There is a very damaging misconception that I hear come up a lot when new players talk about the game.
It is spread with seemingly innocuous, very no-nonsense assertions like this:
"Every option is good, you just have to use it correctly." "There are no bad options. You pick the option that beats your opponent's option."
The biggest wall I run into when trying to help people improve is getting them to understand how little they actually grasp about what these statements mean, why they're technically right, but more importantly, why for most players they cause plateaus and destroy progress for people learning the game.
Mango was a serious role-model for me when I started competing in this game almost a decade ago. I listened to what he had to say. He was the best, I assumed he knew exactly what he was talking about. I fell into a pitfall for a long time because I didn't realize fully what frame of mind the words he was saying were coming from, and how different that was from how I was perceiving them.
Mango is a natural, he plays by instinct. He is not a theorycrafter, that's not why he's good. He is a fighting game player. He gives advice out a lot, but it's not do this on this frame and this beats that, it's how he 'feels' about the game. It took me years to decide if Mango was way smarter than anyone realized he was, or not. And it varies based on what subject he's talking about. Mango will talk to you about something he's never actually thought hard about before because he likes talking about Melee and he's a real social butterfly. Not everything he says is the New Testament. He's a person just like you. He's good at pushing buttons and not getting hit, and he's good being intimidating within the game. But he's not Dr PP, he didn't learn the game that way.
I hear this quote a lot. Not just today, not just who I've been talking to recently, I hear it a lot. told people about it a lot. It's an important quote in a lot of peoples' paths within this game.
"If you just play a little weird against Jason it throws him off. He always picks the best option, so if you just throw stuff at him he doesn't expect he doesn't know what to do" Heavily paraphrased, continued. "The best option isn't always the right one. You always have to be trying new stuff and mixing it up."
This is great advice for someone who wants to improve at the game. Everyone's problem is that they don't use enough of their full suite of options. If I go to a local, maybe 90% of the players there, no matter how good they are or where they place in bracket, do the exact same thing in the same situation every time, without fail, they are utterly predictable. For some of them, it's instinct, and they do it because it's working on the people around them everyday. For some, it's autopilot, and they're continuing to do the same thing even after it hasn't worked ten times.
For them, this was the best advice Mango could really give. "Hey, I do pick a lot of the same options, I shouldn't do the same things every game, even if they work, if I want to get better," is a great realization to give people.
That is not how the philosophy that Mango is always playing by. If he has led you to believe this, you have been, misled. That was his improvement strategy. When he says it talking about M2K, he's just speaking off the cuff about how he could probably put into English what little thing gives him the edge against Jason.
Fact 1.
There are good options in this game. There are extremely strong options in this game that should be used, a lot. That is why we have a metagame. There are people who pick nothing but poor options, and they are bad at the game. There are people who pick a grab bag of multicolored options, and they are inconsistent. And there are players that consistently make excellent choices, at the right time, and execute them properly.
These people use good options by "default". They are not consistently fighting an autopilot urge to pick panic options, or obvious options, or common options.
Example
Say a bad player's default option when under pressure is not to sweetspot. A good player's default option, without thinking, is ALWAYS to sweetspot. It just makes sense in the game, number one, and it's harder to do than just lazily not sweetspot, so most people don't do it. This ability that will help them against bad players who edgeguard by covering bad doublejumps. Because hell, that is what they are used to covering 99% of the time. If I'm recovering against a player who's also good, if the sweetspot doesn't work, then I mix it up. Shine stall. Wall jump. But then I'm gonna go back to the good old sweetspot once I've won some respect. Because it's a good god damn option, you want to keep it. Show you can do something else if you have to, but never let someone take away your good options if you still want to win the game. The best options are hard to punish. They give a lot of reward. There are a lot of them in the game.
Fact 2
If you don't believe that you pick a lot of naturally inherently terrible options, and that you need to start switching in good ones before you can improve, you've hit a plateau.
There is a best option for EVERY situation. Whether you want to pick it or not does not matter, the best option was already there, and it has been what was defining the meta. For most people on the site right now, before you even started playing the game, we knew what the best option was, and the meta has grown around that. The best players know the best option is the one they have to cover, the one they're wary of, and that's what they're basing THEIR decisions around.
Are you really basing your decisions around their best option? Do you have a playstyle that employs only strong options or similarly powerful ones? It's hard to be good at the game by ignoring the intimate knowledge of mixups good players like Mew2King have, regardless of what you may hear from anyone, no matter how good you think they are or how much authority their opinion should hold, picking options at random will never make you a good player.
