notice that they tend to sit in shield and wait for you to hit their shield before acting a lot, then tomahawk grab sometimes" would be.

But yeah, "mindgames" used to be such a terrible overused term. Nobody uses it that way anymore though. I don't see the problem with it having a definition similar to "situation-specific trick that works because it plays on the opponents' expectations and/or by using misleading visual cues". That gives it a separate and still descriptive/applicable definition from "reads/punishing habits".

yup. if i've noticed that my opponent sits in shield when i jump towards him and tomahawk grab him for that reason, then it's a mindgame. if i try it on an unknown opponent and it works, it was just a trick that happened to work.

the problem is there's no real words for the different things. People generally think of standard play as like "camp until you see an opening and then capitalize on it," or "approach safely and cover as many options as you can" and things like that, and so all these little movement tricks that have become standard, like triangle jumping and tomahawk grabbing and so on and so forth are labeled "mindgames" when they're not, particularly, they're standard baiting and tricking procedures that work on most players when used sparingly, just like anything else in standard play.

So a tomahawk grab is pretty much an element of standard play at this point, because it has been demonstrated to be useful in a number of matchups against a large number of players. Perhaps we need a separate word for this group of actions, but I think what most people mean by mindgames is actively tricking your specific opponent. A trick that would work against dozens or hundreds of players in a situation is not a mindgame, it's just you hoping your opponent is one of those players. A trick that works specifically on your given opponent that wouldn't generally work on most other players is a mindgame. At least that's how I think it should be defined.

Also I'm overloading the word trick: i'm using it to mean something along the lines of "non-straightforward movement" and also to mean "deceive your opponent," which I shouldnt be but don't feel like fixing after the fact.

Relatedly, I also think that a lot of people consider conditioning someone and then capitalizing on it to be a mindgame. I don't really agree, I think this is basically just the fundamental reason that mixups work, but it's closer than the first group of now-standard movement tricks that i was describing.

psst: fox boards, if we're boring you, we can take it to PMs if there's more to say.

 

[Brookman]

yup. if i've noticed that my opponent sits in shield when i jump towards him and tomahawk grab him for that reason, then it's a mindgame. if i try it on an unknown opponent and it works, it was just a trick that happened to work.

no. . . That's still mind games.

also,

Joking aside, doing dumb **** is often really smart.

You know how playing against really really bad players is frustrating because all of the cool **** you know doesn't work on them?

I think you missed my point entirely. You mention that playing against bad players is frustrating . . . which means you'r ebad yourself. That's all I was trying to say. Never once did I assume you were promoting playing 'stupid' as a good idea, I just simply noted that you're bad.


To be clear: All the cool **** you know probably doesn't work against good players any better than it works on a bad player.


And I assume by bad you mean someone who doesn't play in tournaments but they still play, and probably have a decent enough head on their shoulders to understand how to FSmash your approach with marth.

miritE?

 

[JPOBS]

Foxlisk, i dont think mindgames should be defined to "taking advantage of a specific habit of your opponent"

You seem to be brushing off effectiveness of a tomahawk on a random opponent (say, first time u ever try and it works) as just being a "trick"
Sure its a "trick", but imo, and mindgame is absolutely ANYTHING that plays on the general expectations of the opponent, no matter how small.

what you're describing sees more like "adapting" to me. i.e. you realize your opponent has a habit, so you just punish it. I personally dont consider that a mindgame
but now we seem to be grasping straws and arguing semantics so whatever.

so...how bout that shine eh?

 

[Brookman]

Right, I think we need to change the subject ot something more tangible and productive.



Let's talk about REVIVAL OF MELEE THREE!!

who is going??

 

[Palpi]

I am not going

 

[trahhSTEEZY]

i am not either =[ armada was almost going to rom 3 too.

im going to don't go down there jeff, anyone else going?

 

[Winston]

Right, I think we need to change the subject ot something more tangible and productive.



Let's talk about REVIVAL OF MELEE THREE!!

who is going??

I am!

But I'm not a fox main!

I think there's like a 50% chance I will be in 6 months to a year though.

 

[RaynEX]

More Fox mains make the world a better place.


Also, what the hell happened a few pages ago? People be waggin their ***** at each other about teams and ****.

 

[Wenbobular]

I'm going! Wahoo!

 

[Sinji]

More Fox mains make the world a better place.


Also, what the hell happened a few pages ago? People be waggin their ***** at each other about teams and ****.

I agree fox mains make the world bright.