lol i dropped him for diddy
On maining MK as a tournament player:
Yea I am dropping him as well. I got butt stomped by players I felt were much worse than me in some ladder games yesterday. I was significantly outplaying them but they just had to do so little work to get a KO on me by comparison. They weren't even playing AMAZING characters (Ike and Wario). I don't think I was playing GREAT but I wasn't playing bad and I was certainly playing better than them. I rematched both of them in practice later with my Sheik and crushed both easily. I am by no means bad at MK but Sheik is about the same ground speed, racks damage faster, is safer, has better combos, better recovery and just more options overall. The ONLY thing MK really has over Sheik is the absurdness that is shuttle loop.
And as much as I didn't want to say it in the video thread, the people ito was wrecking so hard are just far inferior players to him. He probably could have beaten those players with just about anyone in the cast. As cool as it was to get MK some exposure, it didn't prove much. Ito is seriously good.
On Metaknights supposed strengths:
I have talked about how great metaknights edgeguarding is but honestly MK doesn't have a kit geared towards horizontal knockback anyway so he struggles to even get people out over the edge. I have gone through entire tournament SETS where I never hit my opponent a significant distance over the edge and get all my kills vertically. Maybe if I totally mastered perfect pivot downsmash I could create move situations but at the kind of percents where I start getting good edgeguarding potential with dsmash I might as well just go for a grab to rack more damage and set up for shuttle loop kills :/
On metaknights aerials:
I do see one thing significantly missing from a lot of MK play and that is dair camping. If you played Brawl you might be familiar with it. Basically you get above your grounded opponents and use your multiple jumps to hover while dairing their shield. Usually you can vary your jumps and timing enough to bait out something and punish them. You can also use this technique to safely dair at someone once and back off
That's because every character needs at least 1 lagless areal to give them a higher number of approaching options. This is the main reasn why meta knight is bad, since literally every move carries a high landing lag.
Yea I basically do 4 approaches with MK. Dash grab, Dash attack, run up instant fullhop dair into dair camping, approaching from the air, dair camping their head until I have 2 jumps left and then backing off or landing behind them and pivot grabbing if they are stuck in shield. The 5th option only really works against players who consistently spot dodge approaches which is just run up tornado. These players usually learn to stop spot dodging EVERYTHING and you have a window where they are conditioned to either roll or just block in which case your dash grab becomes very good but everything else becomes ass. Having an opponent conditioned to where dash grab is your best approach at high percents is NOT useful.
My major thoughts on the character:
I do think the character is much better than people give him credit for but you need to be EXTREMELY good to make the character shine. Usually this isn't a problem in a competitive game. HOWEVER, high skill ceilings is only really worth it if the matchup is unusual in some way. For instance, Amsa's Yoshi. A very VERY hard character to play well but when you get good at abusing his armor and shield parry and shield drops, suddenly a TON of top tiers characters normally very safe options become totally non-viable. You have to play against Yoshi in a specific way and with specific options that you don't really dedicate practice time or thought to. Yoshi is essentially lowering your skill as a player because he is making you do things you don't normally and aren't as good at. Metaknight, however, does not have a way of twisting a matchup in the same way aside from making you have to play just a little safer defensively to deal with his great dash grab and the threat of his shuttle loop in the air. Neither of these are particularly hard for higher tiers to avoid with their safe moves.
All metaknight really needs is move damage. I know people say reach this and reach that but he doesn't REALLY need more reach. He is plenty fast enough to deal with his reach and there are slower characters with less reach that do fine. The problem became most apparent to me against a very skilled DDD player. I was connecting a full move more than 20 times a stock on him and he was killing me in an average of 9 moves. NINE. It was frustrating that I had to make more than twice as many openings or combos than him. I really just wasn't doing enough damage, even when I landed 5 upair strings (which is situational at best) he just had to land d-throw + fair to get the same percent if not more.
If MK racked damage at a comparable rate to sheik, diddy, c falcon and other top tiers, hell even mid tiers, he would be a very strong contender for A or B tier.
What am I gonna do about it:
This is hard to say. I REALLY like metaknight and his playstyle fits me well but I cant really justify him over who I feel is his closest simulacrum: Pit. Pit plays in a very similar manner but does probably twice MKs damage. It also helps that Pit is fun as hell. I might also just play Sheik and be a boring **** like half the other competitive players in this game.