Aside 1
Mixing up your good, strong options with other well-reasoned, strong, effective, match-up appropriate, spacing-appropriate, conditioning-appropriate options, is different from mixing between a few options you don't understand the worth of randomly.
Techs are a great example of this. Mixing up your techs is important. But you need to know that your opponent is trying to cover multiple options, if he's conditioning you with movement patterns before your tech begins, and which options he's giving up covering, before you resort to truly random teching.
Example
Danger of not picking the best option almost every single time
I hope you like getting tipper Fsmashed by Marth every time he down throws you and dying because you're "mixing it up" and including tech in place. Because that's what's going to happen until you understand what the best option for that mixup is and spam it.
In this situation, if you get downthrown by Marth, and you play a space animal, your best option is to tech away. Every single time, that is your best option. Missed tech gets tippered, tech in place gets tippered, tech roll in gets grabbed and you're back where you started. Tech roll away every single time. Do not ever choose an option that is not that unless you are by the ledge. If you choose Tech in Place, you are making a decision a bad player would make. What's the other side of this coin? When is it not a bad decision? When you are 100% certain, not 99, 100, that
a. Your opponent is a good player, and
b. Your opponent is already expecting you to evade the tipper, and
c. Your opponent is good enough that he intimately understands that Tech Roll Away Gets you Out, so
d. Your opponent runs past you and commits to covering tech away.
That's a lot of conditions. Why should you always tech away? Because your opponent is going to give you a visual indicator before you even have to hit that tech by moving toward you preemptively. Feel free to pick whatever tech option you want now that he's given up free coverage of 2. (Tip, if he dthrows you and starts moving, miss the tech on purpose unless you've seen him pivot before. if you want, make him first prove he can pivot tipper you out of DD before you let him rob you of an option.)
Fact 3
If you lose in bracket to varying skill levels of players, this is why. You are not a player who makes consistently high-caliber decisions. You're just a wild card. You will sink or swim based on how you're playing "that day", with a huge rubberband for success. Some people will just "read" you over and over and you'll get trashed. Sometimes everything "will just work" for you. You'll always hit him right when he's coming out of shield. You'll always beat his hitbox with just this other one. You'll always win X aerial exchange. And then suddenly, those situations aren't even happening anymore. You don't even understand how to make them happen. Why would you, you don't even have a gameplan.
Aside 2
Mango and Mew2King also say they play better or worse on some days and that's the decider for how their matches go. That is not what is happening to you. It is, but your mixups are infinitely poorer than theirs. Notice how they always do well. It's because they are defaulting on fantastic options. It's likely that if someone watched your match your default gameplan is mediocre.
A mindgame for you. If Mango said just spamming only the best option is easily exploitable, and you went "You're right Mango. I'm not going to fall into that pitfall" then how is Mew2King so good? How is he on Mango's level if he suffers from the worst noob habit in the game, not mixing it up?
There you go. Clearly choosing excellent options works? It got M2K that far.
They're both false premises. Mew2King does not only pick the best option. He also has an intimate understanding of how to mix his options up based on the threat of his best option.
Getting to the End
Something can be said for only choosing the best options. You'll get really, really, far. You could probably make MioM Top 100 or close to it if you actually did just indiscriminately choose the most powerful options. There is actual proof of that on the list, he hasn't even been playing that long. The reason for this phenomenon is:
You are more likely to WIN against MORE people by repeating optimal decisions than you are likely to LOSE to some form of "hard-countering, adaptable player" that is so rare a style of play to see in bracket.
Melee's new players don't what advice to ignore or take. I get it. I have played for a long time. We all sucked so we all just tried to listen to all advice and do the thinking for ourselves. But if you want to progress faster than we did, you have to sort the good from the bad, we didn't have the luxury of having a lot of that done for us like you guys do now. The old guard is doing a great job at letting you know what relevant tech you need to have or what really crucial positioning mistakes you're making. It sucks that people fall into this pitfall.
---
Watch a video of yourself and go through the options you picked in a scenario. You probably had about 10 different choices you could have made in one moment. How do you figure out which one was the best one? How do you start REPLACING YOUR BAD OPTIONS?
Let's get into really dirty analysis. This is a lot of work. But it pays insane dividends. I'm going to explain the concept, so you know how I do it.
Two characters are in a mix-up situation where they both have 3 options available. Rock, Paper, and Scissors. On the surface it appears as if both players have an equal number of options, and they all play a useful role; there is no "optimal" option in rock paper scissors. So, you might think the 'correct' option (people tell me there's no such thing as a correct option in rock paper scissors and Jason turns in his grave. There is in Melee!) is based on "what your opponent's decision is".
