Q&A Mewtwo Philosophy - Q&A Ask Away

[Taj278]

Thank you, sir.

 

[Shiny Mewtwo aka Jigglysir]

I'm not sure if I have much more to say even though I said this is part 1. If anything, I would rather have some feedback on my matches and play in general (good or bad is fine despite my previous statements). This would be the first time in several years that I would be able to watch someone else play Mewtwo and quite possibly learn things and steal things. I never really considered myself a creative player and that was one of the things that always bothered me while playing Mewtwo. Everyone else kind of gave up on him, and I was pretty much alone for the rest of his development. It was great being called the best Mewtwo in the world, and it was something I wanted a lot as kid, but now it is a bittersweet departure and it's funny how quickly I've been relegated once everyone's favorite players start picking him.

That was a really great post Taj. Do you think you could re-post it over on the PM Mewtwo boards so more people see it? I'm sure everyone there would love to read it.

I'll definitely go through your matches some time in the next week or so as I'm compiling things for the PM Mewtwo video thread and write down some feedback on your play. Let me know where you would prefer I get it to you (ie here, a PM, etc)

And don't worry about being relegated, you're still the best Mewtwo in my eyes Always will be

 

[Swann]

I think it's pretty cool, and a testament to your abilities, that despite the issues (sweetspotting, unknown MUs, changes to your character, etc), you still managed to get 9th out of over 380 people.

I really hope that you enjoyed yourself. You seem like such a good dude, wish I could've been there cheering you on!

 

[Wobbly Headed Bob]

It always surprises me when I hear that you feel you don't get good feedback. I think everyone was blown away from your performance, it's just that people already expect so much from you and expect you to know how good you are.

I also thought that you'd be happy that Mewtwo wasn't brutally buffed up to the point of dumbness, and I honestly think that his changes were inspired by your highly intelligent gameplay and they didn't want to ruin that. Looking at how you took those matches from Chu Dat. It was so smart compared to a character that now looks so dumb, and I don't think people want that to change, and I thought it was really hype.

 

[Taj278]

Thanks man. Well, most of the feedback I got from anytime I've played Mewtwo from Apex and the week prior was that I was doing everything wrong and my playstyle pissed at least one person off. People liked the way KDJ played Mewtwo more than the way I played because he made more use of his new tools than I did. Which is understandable, but I just have a tough time seeing the benefit with a lot of his new kit. A lot of those things don't really suit my playstyle that much. It is good to hear the usual people still like me though. :D

 

[Swann]

I think it's just that, because you "invented" mewtwo (and you did), people expect you to utilize all his new options, and invent new strategies around them. What I think those people might have missed is that you're still Taj, you're playing the mewtwo you know. You stuck to what you knew, AND because the character was designed with your specific toolset in mind, there was no reason to disregard your playstyle. You've said you hadn't really messed around with PM much (which the complainers probably didn't understand), but you seem like the type of person who can innovate on their own style, given some time.

Aside: and honestly, placing 9th at the largest PM tournament to-date with a character who has been changed since you mained him against characters you've never seen before? I'm pretty sure the 373 you placed above wish they could claim something like that!

 

[didds]

I find that his new tools just have a niche, but if used whenever the niche opportunity comes about, makes him worlds better. For example, when I hear people talk about teleport (in a non recovery type way) it's almost always as a combo extender. Although it works sometimes, I find the time it takes to teleport and throw out my next move is unsafe more often than not. But, teleport is amazing as a zoning mix up. Imagine your regular wd zoning, mixing up d tilt, shadow balls, djc u air (actually viable on the ground now due to the better hitbox, but still situational), but now throw in the threat of teleporting to the back of your opponents shield and throwing out a fair immediately upon reappearing. And the ability to turn around coming out of teleport only increases the space he can control with both fair and bair. And float I love to use for platform coverage since u air covers most if not all of the platforms.

I honestly think you just need more familiarity with the game in general taj, I mean you showed how well just a good melee mewtwo could do in PM, imagine a good pm mewtwo. I think many might be a little bummed just because they understand that you can't dedicate a ton of time to this game anymore, even though everyone wants an archetype to look at.

