Oh **** thought I did the rest for some reason... I think the site went down and i lost my save
Here's an easy but crucial one I believe. Seems pretty self explanatory.
Essentially, you give that upb of yours a hitbox! However, I don't recommend practicing this by just jumping off the stage like here because the angles are all off from how you'll usually get into this situation. This is just meant to demonstrate the idea.
There's no firm technique or method to do this since your trajectory and the situation is going to be different each time.
Just get used to hovering the can ABOVE your trajectory, not actually in it. You mostly want to threaten the area right in front of the ledge. If you were sent high enough, you can safely get the can on stage with you, though verical/low recoveries should just focus on getting back.
Tips:
1: To practice, I suggest taking a lv.3 ganondorf to the training room. Setting HP to about 125% and him to attack. If you just stand in front of him (just outside grab and tilt range and within wizard foot range), he'll almost always just wizard foot. This'll send you pretty far horizontally and represents a pretty standard iffy recovery, and as your percentage goes up it changes things up a bit so it doesn't get too stale and you get used to some different distances.
2: It seems like there are
only three major points during the upb you need to tap the direction you want to go to achieve maximum distance.
Let me repeat.
You can achieve the maximum distance during the upb while also popping the can to protect you. The timing is rather strict, but straightforward. (the points are simply the beginning, middle, and end of the animation)
The issue is, you can only pop it once at any time between these points. So this can only be used for keeping the height it is at, not going higher. So get the can up BEFORE you recover. It will never go higher until after you finish the upb animation. When you KNOW you're going to make it and sweetspot, you can let up on the direction and focus on popping the can.
So definitely get used to the timings there. Those one or two extra pops may not seem like much, but killing downward momentum to keep it at a certain height is actually very helpful.
That said, you still have to take the time to kick the can, thus falling closer to the blast zone. So it isn't like just because it doesn't hurt your upb distance, it doesn't hurt your actual ability to recover solely from distance. So we need to work on alleviating that.
2: Always kick on the double jump back to stage. The higher the can starts the better, horizontal placement isn't a huge deal.
3: Never try it without your double jump unless you're about ledge-level when you would kick, and about visible on the screen (not near the blastzone/offscreen) And even this takes precise timing.
You either risk not making it back or just having the can too low to help you anyway. At this point it would be more worth it to be tricky with the trajectory of your recovery, and have the breathing room to do it.
4: This is especially helpful on omegas with low walls as if the can goes too far/low when you hit it again it will bounce against the wall and up again (not with an ideal trajectory but it's something)
*I feel I should stress this is way more important than the other stuff. Those are for pretty ideal situations and just get people used to the projectiles, but this has applications in every match against every character.
And when c-sticks come and edgeguarding becomes more of a threat, I personally feel I'm going to be needing to do this nearly every time. Get good enough and you can turn your disadvantage into an advantage by setting a can on the stage or punishing edgeguard attempts.
Edit: Got my horizontal/verticals mixed up like a dummy