correction: i discovered the correct way to play samus for ME personally, BASED on her fundamentals.
i just watched plup vids and i kinda confirmed what i discovered. hugs is very minimalistic when it comes to samus, but the reason it works is because of the way her character works. she is supposed to be slow and tricky
one important think i realized when playing ice climbers is this: if you shoot an ice block (a slow, terrible projectile that slides on the ground) the opponent can avoid it easily. but that's the point: they still have to avoid it. in chess, even moving a pawn forward is still an advance. it forces the opponent to react. if you move the pawn in an excellent, well-fortified position, the opponent really needs to find good workarounds.
shooting an ice block from, say, beneath one of the platforms on pokemon stadium, is a great pawn advancement because the platform is protecting from above. if popo is desynched, he can also protect nana by using a uair or shooting another ice block.
i was a very aggressive player before, and i realized one of the ways i like defending myself is with projectiles. this is how i improved so much with young link, and i applied that theory to samus.
with samus, i tend to shoot a lot of missiles in my opponent's general direction even if they are not meant to hit. when they see the missile, they have to consider it's position and avoid it. even if it's way above their head, they have to think of not jumping. with samus, you can control your opponent's movement by throwing stuff out there, even if it's an uncharged or mid charged energy shot. (shoutouts to mid-charged shots, those things are actually really great.)
even if you do something silly like a retreating bomb, the opponent still has to find a way around it. when i realized this, i thought "man, i can do the stupidest stuff with samus and get away with it." this is why dark mike was so good. using him as my mental inspiration, i picked up the character and was fairly successful, while keeping in mind hugs' fundamentals. hugs' play tries to reduce randomness, but for an aggressive style player like me, samus can be used to control the opponent.
to play samus with a more intuitive rather than reactionary style, two things are required
1. patience. you need this with any character, but more and more so with slower characters.
2. a feel for randomness. this only comes with experience, and this is just that 6th sense that top players have when going for aggressive mixups. it's like they'll win 55:45 in rock paper scissors because they have that extra reaction time that will allow them to change up their option at the last split second. i call this being "random" even know it's slightly calculated.
like knowing when to grab with samus. or knowing when to do a move that is stupid, like 2 utilts or 3 spotdodges in a row, or dash attacking someone because you think they are going to drop their shield.