And teleport sweetspots are way lower in pm which is why you went on stage a bunch when I'm assuming you were trying to sweet spot. It's a near horizontal angle and you can honestly just let go of ledge and instant tele sweet spot the ledge again. If timed right, it's less punishable than melee m2 stalls. Honestly if mewtwo is not straight up blasted off the top or sides, his recovery should be free. I imagine it would be frustrating knowing how free his recovery is, but just being unfamiliar with the exact spacing. But yea you're awesome taj, reason I started playing mewtwo

 

[Эикельманн [РУС]]

hey guys. i'm back. in need of some urgent critique, even though there's not much to work with. keep in mind these are doubles matches. i'm working on using mewtwo a lot more in doubles because i see a lot of qualities that i like about him in doubles scenarios.

http://www.twitch.tv/clashtournaments/b/502177819

2:30:00 to 2:38:41
3:04:00 to 3:13:23

really need advice on everything. thanks.

 

[Taj278]

Well, in doubles. Mewtwo is basically a poor man's Peach. He can't KO as well, he has less priority, and pretty poor presence. He can split, interrupt, be annoying, and be a stock holder like Peach though.

Things you should continue to do:
Keep looking to break up 1v2s, even though Mewtwo doesn't have much presence, he's good at just throwing himself on top of someone in some way. Sometimes it pays off well and you hit someone, other times, you get hit, but at least you give your partner some breathing room.
Get out of the way of you teammate and letting him finish combos or hit out of your grabs since Mewtwo's throws have so much dead weight, it's hard to follow up a lot of the time unless it's a tech chase situation.
Take cookies.


Things you should stop doing:

Going for crossups on your big wind up moves like backair and forward air on shield, it's super punishable out of shield.

Upthrow for KO too early. You can infer the KO percentage from the FD thresholds. Each stage is a certain percentage smaller than FD. Learn them.

Giving too much free damage for no gain in positioning for you or your teammate.

Things you should start learning to do:
Teleport to ledge. You gave up a lot of easy stocks because you're going to stage or you're not sure of teleport distance and going way too high. Learn to sweetspot the ledge and save your stocks and give them something to think about. It also helps you take more cookies.

Saving your teammate. The one game on DL, you let your Falcon die when he was very easily savable by throwing shadow ball, or just going out and charging shadowball/neutral airing/forward B/down B/ whatever, but you just stood there and fought Sheik 1v1 and lost. Save your teammate whenever you can, because having the partner greatly increases your chance of winning. If you get a single grab, it turns into a release for Falcon's grab, and you can infinite and guarantee your win with shadowball charging.

Try to be more annoying. You need to be hard to kill, and you need to have enough presence to make them have to give you SOME attention so they don't just ignore you and kill your teammate. You need to be able to empower your teammate like Peach does, without any of her amazing tools to do so. It's kind of hard to play Mewtwo in teams, but he's really good with wrecking ball characters like Falcon/Fox. I also feel like he might even be good with characters like Ganon/Bowser as well.

Otherwise, you had an awesome setup on the Fox on FD on last stock. A good edgeguard as well. Some of those down tilt > forward air confirms were really good, too. I didn't even think some of those would connect.

 

[Эикельманн [РУС]]

omg yessssssss. i'm gonna get so good. thanks man! those tips are great.

 

[GrownCannoli]

I am thinking really outside the box here but I am new and never played a tournament in a fighting game so excuse this dumb question.

Do name tags help or hurt you? Like does having a tag above your head mess with some people? Maybe make it harder to space you or combo you properly?

Also Taj if you read this this the next question is specifically for you. (Although anyone can respond)

Do you still feel like you could improve with your Mewtwo, or do you think Mewtwo could be controlled better by someone else possibly?

Basically I want to know if there is a proverbial Mewtwo wall that the character himself can't get passed. Something that other characters might be able to reach beyond what he is capable of simply because they have more advantages.

I want to put time into this game but not best in the world time. Just better than average time lol. Do you think spending that time on Mewtwo is a waste? (I am not asking from a fun perspective but from a person who strives to go at least 55%-45% with this career melee record lol)

 

[Taj278]

I always feel like nametags help people focus and narrow in on you when you teleport and air dodge. I tend to not like it with Mewtwo, but other characters it's probably okay.

