thanks derf, gr8 advice i really appreciate it. i like how active you seem to be on the ic boards with giving out info and helping people. i'll try to contribute more as i get better. also, is anyone else the only ic player in their region? it seems like im able to get away with a lot of shieldgrabs and stuff i shouldn't be able to because people dont know the matchup well.
no problem dude, knowledge is power. We all get better by sharing information, since we all interpret information differently.
You can learn from anyone, so feel free to contribute as much as you can, even if it feels trivial or obvious.
as for my region, I'm the only active IC in northern Ohio. There are a couple newer ICs that popped up, but they are still veeery new. I live in NEOH, which has a fairly combined community with Pittsburgh/Western PA, and I guess there are a couple ICs there that I just got to meet recently. I think they are also fairly new to the scene as well though.
Other than that I only ever see other ICs when I travel. There is one pretty decent IC in central ohio somewhere, but I almost never see him at anything (don't even know if he still plays, tbh).
So recently I've been having a lot of trouble against Falcon. In the last two tournaments I've been to I got knocked out by a Falcon each time.
This weekend I managed to get a best of 5 set recorded at a pretty small tournament's losers finals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeAdu8sC80A
The video is a full 20 minutes but if someone cares to watch you can see how I start being able to read his down air approaches (which he was spamming a whole lot) and intercept with uairs. The trouble is that when I hit one I don't really get much off of it and if I fail to intercept the Falcon gets huge damage on me and/or nana.
If anyone could suggest some decent follow ups out of uair that would be sweet and any other tips/analysis would be appreciated too.
I'm already aware that my edgeguarding was a bit dodgy and that I should definitely have been wobbling more.
I saw this yesterday, but didn't get a chance to watch until now, so here's what I can see:
Right off the bat, spawn positions yo. Port 2 is decent on a couple stages, but BF is not one of those. You get your go! desync, but you get stuck in a very dangerous position from the start (you don't gain anything being able to desync on the top platform anyway, and if your opponent is already p1, you don't have port priority no matter which port you are in). You didn't lose too much to it here, but it's a scary place to be. Especially against characters like falcon (fox is my least favorite). I've taken like 60% and lost my nana because of spawning up there before.
If you can't get port 1 on BF, always opt for neutral start.
first thing that really stands out to me, and it just something you get better at with time, you are making good use of your movement, but it's a little choppy at times. Particularly your ledgedashes, which you may be using a little too much (a common IC problem).
at 1:36 (your first death), this is just an awkward position to be in against falcon. When you used your double jump here, it limited the number of places you could be and he uaired and covered them all. Probably should have straight waited, which gives you the threat of double jumping, air dodging, or fast falling to the ledge if he jumped at you.
When you respawned, I have no idea why you are on that platform. A lot of people like to jump on platforms like idiots, but falcon is always just going to uair underneath you. I think you were trying to bait him into doing this while you were invincible and dsmashing his extended hitbox, but it didn't really work out for you and taking control of the stage probably would have been a lot better.
This lost you the small lead you did have, which forces you to have to approach falcon.
You already mentioned the dair approaches, so I won't go too into that, but just utilt or shield.
He is dairing a lot more than he should be, and it's wrecking your nana pretty hard.
at 2:05 good use of nana as bait.
but then that wd fsmash you went for was a little bit of an over extension, dsmash is faster and might have hit, but it looked like he sweetspotted, so it might have been better to just sit back a little bit and try and lock him on the ledge.
This gave him an opportunity to hit you offstage, then you kind of did a panic upB and lost nana.
At 2:27 going high over falcon is never safe. He just reacted to where you were going and uaired you.
you redeemed yourself at 2:39 by baiting him and using the actual invincible part of ICs ledgedash.
At this point I'm just going to say, overall, you should try to wall falcon a little more. It's hard for him to get around it due to how slow his moves are, so you can just cover the space he wants to come in at you very easily (watch for dj baits though).
Utilt and uair do this well.
Tbh, I'm not sure how great of a pick battlefield was. In general, I'm not a huge fan of it against falcon (although I prefer it to fd and dreamland). But the platforms are really good heights for him and the top platform can be irritating to deal with, even though he isn't really abusing it here.
at like 3:45-ish he just jumped and daired over your dsmash approach.
This is a big problem with dsmash (in this mu in particular), you have to mix up your approaches a little more. I a fan of mixing up utilts, up angled ftilts, and jabs against falcon. ftilt forces a knockdown and will sometimes catch him out of jump if he tries to space around utilt, utilt catches him out of jumping above you, and jab is great if you kind of wd through him and catch dash away or something.
around like 4:00-4:17ish you're just kind of freaking out and throwing out a bunch of smash attack and he's able to punish you for that. Don't under estimate the power of empty movement, especially when people are trying to keep you separated from nana.
A lot of times, you'll be able to save her just by threatening someone then reacting to what they do.
When you throw out smash attacks like that, you're locked in the animation and vulnerable, so they can either punish you directly or just secure the kill on nana.
I notice you go for a lot of dash attacks in neutral, and I don't think I've seen you hit with one yet.
Dash attack isn't bad, but I'd be a little more wary of the way you use it in neutral.
At 4:51 you could have punished that dsmash with WD OoS a little faster. It looked like you dropped your shield first, then wavedashed in, rather than jumping directly out of your shield.
When you jabbed you also didn't cancel with crouch fast enough for the jab->dsmash to connect, that was probably just a flub.
At 5:57 he sh daired over your dsmash approach again.
I only watched the first game so far, because it's really late for me right now, but I'll watch the rest later.
Right now I think the biggest things are to look at the way you approach and how he reacts to it.
You also ledgedash almost every time you are on the ledge, and ICs ledgedash kind of sucks since you're only invincible in the beginning, you didn't get punished for it very much, but it's something you should mix up a little more to be safe.
The other thing that really stood out to me is that I don't think I saw a single blizzard that entire game, which is a really important tool against falcon.
So yeah, hope that stuff helps, I'll watch some more tomorrow if I have time.
Out of curiosity, what does a double ICs team generally look like?
I've only seen it once, and that was when Nintendude and Chudat teamed together a few months ago. They managed to win the whole tournament, beating Cyrain and Tope in Grand Finals. It was really fun to watch.
Here's the set, if you're curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ulpi1iBLRE
I've talked about double ICs a couple times before, its a really interesting concept and I really don't think it's that bad of a team, just not many people can play it correctly (although I've actually seen chu play it a couple times), and some matchups are kind of hard for double IC to handle.
I liked the way chu and nintendude tried to keep control of center stage, but there are a lot of things they could have done a little better. The way double ICs works most effectively is when one IC goes in, the other walls the other opponent out. It's what it looked like they were going for by controlling center stage, but its kind of hard to do when there is a spacey on screen, so a lot of the time you have to just go in on the spacey really hard and wall out the other opponent if they are a character that doesn't handle the ICs projectile walls as well.
It also really helps to have an IC comfortable playing on platforms (which a lot of people aren't). This lets double ICs control a lot more vertical space since they can cover the holes in the other's projectile walls a lot better with proper positioning and stuff.
It requires a lot of awareness to be able to play the team correctly though, but I think double ICs is a ton of fun. It's definitely not the best team out there, but there are some ways to make it work.