Let's give these little hand signs names, and consequences.
The two hands throwing the signs are Fox and Falco. Let's put them in shield because who cares it doesn't matter. We will assume neither player has the advantage of waiting for the other player's decision before he chooses. Because that's cheating. (Hint: In Melee, you always want to cheat. Don't commit first! Don't make decisions for no reason!)
Rock can be... Nair
Paper can be... Grab
Scissors can be... Shine
Let's create some hypotheticals so we can put this in melee terms and then apply our actual concepts to them.
We'll assume for this example that if the Fox player Nairs, and the Falco player grabs (ROCK VS PAPER), Falco will get the shield grab in the startup of Fox's hitboxless aerial.
If Fox grabs, and Falco player shines (PAPER vs SCISSORS), Falco will shine Fox's extended grab hurtbox in the startup.
If the Fox player shines, and the Falco player tries to Nair (SCISSORS vs ROCK), we hope that Nair would win for the purpose of our example but Shine is huge and it can actually sometimes beat Nair. Luckily not very often.
If the Fox player grabs and the Falco player Nairs (PAPER VS ROCK), Fox will get the shield grab in the startup of Falco's hitboxless aerial.
I think that's enough typing these is tedious and you get the idea.
The next paragraph is the most important one you'll read in the essay, probably because it will determine whether you benefit from what I'm writing.
Perfect parallels are hard to find, and then contextualize within example that has 3 options for 2 characters that are actually relevant and can situationally all beat each other. That is a very specific request to make of Melee.
It was hard to pick three examples that fit in a practical situation and have them act as representatives for Rock Paper Scissors in a logical equivalency, in Melee there are often many more options and people are doing them at wildly varying timings and one player will be waiting for the other player to pick his and countering and the other player won't be, but hopefully this should satisfy that we've got a triangle of options in this game and at first glance they all have an equal chance of working, depending on what our opponent picks. So how is there even a best?
This entire essay was written to teach you how to apply the concept of risk and reward.
Risk and reward.
Instead of working our way toward the option that is each character's best, we're going to start from the the presumption and go down. Explaining it this way has never failed me.
Falco's best option is Shine. Fox's best option is Grab.
Every single time, this is the case. These are their best options. Every mix up that is going to occur between good players is built on the bedrock that both of these players have traveled up the bracket picking good options.
So here, let's take our test dummies and make the Falco pick Shine every time and the Fox pick Grab every time. And now they meet each other. These good players, who both just naturally choose their best option without even thinking.
Then something really interesting happens.
Falco picks Shine, and Fox picks Grab.
Fox gets Shined, Fox takes 80 damage, Fox eats a bair, then he gets lasered, then he gets edge guarded, then he dies.
This is why we call Falco's Shine his best option. It leads directly into a very strong, very likely, very guaranteed punish on Fox. That shine is worth 40 to 80 damage. That shine is nearly worth a kill. The Risk and Reward for Falco is HUGELY IN HIS FAVOR. Ever hear Mew2King say he only camps the ledge because it's an effective strategy? It is effective. The risk reward is in his favor. Why does Hbox bair? Risk reward. These strategies are potent and they've survived years because the risk reward is so skewed that these players will continue to use them.
What is the risk to going for the Shine? He gets outspaced by a nair from Fox, because Nair is disjointed below, beats Shine outright in 8/10 cases, is safe for Fox to do. (Scissors trumped by Fox's ROCK)
So I told you Shine was the best option but now we're looking at an option fox can choose to beat it. Is it still Falco's best? Well, yes. Him getting shined once doesn't make it a bad option suddenly. Fox only chose the nair (if he's playing with purpose) to beat that Shine. That shine is dictating the Fox's careful actions in close range with Falco.
Because the shine has the highest reward for Falco and is the riskiest thing Fox can get touched by. Let's look at Fox's side.
What was the risk on that Nair? Fox's risk was low. If He chooses ROCK again and Falco counters with PAPER, shieldgrabs (remember that's paper) from Falco are not going to put 80% damage into a Fox every time. So does Fox really care if he gets grabbed by Falco? No, because if he stops throwing ROCK just because he doesn't want to get grabbed, he hasn't effectively stopped the threat of FALCO'S SHINE.