I can still improve with Mewtwo to some degree, I'm not a perfect human being. There are people that can probably even control him better than me if they put in the time. The problem is the worth. There will be a wall that all Mewtwos will run into as they play in tournament and against certain strats, but it doesn't mean that you or anyone else can't have better spacing or precision than me. It doesn't mean that you can't have better followups and timing than me. I may have been the forerunner for Mewtwo for a long time and implemented most of the tricks at all levels, but there are some things I definitely don't do, that other Mewtwos do use and could possibly be more efficient than me.

 

[GrownCannoli]

Thank you for responding so quickly, the name tag thing makes perfect sense.

Also, thank you for the honesty. I doubt anyone will ever surpass you as a Mewtwo player, I just wanted to know what your thoughts were.
I'm sure like many of us here, catching Mewtwo was a really big moment in my childhood. That memory is what makes me keep picking Mewtwo on the select screen even though its a bit brutal sometimes lol.

 

[Tranquility]

Hi guys.

I haven't been playing too long however I've been doin okay lately with mewtwo. However I've noticed that playing against marth is just extremely hard. He outranges mewtwo in just about everything and the only time I can get damage in is if they either make a mistake or if I can get under them while they're on a platform. Wondering what I should do since this just seems like a horrible matchup for mewtwo.

 

[Deleted member 212841]

gcyftftdtfyxycyvj

 

[Deleted member 212841]

gcyftftdtfyxycyvj

 

[Taj278]

Spaced anything is generally safe on shield against most characters. Mewtwo doesn't really have anything that he can do on top of someone's shield that he can link with something else to avoid getting shield grabbed like most characters with some kind of SHFFL'd aerial into jab or whatever.

Mewtwo's teleport should be able to go in as many directions as Fox/Falco's up B, but I don't know the number.

 

[net1234]

so im picking up mew2 because my scrub friend who plays roy and always looses claims "hes using a lower tier so he has higher skill." so i chose a character lower than his on the tier list what are the key components to the roy m2 matchup

 

[MookieRah]

There isn't much special about the Roy matchup. Crouch cancel is very effective against Roy, and should help you in neutral as you can crouch through most of his approach options.

Both you and Roy will be approaching with grabs and dtilts, and Roy has a bit more range on his, but you can toss shadow balls to force him to come to you. Downthrow is your go to throw for racking up damage, and if your opponent doesn't DI properly you can follow up with a dtilt, another grab, or you go for a tech chase.

Be sure to punish any aerial approaches from Roy, as I don't believe Roy has any safe method of shield pressure with aerials. If he goes for a cross-up and his body lands inside M2 you can simply shield grab (Mewtwo's grab extends ever so slightly behind him), if he is further behind you you can DJC nair to punish. DJC nair is a great tool for punishing cross-ups, because if one doesn't angle their shield downwards it will shield stab a lot of characters even at full shield strength (I found this out with the 20XX hack pack).

Other than that stick to bread and butter Mewtwo stuff. Learn to SUNC, aka teleport to ledge via downward teleports and running off to teleport ledge grab.

 

[Apex Ash]

Still a chance mewtwo will be in the new smash

 

[MookieRah]

I don't know if Taj will actually respond to this or not but here goes:

You have talked about using Mewtwo a lot despite knowing that he wasn't a great character, and you have even posed the question to others if they would still use him if he is even worse. My question is, did you always feel this way? Did you always think that Mewtwo was a bit of a burden in that you were so good with him and he fit you well, and you always wished you had that talent with another higher tiered character, or did you eventually just get disheartened into feeling that way over time?

I ask this because personally, I used to feel that Mewtwo was actually a strong character when I was playing at the top of my game. I was aware he had his weaknesses, but I actually felt that he was a capable character and I trusted I could win with him. I held this view despite several people telling me how garbage he was for a long time. Over time though, I began to start blaming Mewtwo for my losses, and as that went on I eventually switched. After the switch to Marth, I didn't see a significant advancement in play, and honesty if I stuck with Mewtwo the entire time I wouldn't do much worse, if worse at all.

