Ganon: Best and Worst match ups?

[Monk of MaZe]

When playing Ganondorf, who should I be wary of playing against and who should I be excited to face?

 

[CORY]

falco is miserable. like, almost "pick up a secondary to deal with this matchup" miserable. you're big and have low mobility, so he can completely dictate the pace of the match. if you can touch him (at early percents), you don't necessarily get much, since you'll end up having to do hard reads to get your combos. but if you get him offstage, you can touch him once and he's 90% dead.

ivy and snake make me feel similarly, but they don't control your movement quite as bad, and you can get some actual combos on them, rather than working for a lot of hard reads to hope for the best. shiek is also pretty not fun, almost as not fun as falco, just because she can stop your everything, especially if she decides to play patient and lame.

i find rob and wario to be not fun, but i don't know if it's just a mental block on them or if they're just bad matchups for real. wario feels like he baits you SUPER easy, but doesn't die easily, due to his weight and recovery options. i also just fall for shoulder bash from anything (i think this is entirely on me, though). rob just kinda locks out a lot of your options and can boost in from awkward angles for dorf to cover, but i also don't have much experience against rob, so this might just be on me.

for good matchups? well... i can't really think of any matchups explicitly in ganon's favor. you mostly get excited for characters that you can combo super well, like, marth or zard or something... i think the majority of his non terrible matches sit around the 50:50 range, tbh. you mostly play ganon because you beat people when you can outplay them straight up and then kill in 4 hits.

 

[mattphillyphan]

This is me guessing/being cynical

Pretty miserable:
Falco (to some extent Fox)
Link (smaller extent Toon Link)
Sheik


Doable, but tough:
Snake
Ivysaur
Rob
Wario


Basically, in my opinion, Ganon hates two things - ways to dictate the neutral (often with projectiles) and ways to ensure he's dead once he's off stage. Sheik and Falco have both of these, with Lasers and Needles, as well as a spike for Falco, and Sheik's amazing gimping ability. Fox rips you open because of a better neutral, but you also don't need to deal with lasers, bringing the difficulty down a bit, just don't get caught in shield - Ganon's OoS game sucks. Toon Link I find is less projectile heavy and has a slightly worse recovery than Link.

Characters in the second section often only excel at one, or they are good at both, but not great. Snake can zone with his entire kit and is decent at edgeguarding, but is very space reliant - a smaller stage makes this matchup more exciting. You're dead to bair offstage against Ivy, but she's light and easy to punish due to her B tether. Rob's got it all - weight, projectiles, recovery/gimpability, but if you manage to keep the space between you two to a minimum, and bait/punish boost canceled aerials, you negate half of ROB's kit. Wario is just unpredictable, and is amazing at edgeguarding Ganon, but his recovery is linear enough that you should have him dead if he's off stage.

Ganon doesn't have many great matchups, as stated by Cory. Instead, you wanna focus on playstyle vs. playstyle, player vs. player, and make the right call. I would only resort to a secondary for matchups you personally struggle with - I like having Peach for fast fallers, for example, and once in a WF's side of a tournament I counterpicked a Charizard with my DK to make it to grands - not because it was a bad matchup for Ganon, but because I (correctly) guessed that DK's combo game on Charizard would be more lethal than Ganon's "combo" game.

 

[CORY]

i agree with your rationale for your stuff, but i think tink is a lot rougher than link, tbh. tink's projectiles are more damaging than link's, iirc, and he's much faster, without too significant a loss in power or comboing ability.

i think link is easier to combo than tink, but i can't really say for sure. i haven't played many tinks and the one i would see most often locally is lunchables, who also happens to be a top level player and would run me over with just about whichever character he chooses...

 

[Strong Badam]

Please use the designated matchup thread for this kind of discussion.