The above paragraph is the reason that you always continue to use your best option. Here Falco is controlling Fox's High Reward option by always representing that a Shine is possible. Do not just mix up because your opponent picked a new option. I DON'T have to grab Fox now when we're close up to beat his nair just because he used it last time! You do NOT have to pick the option that beats their option.
"The correct option is the option that beats their option." Now you understand why the quote is ridiculous. In the confines of one vacuumed interaction, yes, you won the situation. In the context of a game? Trying to beat their option gives you leverage!
The dynamic we are slowly realizing here is very important to how to play matchups! we are learning that even in a situation where both characters have 3 options that can all beat or be beaten eachother's options, Falco negotiates these microinteractions because Fox is taking on more risk than Falco by being in them and stands to gain less reward! In match up terms, this is what we call a disadvantaged situation for Fox.
Let's go look at the risk reward of more of these options.
Fox had low risk on the Nair. If it loses to PAPER, a grab from Falco is a nothing scary at all. If Falco nairs, Fox will win usually, because he gets his moves out quicker. That nair is a Good option. An OK Option.
Why is it an OK option and not the Best one, like his grab?
Look at the Reward. Unless Falco is at kill percent, a stationary Fox nair OOS combos into nothing. You're not beating Falco by Nairing 8 times, because if he calls your timing even once, and shines you on the way up or down, his one read to your 8 taps is nearly a stock on you. Fox can stop the Shine, but he gains very little immediate benefit from whacking Falco with nair.
I can wrap the rest of this up pretty quickly.
Fox Nair is Low Risk, Low Reward.
Fox's Grab is High Risk (loses directly to Falco's Highest Reward, most commonly selected Move, + spotdodge shine lol) and High Reward.
His Shine is High Risk, Low Reward. I might have to explain that one. Fox shines Falco's Shield if Falco Shined OOS at the same time or a little earlier, Fox is in trouble. If Falco waited and shined OOS after, Fox is in trouble. We can go deeper with this if we don't want to stick to our example.
If our Fox learns and applies in his gameplay Shinegrab OOS or Waveshine OOS, or Perfect Shine OOS pullback Nair, his Scissor becomes Low Risk, High/None/Low Reward respectively. This is what Mango means when he says mix your stuff up. You need mix ups on top of mixups. But notice why you're doing them. To deal with Falco's best option. That's the foundation.
Let's make our chart again.
FOX ROCK (DECENT)
FOX PAPER (BEST)
FOX SCISSORS (BAD (for now, you'll get technical later and the matchup'll get easier)
FALCO ROCK (BAD)
FALCO PAPER (DECENT)
FALCO SCISSORS (BEST)
So Fox is in a bind because both players want to use their High Reward option but Falco's just happens to actually straight up beat Fox's. Unfortunate for Fox. What can he do if he ever wants to have threat in microsituations with Falco again? If he doesn't want to settle with just reading Falco's best option and trying to stop it? How does Fox start pushing an advantage?
Win respect for it. Scare the Falco out of using HIS best option, just like he has done to you.
Can we go to Mango on this one? Let's see if we can pick a bad option to punish the best option. Would Shine OOS be considered bad here? Well it's low reward (his shine vs yours) and it's maybe a little risky if you try to continue pressure out of it and you get shined oos after your next move. Dangerous stuff.
But you can pick a bad option to punish the best. That's how you create new good options. The best option is always what matters, but if you're digging in the dumpster, anything you find that beats Best Option is now your OK option. We had that with Nair, we want something new. We want Falco to be scared.
Let's shine oos, and then play RPS again. Fox wavedashes back, Falco Shines OOS, Scissors vs Scissors no win no lose. Now Falco djs out of his Shine OOS because it wasn't perfect. Fox can just jump forward and nair him off the level without his DJ. Dead. Falco is scared of doing Shine OOS because imperfect shine OOS put him in a vulnerable position. If he has to WD down now he might risk getting grabbed by Fox or having aerial pressure descend on him.
Mixups are never based on just being unpredictable, they're based on putting fear into your opponent that he has to devote mental resources to.
"The options I'm picking aren't working against this guy"
"I'm mixing it up but when I'm getting a hit I'm getting nothing off of it (see F), and he's getting huge punishes"
"If I want to beat him I have to try something different. I'm not comfortable playing this style, I haven't practiced X or Y or Z yet. I just lose all my tech skill"
You want your opponent to be asking himself these questions, consistently.
(F: because you didn't expect to get that hit. Because your move was random. Top players' punish games aren't that far ahead of everyone else's, but if you understand when your hits are going to happen before they come to you you will be very unprepared to follow up, and surprised when they work.")