But would we be so quick to blame Mewtwo if, say, there were 5 other Mewtwo players that were just as good as you during your prime? 5 people of roughly your status, all maining Mewtwo. That's clearly not impossible, and I'm pretty sure that you personally don't believe that you are the only person capable of playing Mewtwo like you do. How do you think that would affect Mewtwo's tier list position? I would imagine he'd be considered much higher, and that people would take him seriously. To that end I feel a lot of what makes the tier lists have been a popularity contest, with the "top" always possessing just one or two blatantly obvious good things.

Smash history constantly shows how close minded the scene is to the potential of some of the characters. How many times does someone have to take an "unviable" character to a high level before we stop assuming every character that isn't in the top 5 is garbage? Mango and Hbox showed us that Puff was a true contender, turning the conversation from puff being "ok" to puff being god. Armada showed everyone that Peach could win a national after everyone lost faith in Peach performing well. You and Axe (and PikaChad) have always performed really well with your characters, and now we are beginning to see that Yoshi can do some mean things.

It's also really easy to spot the BS arguments that are always made to perpetuate the idea that someone is losing because of a character as opposed to the players fault. If a great Fox player gets zero to death'd by an opponent, nobody will say that it's because Fox is such a **** character. When a great low tier player gets caught up in a huge combo, somehow everyone thinks the character is at fault. I remember complaining a lot about Mewtwo's hotboxes making him combo food, but honestly Mewtwo has a lot of other properties that does a good job of defending him. Also, how is Mewtwo far worse than Marth when it comes to getting combo'd to hell and back? At high levels of play, almost any character can be punished insanely hard to the point that becomes somewhat irrelevant.

I'm not saying that Mewtwo deserves to be in a top 10 spot or anything like that, but what I'm saying is that if we all think that he's garbage we will never see him perform any better. You, for example, have an amazing set against Armada, both of you at your prime. So at the top of your game, you gave the world's best a run for his money. At that time only a handful of people in the world would have come that close to besting him, and you did it with a "low tier". I think you are an AMAZING player, and I do not want to understate that, but I don't think you are really that much of a statistical anomaly or in any way magical that you alone can tap into all that Mewtwo can do.

One last thing, some characters are just bad in this game. Link, for example, has always had a large fan base of people playing him and trying to do well, but honestly I don't think there has ever been a Link to rise to anywhere close to a national/international status despite this. There is obviously character imbalance, but in general it is foolish for us to assume we know everything there is to know about characters that so few people bother learning.

 

[Cerebellum]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdYcs05OTXk&list=UUXCm4aBY21er68B11XBzeJg what do you guys think i ended up 14 stocking this level 9 donkey kong and also near the beginning he was 5 stocks ahead

 

[T-skjorte Ninja]

To reply a rather year old post.
The reason I play Mewtwo.

I, like many, started out with Fox and Sheik, because I always prefered fast and weak characters. As a kid, I dominated my neighborhood with Fox, even before I had internet to learn the new technical techniques. Eventually, I just felt that they were kind of boring to play as, because roughly 70% of the playerbase mains Fox. (Ass-pulled number). Melee eventually became boring because the competitive field became rather Predictable. It's usually Fox, Falco, Marth, Sheik or Peach who end sup in the finals.

After the release of Project M, I played Mewtwo and loved his teleporting playstyle. Being capable of being slow and fast at any time was more fun. I tried to project the same gameplay into Melee during Trå Til 2. While that didn't work out, I found out how interesting it was to actually play low-tiers competitively.

Then came the recent DrømmeLan 2014, a few days ago. My Mewtwo wouldn't get 4-stocked so easily anymore, and I could even sometimes win against decent players. After looking through one of Tai's videos, I already boosted my performance by quite a bit.

I then realised that the same story, happened to me in Brawl. I mained Snake because I always loved SNake. But he ended up being one of the god-tiers in the game, and eventually the tournament finals would usually have Snake or Meta Knight. Then I decided to play main Sonic, a low-tier.


