Mewtwo's current place in the meta.

[Deleted member]

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[DM_3091]

Great question since pros have been placing him all over the place in their tier lists, and as you mentioned, he’s currently getting very little love in the competitive scene at the moment. However, I think Mewtwo is one of the characters that will slowly gain more traction as the meta progresses. He’s certainly not the easiest to play, as his size and weight give him an obvious vulnerability in disadvantage. That being said though, he has a very well-rounded kit with great mobility, recovery, power, range, and edge-guarding capabilities.

Once pros start to get used to his changes from Smash 4, I believe he will continue to get significantly more use in tourneys, and ultimately end up somewhere in high tier. I don’t believe he’ll be top tier, but comfortably somewhere in the top 15-20 of the roster imo. I think he’s gonna be very viable, and I really look forward to seeing what some high-level pros are gonna be able to do with him down the stretch.

 

[DM_3091]

https://youtu.be/oxT-AMfHIjY

Saw some really solid Mewtwo gameplay from SDX out of the Glitch 6 tournament, and I wanted to revise my previous comment. After watching some high level Mewtwo gameplay for the first time in this game, I honestly think that Mewtwo has top 10 potential, with top 10-15 being pretty likely imo.

It’s still very early, but SDX showed some really good stuff in the second and third games of this set... Some of his combos out of dtilt were nice af, and he had some really good shorthop fairs to punish Remzi’s jumps from the ledge. That one downair spike in the second game when Remzi was hanging on the ledge was also filthy.

SDX was great at staying out of reach and being unpredictable on his recoveries, using Mewtwos’s aerial movement and teleport to his advantage. He ended up finishing at 9th overall in this tourney, and I feel like he really showed some of Mewtwo’s potential here.

There’s still a long ways to go, but this is easily the best Mewtwo gameplay I’ve come across so far, and I figured I share it with anyone who hasn’t seen much of Mewtwo in this game yet.

 

[Lanny]

SDX matches were fun to watch, great to see some m2 representation at a major.

Some things I found interesting:

- Don't think I saw a disable the whole match. I'm convinced there is few or no real situations where it's useful but I see some people keep going for it. Like maybe some crazy b-reversal setup but I haven't seen it really work out
- Kind of surprised to see the fast fall nair panning out to get down, it worked great for like the first month of netplay for me and I feel like everyone online and everyone I play with offline covers it at this point so I usually don't even go for it anymore.
- Cool to see the confusion air stall work, I haven't gotten a lot of mileage out of it but I'm going to try doing it more.

 

[Downshift]

- Don't think I saw a disable the whole match. I'm convinced there is few or no real situations where it's useful but I see some people keep going for it. Like maybe some crazy b-reversal setup but I haven't seen it really work out

He used Disable @ 9:56 in the video, during the 3rd match while Lucina was on the left platform but wasn't able to get a follow up due to the platform.
Like I posted somewhere else, Disable has 6 frames of intangibility at the start, so it can be used to tank and punish incoming attacks, but the timing is basically as tight as a parry so it's not easy.

Also, as I've been playing my current suite of fighters in Ultimate to narrow down to a main, I'm finding Mewtwo isn't often worth the risk as much as others due to that classic combination of light weight and large size and hurtbox. In Smash4 I didn't have as much fear suddenly shifting gears from defense to offense since I knew I could easily bob and weave and get out of disadvantage with multiple air dodges, shields and rolls on the ground, etc. It seems in Ultimate though, with the nerfs to air dodging, rolls and shields, that Mewtwo just can't escape pressure as easily as his weaknesses require him to.

Even going up against heavies like Bowser, DK, DDD or even Ganon is a lot more daunting and intimidating now since Mewtwo doesn't have as much of a speed advantage over them, is just as large of a target, has no KO power advantage and is almost half their weight. Mewtwo's advantage in having a projectile doesn't help a whole lot either given most of the heavies have moves that can clank with it, and he can only spam the small uncharged shadow balls which aren't much of a threat to heavies.

 

[DM_3091]

I completely agree with you that the nerfs to air dodging in particular have made it even harder for Mewtwo to get out of disadvantage. This is certainly a hard hit to Mewtwo since it makes him even more of a high risk/high reward player than he was before (fits the glass cannon archetype to a tee). His size and weight are by far his biggest weakness and the change to the game mechanics have made his weakness more exploitable.

That being said though, he feels better to me in almost every other way. His speed was buffed significantly, especially his initial dash speed (from 1.4 to 2.255). Although heavies are faster in this game as well, I feel like his relative speed difference to the heavies is still roughly about the same as 4, and very noticeable imo.

