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Low-Mid level Fox Critique

Brizzy

Smash Rookie
Joined
Aug 29, 2015
Messages
2
Would any of you guys be able to critique my Fox vs Falco?

I am a player from the Durham Region [Canada]. And have been playing for about two years.

I've always had trouble in the Fox vs Falco matchup, and I was wondering any General, or more specific tips any of you guys have.

[This was a Best of 5, at one of our bi-weeklies]
Set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DaTqTs6tqI
 

20YY SS | Saiblade

Obviously not biased towards Falco
Joined
Jul 1, 2014
Messages
1,169
Location
Florida
3DS FC
3239-4949-5301
Thunder Combo works great on Falco, waveshine-jab reset, and follow from there. Unfortunately, Fox is very good at gimping Falco, shine spiking is an incredibly easy and fast kill for you. I'm not that great of a Fox, he's just a pocket, I'll definitely watch more later today.
 

BRUJO~

Smash Apprentice
Joined
Apr 24, 2015
Messages
165
Location
PNW
All in all, it wasn't a bad set. It was apparent that you were playing consciously, reacting to and punishing his moves. I'm going to point out a lot of things that you can work on, but everyone has a lot of things to work on, so don't feel like I'm picking on you haha.


-General tech consistency. You missed many l cancels and jc grabs. Just grind these out at home, practice them 20 mins a day every day.

-Poorly spaced aerials (especially on shield) are very punishable. Work on spacing in general

-those charged f-smashes lol. Don't go for that hard of a read unless you're really confident in it. They normally didn't work out for you. try to pick options, particularly in edgeguarding, that cover more of falco's options and give you the freedom to react to what he does.

-Shine or grab after dair. 90% of the time you're going to want to follow dair with a shine or a grab. A couple of times you drilled and he was able to punish you. This means you either A) didn't L cancel the dair, B) didn't shine or grab after you daired, or C) shined too late after the landing lag of dair ended. Clean this up and you will be punished a lot less. This is one of the best tools fox has.

-If Falco is directly above you coming down, you can bet your ass he is going to down air lol. Don't try to contest him when he's above you. A couple of times he just full jump daired and caught you because you tried to fight him head on with uair or bair. The hitbox on Falco's dair is OP AF BRO. DON'T FIGHT IT.
What you should have done was saw that he was going to come down on you with a dair and wavedashed to avoid it. Don't shield it if you can avoid it because then he can follow it up with shine and pressure your shield. You want to wavedash out of the way so you can grab or nair punish him while he is in landing lag of his dair.

-If you have Falco (or anyone really) in a hard knock down tech chase situation on a platform, consider wavelanding onto the platform so you can react to their tech with a grab. A couple times you had him hard knocked down on a platform after uthrow and went for an upair, and he just get up attacked and hit you. You can waveland onto the platform and space yourself so that you can cover all of his getup options with a grab.

-Don't get laser locked. This is easier said than done haha, but Falco's greatest asset in this matchup is that he wins the laser war. People often say "Falco's lasers are too good, there's nothing I can do" but obviously this is untrue. You have a couple of options for dealing with lasers
1)Powershield. This is the optimal way of dealing with Falco's lasers, but also the hardest. It gives you a free punish if he lasers you up close and from afar it just deals the damage on him that would have been on you. It will take lots of time to learn, but is one of the most worthwhile things you could ever train yourself to do.
2)Close the gap. Don't let Falco make distance from you. If he has the space to fire safe lasers, you've already lost. Stay in his face. Use your superior speed to chase him down and then fight him in close quarters, cause thats where fox wins in this matchup.
3)Platform movement. You can occasionally use wavelanding on platforms as a way of moving around lasers, but it does put you in a slightly dangerous position. Situationally this is useful, but less so than your other options.
4)Waveshielding. Mostly this will be useful if you can't powershield and if you are like a full stage distance away from falco, basically, its wavedashing out of shield, and then shielding out of your wavedash, and repeating. If you do it in rhythm with falco's lasers, you can close the gap while shielding each laser.

-Speaking of wavedash out of shield, WAVEDASH OUT OF SHIELD. please. its so good man. If you are in shield and he is dash dancing, or otherwise not directly attacking your shield, wavedash out. This can be towards him if you want to attack or punish a laggy movement option, or backwards if you want to create space. Many many times in this set you were holding shield and he wasn't attacking you, so you jumped out of shield right into an aerial. Wavedash oos is much safer.
This is assuming he isn't actively pressuring your shield. When he is actively attacking yourshield with some of that sexy falco shield pressure, shine oos is your best friend, although it is hard to do. using c-stick to jump makes shine oos easy imo.

-Know your strengths. From what I saw here, you seem to thrive in tech chase situations, so look for ways to set those up. Against falco, this can be done with shine (although like Saliblade said, if they aren't teching shine - which at low levels no one will - you'll want to thunder's combo instead) and it can also be done with all of your aerials except for drill at higher percents.

-Lastly, work on movement control. This is a tip that I could give to literally any player, but its so important. You're grounded movement wasn't as slick as it could be. Practice controlling your dashdance/wavedash lengths, and learn some movement to help you bait out attacks while still being in a postion to punish
Two of my favorite movement tricks (especially against falco) are circle jumping and wavedash down.

Circle jump - this is best to do after multiple short hop nair shine approaches.
step one, do a running short hop in
step two, don't do an aerial
step three, right before you land, waveland back
Not only does this look crispy as hell, it gets everyone. so many people will bite and do an anti-air move or just shield. circle jump>jc grab is my favorite mind game

Wavedash down - this can be used in a plethora of situations, but my favorite is during tech chase situations.
Dash in like you are going to do a dash attack, jc grab, etc. then just outside of get up attack range, wavedash directly down, stopping all of your momentum (out of run, you can do crouch as well, but i prefer wavedash because it can be done out of dash too). This is useful just to get people to do something. 90% of the time lower level players will do a getup attacking thinking that you are going to run straight at them. Then all you have to do is wait for the move to finish and grab them.


Yeah, over all you definitely have potential. When you review your own videos, really break them down. Everytime you get hit or you hit them, pause the video and rewind a couple seconds to see exactly how you/they got the hit, what you/they could have done not to get hit, whether it was the best move you/they could have used. See if you could have gotten follow ups in places that you didn't, and in places that you did get follow ups see if you finished the punish with a good finishing move (i.e. up smash, up air, back air, shine off stage, etc.)
 

Dolla Pills

Smash Ace
Joined
Mar 9, 2015
Messages
894
Location
Connecticut
Something really small I want to add here is you need to work on getting back from the ledge better. Most of the time I saw you doing DJ dair, and while it can be good and the other person didn't really punish it a better player will recognize your habits and kill you for them very easily. Fox's best option from the ledge is his insane ledge dash, so you should definitely put the time into mastering that because it is incredibly useful once you have it down (although it will take a lot of practice to be consistent with). At the very least just work on some things other than ledge hop dair
 
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