So, I realised. The main reason I play Mewtwo.
I wanted to bring a new scene to the competition.

I'm simply a low-tier hipster, and might quit Mewtwo if he ever reached the glory of top-tier. :V
Thoooough, you won't see me maining a Pichu anytime soon.

Though, I would lie if I said I didn't enjoy playing him. It's always fun to make a sure that Mewtwo isn't JUST a pushover Mr. Sandbag.

 

[The24thGanondorf]

Since Mewtwo is a really floaty character, would it be better to just keep your distance with his shadow ball and confusion, or would it be better to keep his shadow ball in reserve when fighting with him at close range?

 

[T-skjorte Ninja]

Wavedance, dashdance, and keep using Tail Whips, is what I do.

Well, I don't wavedance. I suck there. Also a lot of grabs, I guess. Shadow Ball hasn't proven to be a effective tool for me, really.

 

[flmo]

I've been messing around with Mewtwo, super fun character. What is the best way to land shadow claw? My method so far has been reading their tech on platform. Can you combo into it off grabs?

Also, dthrow, it seems you can tech chase but that Mewtwo is too slow to cover tech away to get a regrab. Am I too slow or is there a better option you should be going for?

 

[WinterShorts]

I've been messing around with Mewtwo, super fun character. What is the best way to land shadow claw? My method so far has been reading their tech on platform. Can you combo into it off grabs?

Also, dthrow, it seems you can tech chase but that Mewtwo is too slow to cover tech away to get a regrab. Am I too slow or is there a better option you should be going for?

If you read their DI and they have a low percent, you can up-grab into shadow claw (which works well against Fox or Falco) or up-air for a better reach. Despite this video made for laughs, it tells me a good chunk of Mewtwo's grab possibilities.

With d-throw, it is tricky to combo off of. A little more than half of the time you should be able to down-throw into down-tilt. Hope that helps.

 

[Sieghart]

I've been messing around with Mewtwo, super fun character. What is the best way to land shadow claw? My method so far has been reading their tech on platform. Can you combo into it off grabs?

Also, dthrow, it seems you can tech chase but that Mewtwo is too slow to cover tech away to get a regrab. Am I too slow or is there a better option you should be going for?

You should be using dash grab since it has longer range if you aren't already and re-positioning yourself near where they land before you start trying to cover all options on reaction (which is completely possible by the way).

 

[Super4ng]

The reason I play Mewtwo is for the challenge. People look at him and place him low on the tier list. Are you ever going to win a tournament maining Mewtwo? Never. But what we can do is advance his meta and give him a better place on the tier list like he deserves. Plus, Mewtwo is fun as hell to play and is still quite technical. Optimized DJC fairs, short distance teleports, and tech reads are so satisfying.

 

[Synnett]

Hey everyone! I'm currently maining Bowser, and I'm having a hard time with the Sheik matchup. I've been playing Kirby for a while but he doesn't seem to make the cut, so I'm wondering if Mewtwo has a decent match up against this low tier leg blender.

So yea, any nice tools against Sheik?

 

[Sieghart]

Hey everyone! I'm currently maining Bowser, and I'm having a hard time with the Sheik matchup. I've been playing Kirby for a while but he doesn't seem to make the cut, so I'm wondering if Mewtwo has a decent match up against this low tier leg blender.

So yea, any nice tools against Sheik?

http://smashboards.com/threads/retheorizing-the-mewtwo-shiek-matchup.404158/
I think M2 has a much better shot than Bowser, but M2 requires far more work on things like tech skill such as teleports and pivot tilts so I can't suggest using him just for that matchup, especially since I'd still consider it a losing one albeit far more reasonable.

 

[Zivhayr]

Wrong forum, how embarrassing.

 

[br0kencacophany]

why would anyone in the world ever play mewtwo outside of random character matches

Leffen played M2 for fun

 

[JesiahTEG]

Playing Taj IRL was crazy...Unbelievably fast reactions

 

[ranmaru]

I think I played against him once too, and he ****ed me up with his Mewtwo. I think I played him though, I could be wrong. My memory is very fuzzy. Years ago you know. It was probably at Rom.