As always, thank you for reading. It was fun to write.
It is spread with seemingly innocuous, very no-nonsense assertions like this:
"Every option is good, you just have to use it correctly." "There are no bad options. You pick the option that beats your opponent's option."
The biggest wall I run into when trying to help people improve is getting them to understand how little they actually grasp about what these statements mean, why they're technically right, but more importantly, why for most players they cause plateaus and destroy progress for people learning the game.
Mango was a serious role-model for me when I started competing in this game almost a decade ago. I listened to what he had to say. He was the best, I assumed he knew exactly what he was talking about. I fell into a pitfall for a long time because I didn't realize fully what frame of mind the words he was saying were coming from, and how different that was from how I was perceiving them.
Mango is a natural, he plays by instinct. He is not a theorycrafter, that's not why he's good. He is a fighting game player. He gives advice out a lot, but it's not do this on this frame and this beats that, it's how he 'feels' about the game. It took me years to decide if Mango was way smarter than anyone realized he was, or not. And it varies based on what subject he's talking about. Mango will talk to you about something he's never actually thought hard about before because he likes talking about Melee and he's a real social butterfly. Not everything he says is the New Testament. He's a person just like you. He's good at pushing buttons and not getting hit, and he's good being intimidating within the game. But he's not Dr PP, he didn't learn the game that way.
I hear this quote a lot. Not just today, not just who I've been talking to recently, I hear it a lot. told people about it a lot. It's an important quote in a lot of peoples' paths within this game.
"If you just play a little weird against Jason it throws him off. He always picks the best option, so if you just throw stuff at him he doesn't expect he doesn't know what to do" Heavily paraphrased, continued. "The best option isn't always the right one. You always have to be trying new stuff and mixing it up."
This is great advice for someone who wants to improve at the game. Everyone's problem is that they don't use enough of their full suite of options. If I go to a local, maybe 90% of the players there, no matter how good they are or where they place in bracket, do the exact same thing in the same situation every time, without fail, they are utterly predictable. For some of them, it's instinct, and they do it because it's working on the people around them everyday. For some, it's autopilot, and they're continuing to do the same thing even after it hasn't worked ten times.
For them, this was the best advice Mango could really give. "Hey, I do pick a lot of the same options, I shouldn't do the same things every game, even if they work, if I want to get better," is a great realization to give people.
That is not how the philosophy that Mango is always playing by. If he has led you to believe this, you have been, misled. That was his improvement strategy. When he says it talking about M2K, he's just speaking off the cuff about how he could probably put into English what little thing gives him the edge against Jason.
Fact 1.
There are good options in this game. There are extremely strong options in this game that should be used, a lot. That is why we have a metagame. There are people who pick nothing but poor options, and they are bad at the game. There are people who pick a grab bag of multicolored options, and they are inconsistent. And there are players that consistently make excellent choices, at the right time, and execute them properly.
These people use good options by "default". They are not consistently fighting an autopilot urge to pick panic options, or obvious options, or common options.
Example
Say a bad player's default option when under pressure is not to sweetspot. A good player's default option, without thinking, is ALWAYS to sweetspot. It just makes sense in the game, number one, and it's harder to do than just lazily not sweetspot, so most people don't do it. This ability that will help them against bad players who edgeguard by covering bad doublejumps. Because hell, that is what they are used to covering 99% of the time. If I'm recovering against a player who's also good, if the sweetspot doesn't work, then I mix it up. Shine stall. Wall jump. But then I'm gonna go back to the good old sweetspot once I've won some respect. Because it's a good god damn option, you want to keep it. Show you can do something else if you have to, but never let someone take away your good options if you still want to win the game. The best options are hard to punish. They give a lot of reward. There are a lot of them in the game.
Fact 2
If you don't believe that you pick a lot of naturally inherently terrible options, and that you need to start switching in good ones before you can improve, you've hit a plateau.
There is a best option for EVERY situation. Whether you want to pick it or not does not matter, the best option was already there, and it has been what was defining the meta. For most people on the site right now, before you even started playing the game, we knew what the best option was, and the meta has grown around that. The best players know the best option is the one they have to cover, the one they're wary of, and that's what they're basing THEIR decisions around.
Are you really basing your decisions around their best option? Do you have a playstyle that employs only strong options or similarly powerful ones? It's hard to be good at the game by ignoring the intimate knowledge of mixups good players like Mew2King have, regardless of what you may hear from anyone, no matter how good you think they are or how much authority their opinion should hold, picking options at random will never make you a good player.