His combo game benefits significantly from being able to dash-cancel into tilt moves now. His dash attack, fair, bair, ftilt, fsmash, and down smash all received increased knockback. In terms of KO options, fair does have slightly more endlag now, but I find that it kills very early on. Bair, ftilt, and his dash attack all kill noticeably earlier then they used to, and of course his back throw and up throw are easy kill options at high %. I’ve been getting some really good dair spikes and down smashes from the ledge as well. He’s still one of best edgeguarders in the whole game imo.

Overall, I really do think he’s got a whole lot of potential in this game, and is just going to take some adjusting to get used to. At the end of the day though, I’m not trying to convince you to main him since you seem to know your stuff already, and we all know it really just comes down to how the character feels to the individual at the end of the day.

Here’s another SDX set from Glitch 6, this ones against Static’s Bowser. He loses the first game and wins the next two to close out the set. I think this video demonstrates both the nerfs you spoke to and the buffs I mentioned as well. Cheers.

https://youtu.be/Yw6YECaPOfQ

 

[Downshift]

Yeah I think the real issue is that to me, Ultimate Mewtwo feels so similar to his final patch Smash4 incarnation. My other fighters, particularly Zelda and Lucario, feel so different in Ultimate that it's natural for me to take a totally different approach to playing them, but that hasn't been the case with Mewtwo. Therefore, I've been playing him just like I did in the previous game, which like you've explained can still work but isn't optimal at taking advantages of the buffs he has this time around.

Thanks for the SDX vids also. I think seeing more top players taking Mewtwo deep into tournaments will show us a lot of new and different play styles and techniques as the meta evolves.

 

[Firox]

He used Disable @ 9:56 in the video, during the 3rd match while Lucina was on the left platform but wasn't able to get a follow up due to the platform.
Like I posted somewhere else, Disable has 6 frames of intangibility at the start, so it can be used to tank and punish incoming attacks, but the timing is basically as tight as a parry so it's not easy.

Also, as I've been playing my current suite of fighters in Ultimate to narrow down to a main, I'm finding Mewtwo isn't often worth the risk as much as others due to that classic combination of light weight and large size and hurtbox. In Smash4 I didn't have as much fear suddenly shifting gears from defense to offense since I knew I could easily bob and weave and get out of disadvantage with multiple air dodges, shields and rolls on the ground, etc. It seems in Ultimate though, with the nerfs to air dodging, rolls and shields, that Mewtwo just can't escape pressure as easily as his weaknesses require him to.

Even going up against heavies like Bowser, DK, DDD or even Ganon is a lot more daunting and intimidating now since Mewtwo doesn't have as much of a speed advantage over them, is just as large of a target, has no KO power advantage and is almost half their weight. Mewtwo's advantage in having a projectile doesn't help a whole lot either given most of the heavies have moves that can clank with it, and he can only spam the small uncharged shadow balls which aren't much of a threat to heavies.

Totally agree with your assessment. I've been training a lot with M2 but I really do feel that his size and weight hold him back more than his buffs allow. Anyone with a good reflector and some decent air game can rip him to shreds, especially wolf and falco who can outpressure his shadow balls. He also has a sad lack of combos outside of Dtilt and he lost his up tilt -> up smash kill confirm. His ranged aerials are slow and his fast aerials have no range. Swordies can wreck him all day. Granted, his tilts are all amazing and he has great recovery, but I just don't see how that puts in the top ten fighters. I feel that there are other picks that offer all those upsides without such crippling downsides.

 

[Rhus]

Fox main here - I seconded Mewtwo in Sm4sh and played him a bunch.

Fox and Mewtwo actually share a ton of similar traits. Glass cannon archetype, focused on high speed gameplay and insanely good advantage with a good neutral and terrible disadvantage.

I struggled getting the hang of Fox for a bit, and Mewtwo seems different too - his hitboxes and KB trajectories have been shuffled around so it is really a learning curve to deal with. However, just like Fox, Mewtwo's power budget was smoothed out. His Dtilt was nerfed, but he has a much better Ftilt and a more consistent Utilt. His confusion is a lot worse overall, but his disable had a lot of notable improvements.

I think we'll need to focus heavily on safe and pressuring neutral options using his excellent dash and weird wavelanding to bait options. Once I stopped treating Fox like Sm4sh Fox, I was doing a lot better with his new options, I think the same can be applied to advancing Mewtwo's meta.