How many mains is too much?

[IncomingGhost]

So, my friend avidly plays PM and likes to think of himself as a competitive player. He mains (I already told him 3 was too much) and recently said that he also picked up as mains, not secondaries. He ALSO said that he's taking my advice to stick to 1 character with a grain of salt because he's really improving.



Here's a video of him playing for anyone interested. He's beanzofchaos

 

[Narpas_sword]

You either have 1 main or none.

If you can play a bunch of character well, they're all secondaries.
It's a main once you select one to play.

Imo, your main is the one you pick when you are in a double blind situation.

 

[ECHOnce]

3 is actually where I'd top it off. I tried maining 4-5 characters for a long time, but your secondaries start to drop off if you don't practice their movement (and it's hard to get comfortable with going back and forth between them, if they're too different). I'd suggest going for two, but you can be flexible and do three if two of them feel similar. If he's an outlier, and is better than the average person and maintaining several mains, maybe 4ish. Although there are players out there that "main" upwards of 6-7 characters (I know someone who's on my state's Melee PR that just counterpicks using any of the top tiers, without any preference), I feel like...once you get past 3, you're holding yourself back. Since all the time you spend maintaining good movement for all 4+ of those characters could instead be used to focus heavily on just the 2-3 you enjoy more or feel more comfortable with.

EDIT: I was throwing around the term "main" a bit loosely here. I agree with Narpas, in that you can really only have one "best" character, even if that goes back and forth between 2-3 characters you're proficient with. What I meant to say was you should try keep it to 1 main, and 1-2 secondaries to cover each others' bad MUs.

 

[IncomingGhost]

3 is actually where I'd top it off. I tried maining 4-5 characters for a long time, but your secondaries start to drop off if you don't practice their movement (and it's hard to get comfortable with going back and forth between them, if they're too different). I'd suggest going for two, but you can be flexible and do three if two of them feel similar. If he's an outlier, and is better than the average person and maintaining several mains, maybe 4ish. Although there are players out there that "main" upwards of 6-7 characters (I know someone who's on my state's Melee PR that just counterpicks using any of the top tiers, without any preference), I feel like...once you get past 3, you're holding yourself back. Since all the time you spend maintaining good movement for all 4+ of those characters could instead be used to focus heavily on just the 2-3 you enjoy more or feel more comfortable with.

Watch the video and judge for yourself whether he's an outlier haha

 

[ECHOnce]

Watch the video and judge for yourself whether he's an outlier haha

TBH I didn't watch past the 1st minute or so, since I don't think a single vid would be enough for me to determine if his skill in characters is dropping as he picks up more "mains," or if his improvement is slowing down as he picks up more.

If you're looking for ways to communicate this to him, or to get him to see things in your light, I'd stop telling him about it. If you two go about 50-50 in friendlies, over time he'll probably realize that you may start overtaking him in skill a bit, by playing only 1-2 characters and becoming as proficient as you can with them, instead of balancing improvement out across various characters. That's what happened to me lol. I mained Zelda/Sheik and secondaried a good 3-4 characters for a few months. It worked out for a while, but within half a year, my friend who stuck to just Sheik started beating me consistently, and he was taking on higher levels of players because he didn't have to worry about juggling different MUs and all.

TL;DR - leave him to figure things out on his own, but make sure to keep playing with him so he can notice an apparent difference between your paces of improvement in the long-run. Hopefully that'll get him to rethink his approach to mains, like it did for me.​

 

[ChiePet]

Forever, and i still go by this; in any FG you can mess around with or get good with whoever you want, but you have ONE Main, and Maybe One Sub/Secondary. Having multiple Mains is like saying you dont have an actual main but instead have a plethora or handful of secondaries.

Gotta make a commitment to something/someone before you can get serious by any means, right?
Works similarly enough, but as with almost anything game related: Everyone's different, so to each their own.
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