Aside 1
Mixing up your good, strong options with other well-reasoned, strong, effective, match-up appropriate, spacing-appropriate, conditioning-appropriate options, is different from mixing between a few options you don't understand the worth of randomly.
Techs are a great example of this. Mixing up your techs is important. But you need to know that your opponent is trying to cover multiple options, if he's conditioning you with movement patterns before your tech begins, and which options he's giving up covering, before you resort to truly random teching.
Example
Danger of not picking the best option almost every single time
I hope you like getting tipper Fsmashed by Marth every time he down throws you and dying because you're "mixing it up" and including tech in place. Because that's what's going to happen until you understand what the best option for that mixup is and spam it.
In this situation, if you get downthrown by Marth, and you play a space animal, your best option is to tech away. Every single time, that is your best option. Missed tech gets tippered, tech in place gets tippered, tech roll in gets grabbed and you're back where you started. Tech roll away every single time. Do not ever choose an option that is not that unless you are by the ledge. If you choose Tech in Place, you are making a decision a bad player would make. What's the other side of this coin? When is it not a bad decision? When you are 100% certain, not 99, 100, that
a. Your opponent is a good player, and
b. Your opponent is already expecting you to evade the tipper, and
c. Your opponent is good enough that he intimately understands that Tech Roll Away Gets you Out, so
d. Your opponent runs past you and commits to covering tech away.
That's a lot of conditions. Why should you always tech away? Because your opponent is going to give you a visual indicator before you even have to hit that tech by moving toward you preemptively. Feel free to pick whatever tech option you want now that he's given up free coverage of 2. (Tip, if he dthrows you and starts moving, miss the tech on purpose unless you've seen him pivot before. if you want, make him first prove he can pivot tipper you out of DD before you let him rob you of an option.)
Fact 3
If you lose in bracket to varying skill levels of players, this is why. You are not a player who makes consistently high-caliber decisions. You're just a wild card. You will sink or swim based on how you're playing "that day", with a huge rubberband for success. Some people will just "read" you over and over and you'll get trashed. Sometimes everything "will just work" for you. You'll always hit him right when he's coming out of shield. You'll always beat his hitbox with just this other one. You'll always win X aerial exchange. And then suddenly, those situations aren't even happening anymore. You don't even understand how to make them happen. Why would you, you don't even have a gameplan.
Aside 2
Mango and Mew2King also say they play better or worse on some days and that's the decider for how their matches go. That is not what is happening to you. It is, but your mixups are infinitely poorer than theirs. Notice how they always do well. It's because they are defaulting on fantastic options. It's likely that if someone watched your match your default gameplan is mediocre.
A mindgame for you. If Mango said just spamming only the best option is easily exploitable, and you went "You're right Mango. I'm not going to fall into that pitfall" then how is Mew2King so good? How is he on Mango's level if he suffers from the worst noob habit in the game, not mixing it up?
There you go. Clearly choosing excellent options works? It got M2K that far.
They're both false premises. Mew2King does not only pick the best option. He also has an intimate understanding of how to mix his options up based on the threat of his best option.
Getting to the End
Something can be said for only choosing the best options. You'll get really, really, far. You could probably make MioM Top 100 or close to it if you actually did just indiscriminately choose the most powerful options. There is actual proof of that on the list, he hasn't even been playing that long. The reason for this phenomenon is:
You are more likely to WIN against MORE people by repeating optimal decisions than you are likely to LOSE to some form of "hard-countering, adaptable player" that is so rare a style of play to see in bracket.
Melee's new players don't what advice to ignore or take. I get it. I have played for a long time. We all sucked so we all just tried to listen to all advice and do the thinking for ourselves. But if you want to progress faster than we did, you have to sort the good from the bad, we didn't have the luxury of having a lot of that done for us like you guys do now. The old guard is doing a great job at letting you know what relevant tech you need to have or what really crucial positioning mistakes you're making. It sucks that people fall into this pitfall.
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Watch a video of yourself and go through the options you picked in a scenario. You probably had about 10 different choices you could have made in one moment. How do you figure out which one was the best one? How do you start REPLACING YOUR BAD OPTIONS?
Let's get into really dirty analysis. This is a lot of work. But it pays insane dividends. I'm going to explain the concept, so you know how I do it.
Two characters are in a mix-up situation where they both have 3 options available. Rock, Paper, and Scissors. On the surface it appears as if both players have an equal number of options, and they all play a useful role; there is no "optimal" option in rock paper scissors. So, you might think the 'correct' option (people tell me there's no such thing as a correct option in rock paper scissors and Jason turns in his grave. There is in Melee!) is based on "what your opponent's decision is".
