Personally, there's only been 2 times where I have gotten flak for bringing out the dog and winning with him. The 1st time was when I once ran into a Flare Blitz spamming
player (forgot the name of that person) in the FG FFA room, and I was
for that 1st round (Woot! What luck for me to start the session with a solid counterpick to that strategy on deck already. :D) However, after losing with Alph, both For Conquest and as one of my anti-FB-spamming characters (Alph's thrown Pikmin, especially Reds, make him crash onto the floor), due to the wombo combo shenanigans that can sometimes happen in the FG FFA room, that Char player got 1st place & started saying to the whole room that they should "TRAINMORE" (I think), and me being the possibly rare kind of player that
enjoys challenging FB spam with projectiles that can make him crash onto the floor, rather than Counters, I stuck around.
2nd round, I tried
, whose Side B, Hydrant, Trampoline, and Fruits all stuff it, and yet again, due to wombo combos and now a Shulk player's fantastic Vision timings, I did not get 1st & that Shulk did, which I'm okay with, since he made hard reads to earn 1st place. The Char player was silent about that.
3rd match, I finally bring out my 3rd and most reliable counterpick,
, under the name "CostcoDawg", whose Gunmen, Can, and Clays (NOT shot-up, as someone I've seen in a downloaded Wii U replay found out the hard way in Sudden Death) ALL stuff FB HARD, and DH's got the speed to run-up USmash him for it. Because it's the FG FFA room, where keeping such things lying around is much harder due to 2 other players that can disrupt them (rather than 1 other in Teams), I could not maintain a littered flatland, and got rekt for it.
4th match, after more "TRAINMORES" I brought out
, yet another counterpick, due to Mechakoopas stuffing it, Side B Jump Cancels giving me extra mobility to leap over it & a way to bait FBs, and Jr's punishes with Side B JCs --> 2x UAirs HURTS! Oh, and he's got more KO power than DH. I don't recall if I won that match or not, but I probably did, and it might've either been too close for comfort, or such a beatdown that I earnestly feel sorry for him, considering who I pick next after this....
5th match, I go back to DH, and unlike the previous rounds that had fully stocked 4 players in it, there was only 3, including myself, a WFT player (another good MU for my short doggie), and the Char. I did the usual routine of leaving my Cans, Gunmen, and Clays lying around between me and the Char (which also hurts the Trainer's Soccer Balls & Sun Salutations pretty badly as well), and its much easier to keep such stuff up with 1 whole less person in the room.
While I just fight whoever's closest to me, while trying to send said closest person to the other players for wombo combo shenanigans (a good strat for making sure you don't get kicked for targetting 1 person excessively), I couldn't KO WFT, because the Char kept KOing her before I could. The only person I KO'd was the Char, who bonked his head into my stuff enough times for me to run-up USmash him out of the stage. By the end of this match, I finally won, and after that, I went "GreatGame!" as I usually do, win or lose, and the Char person went "..." and then "USUCK" and then he left before I could give him a chance to run it back like the good sport I am. Dude must've been salty over losing to both the traditional Counter counter, and the more micromanagatively unorthodox projectile littering strategy that I employed (which is also how I keep teammates around when projectile-heavy characters are running around). Let this story be a lesson to Flare Blitz spammers out there: If you stick around long enough in any given session using that strategy, you better get ready to switch it up when folks like me counterpick you with the likes of
,
,
, and even
, and others Counter you with the likes of
,
,
, and even
, or you'll be seeing yourself getting bodied in posted replays in the 3DS and Wii U replay download sections.
The 2nd time was in FG 1v1 (a room I rarely visit), where I went up against a
player as the dog for the 1st match. It was pretty close, but I took more damage than expected, due to expecting that Peach player to Side B more often than she actually did, making my preemptive Gunmen guardians vulnerable to strikes that KO-ed them and hit me at the same time. It was close, but alas, all that damage from getting mixed up while aggressively rushing her down added up, and I lost for it. The next match, I stuck with the dog for best 2 out of 3, and he hard counterpicked me with
, who he surely must've known is one of the dog's absolute worst matchups, since he must've felt that his 1st win against me was cutting too close for comfort. It was definitely one of the roughest battles I've ever had in all of FG, especially since the last time I've ever really ran into a Sonic player was in FG Teams, where I had a teammate to hand him off to that quite often were actually better at handling him than I was (ex.
,
,
, etc.), as well as FG FFA, where there's 2 other people I could focus on instead that could help wombo combo him from 0 to 60% in 3.5 seconds. Without such outside interference to get in Sonic's way, the thread here about that MU pre-patch certainly became real to me. We were neck 'n neck, all throughout the fight (including me landing a whole string of FAirs after 1 shot-up Clay at one point), until a fantastically timed BAir from me while he was crouching when both of us were around 125% sealed the deal. The thrill that match gave me was akin to the Q VS Makoto MU as Q & Twelve VS Ken as Tweleve (lawl, arcade typo) back in SF3:3S.
After that, he went
for a lot of matches, and when he won against my dog twice in a row convincingly (which happened in his 1st two matches as Falcon directly after beating his Sonic), I had to admit that he got my dog tag numbers so to speak, and switched to
& proceeded to body him for the next several rounds as the other Koopalings (including Jr himself) with Mechakoopas & Side B Jump Cancel juggle punishes ahoy, even when he finally switched to the Mario Bros. after 8+ matches with me as Jr. Oh, and throughout all these matches, no words were uttered by that challenger, whose name I sadly have forgotten, while I myself gave hearty "GreatGame!"s after virtually every single match, until I had to give him a "LASTGAME" tag, and after that match where he repped
and won (one of Jr's bad MUs if he gets in on him), I indeed left. Maybe when I ask my 2nd youngest bro later about his name, I'll probably edit it in and give a shoutout to him in the Online Discussion area.
Aside from those instances, nobody ever really calls me out in the Character Select screen for repping an aggressive rushdown doggie that actively does his best to be the hyperactive guard dog in FG Teams (a match where I kept my Shulk teammate around the entire 2 minutes against a
by blocking off her arsenal with my own in the 3DS version was among my proudest moments as the dog in FG Teams). If anything, I get GGs more often, though that's probably because I bring out the "GreatGame!" tag after many a match in FG FFA or Teams. Oh, and I also rep the "CostcoDawg" tag as a way to both get a chuckle out of them (& me still), and to warn them that the canine's going to come out.