Let's give these little hand signs names, and consequences.
The two hands throwing the signs are Fox and Falco. Let's put them in shield because who cares it doesn't matter. We will assume neither player has the advantage of waiting for the other player's decision before he chooses. Because that's cheating. (Hint: In Melee, you always want to cheat. Don't commit first! Don't make decisions for no reason!)
Rock can be... Nair
Paper can be... Grab
Scissors can be... Shine
Let's create some hypotheticals so we can put this in melee terms and then apply our actual concepts to them.
We'll assume for this example that if the Fox player Nairs, and the Falco player grabs (ROCK VS PAPER), Falco will get the shield grab in the startup of Fox's hitboxless aerial.
If Fox grabs, and Falco player shines (PAPER vs SCISSORS), Falco will shine Fox's extended grab hurtbox in the startup.
If the Fox player shines, and the Falco player tries to Nair (SCISSORS vs ROCK), we hope that Nair would win for the purpose of our example but Shine is huge and it can actually sometimes beat Nair. Luckily not very often.
If the Fox player grabs and the Falco player Nairs (PAPER VS ROCK), Fox will get the shield grab in the startup of Falco's hitboxless aerial.
I think that's enough typing these is tedious and you get the idea.
The next paragraph is the most important one you'll read in the essay, probably because it will determine whether you benefit from what I'm writing.
Perfect parallels are hard to find, and then contextualize within example that has 3 options for 2 characters that are actually relevant and can situationally all beat each other. That is a very specific request to make of Melee.
It was hard to pick three examples that fit in a practical situation and have them act as representatives for Rock Paper Scissors in a logical equivalency, in Melee there are often many more options and people are doing them at wildly varying timings and one player will be waiting for the other player to pick his and countering and the other player won't be, but hopefully this should satisfy that we've got a triangle of options in this game and at first glance they all have an equal chance of working, depending on what our opponent picks. So how is there even a best?
This entire essay was written to teach you how to apply the concept of risk and reward.
Risk and reward.
Instead of working our way toward the option that is each character's best, we're going to start from the the presumption and go down. Explaining it this way has never failed me.
Falco's best option is Shine. Fox's best option is Grab.
Every single time, this is the case. These are their best options. Every mix up that is going to occur between good players is built on the bedrock that both of these players have traveled up the bracket picking good options.
So here, let's take our test dummies and make the Falco pick Shine every time and the Fox pick Grab every time. And now they meet each other. These good players, who both just naturally choose their best option without even thinking.
Then something really interesting happens.
Falco picks Shine, and Fox picks Grab.
Fox gets Shined, Fox takes 80 damage, Fox eats a bair, then he gets lasered, then he gets edge guarded, then he dies.
This is why we call Falco's Shine his best option. It leads directly into a very strong, very likely, very guaranteed punish on Fox. That shine is worth 40 to 80 damage. That shine is nearly worth a kill. The Risk and Reward for Falco is HUGELY IN HIS FAVOR. Ever hear Mew2King say he only camps the ledge because it's an effective strategy? It is effective. The risk reward is in his favor. Why does Hbox bair? Risk reward. These strategies are potent and they've survived years because the risk reward is so skewed that these players will continue to use them.
What is the risk to going for the Shine? He gets outspaced by a nair from Fox, because Nair is disjointed below, beats Shine outright in 8/10 cases, is safe for Fox to do. (Scissors trumped by Fox's ROCK)
So I told you Shine was the best option but now we're looking at an option fox can choose to beat it. Is it still Falco's best? Well, yes. Him getting shined once doesn't make it a bad option suddenly. Fox only chose the nair (if he's playing with purpose) to beat that Shine. That shine is dictating the Fox's careful actions in close range with Falco.
Because the shine has the highest reward for Falco and is the riskiest thing Fox can get touched by. Let's look at Fox's side.
What was the risk on that Nair? Fox's risk was low. If He chooses ROCK again and Falco counters with PAPER, shieldgrabs (remember that's paper) from Falco are not going to put 80% damage into a Fox every time. So does Fox really care if he gets grabbed by Falco? No, because if he stops throwing ROCK just because he doesn't want to get grabbed, he hasn't effectively stopped the threat of FALCO'S SHINE.
The above paragraph is the reason that you always continue to use your best option. Here Falco is controlling Fox's High Reward option by always representing that a Shine is possible. Do not just mix up because your opponent picked a new option. I DON'T have to grab Fox now when we're close up to beat his nair just because he used it last time! You do NOT have to pick the option that beats their option.
"The correct option is the option that beats their option." Now you understand why the quote is ridiculous. In the confines of one vacuumed interaction, yes, you won the situation. In the context of a game? Trying to beat their option gives you leverage!
The dynamic we are slowly realizing here is very important to how to play matchups! we are learning that even in a situation where both characters have 3 options that can all beat or be beaten eachother's options, Falco negotiates these microinteractions because Fox is taking on more risk than Falco by being in them and stands to gain less reward! In match up terms, this is what we call a disadvantaged situation for Fox.
Let's go look at the risk reward of more of these options.
Fox had low risk on the Nair. If it loses to PAPER, a grab from Falco is a nothing scary at all. If Falco nairs, Fox will win usually, because he gets his moves out quicker. That nair is a Good option. An OK Option.
Why is it an OK option and not the Best one, like his grab?
Look at the Reward. Unless Falco is at kill percent, a stationary Fox nair OOS combos into nothing. You're not beating Falco by Nairing 8 times, because if he calls your timing even once, and shines you on the way up or down, his one read to your 8 taps is nearly a stock on you. Fox can stop the Shine, but he gains very little immediate benefit from whacking Falco with nair.
I can wrap the rest of this up pretty quickly.
Fox Nair is Low Risk, Low Reward.
Fox's Grab is High Risk (loses directly to Falco's Highest Reward, most commonly selected Move, + spotdodge shine lol) and High Reward.
His Shine is High Risk, Low Reward. I might have to explain that one. Fox shines Falco's Shield if Falco Shined OOS at the same time or a little earlier, Fox is in trouble. If Falco waited and shined OOS after, Fox is in trouble. We can go deeper with this if we don't want to stick to our example.
If our Fox learns and applies in his gameplay Shinegrab OOS or Waveshine OOS, or Perfect Shine OOS pullback Nair, his Scissor becomes Low Risk, High/None/Low Reward respectively. This is what Mango means when he says mix your stuff up. You need mix ups on top of mixups. But notice why you're doing them. To deal with Falco's best option. That's the foundation.
Let's make our chart again.
FOX ROCK (DECENT)
FOX PAPER (BEST)
FOX SCISSORS (BAD (for now, you'll get technical later and the matchup'll get easier)
FALCO ROCK (BAD)
FALCO PAPER (DECENT)
FALCO SCISSORS (BEST)
So Fox is in a bind because both players want to use their High Reward option but Falco's just happens to actually straight up beat Fox's. Unfortunate for Fox. What can he do if he ever wants to have threat in microsituations with Falco again? If he doesn't want to settle with just reading Falco's best option and trying to stop it? How does Fox start pushing an advantage?
Win respect for it. Scare the Falco out of using HIS best option, just like he has done to you.
Can we go to Mango on this one? Let's see if we can pick a bad option to punish the best option. Would Shine OOS be considered bad here? Well it's low reward (his shine vs yours) and it's maybe a little risky if you try to continue pressure out of it and you get shined oos after your next move. Dangerous stuff.
But you can pick a bad option to punish the best. That's how you create new good options. The best option is always what matters, but if you're digging in the dumpster, anything you find that beats Best Option is now your OK option. We had that with Nair, we want something new. We want Falco to be scared.
Let's shine oos, and then play RPS again. Fox wavedashes back, Falco Shines OOS, Scissors vs Scissors no win no lose. Now Falco djs out of his Shine OOS because it wasn't perfect. Fox can just jump forward and nair him off the level without his DJ. Dead. Falco is scared of doing Shine OOS because imperfect shine OOS put him in a vulnerable position. If he has to WD down now he might risk getting grabbed by Fox or having aerial pressure descend on him.
Mixups are never based on just being unpredictable, they're based on putting fear into your opponent that he has to devote mental resources to.
"The options I'm picking aren't working against this guy"
"I'm mixing it up but when I'm getting a hit I'm getting nothing off of it (see F), and he's getting huge punishes"
"If I want to beat him I have to try something different. I'm not comfortable playing this style, I haven't practiced X or Y or Z yet. I just lose all my tech skill"
You want your opponent to be asking himself these questions, consistently.
(F: because you didn't expect to get that hit. Because your move was random. Top players' punish games aren't that far ahead of everyone else's, but if you understand when your hits are going to happen before they come to you you will be very unprepared to follow up, and surprised when they work.")
As always, thank you for reading. It was fun to write.
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