On teams and who to team with.

[O Rly?]

I've been a fan of teams (friendly fire ON, of course) lately. My 1v1 Pikachu game is ABYSSMAL due to the presence of a Marth and a Sheik amongst my peers that are both greater than I am, and as such, I noticed I could actually fare better in games with teams when I play the endearing little rodent.

To me, it seems like Pikachu would be an excellent team player, as on most stages not named Final Destination he has a versatile recovery, can clear a big fight out with several different moves, and is enough of a threat to save a partner from an edgeguard.

But my questions are these: which stages are the *best* to pick, and with what partners? Assume that I have better than average "partner avoidance" skills (I won't ever attack an ally knowingly, unless we stand to benefit from it.)

 

[N64]

When teaming I usually give priority to my partner. Pika is good on a fair amount of stages for different reasons, you usually just have to adapt your style a bit. With large stages, pika can work decently as a lifetank, as he can recover from about anything that doesn't outright kill him. Offensively, you'll also want to try for a lot of gimp kills, as that's a good way to take out a lot of characters on large stages where you'd otherwise have to rack up considerably more damage to kill with his other usual kill moves. On small stages, upsmash and nair are your friends. Upsmash kill any light characters whenever you get the chance. You have to be a little more careful though, as you'll die a lot faster. Try to stay in the middle of the stage (obviously don't just stand there, but don't fight on the sides a lot unless you're already in control of the situation). Upsmash can kill regardless of where you are on the stage horizontally, but most other characters rely on spikes or moves that kill you off the side, so stay in the middle.

Otherwise, be agile as usual, take advantage of your kinda small body frame for hit and run stuff mostly. You won't have much opportunity to combo, through the nature of teams, so just still to hit and run stuff a lot. Also, jolt hurts about as much as it helps, so use it sparingly. You have a partner whose feet you can easily tangle with stray jolts, be careful.

As far as characters that work well with pika, I dunno. He's fairly versatile, so play off the strengths/weaknesses of your teamate. Most of what I do in teams is try to dart around my teamate while attacking my opponent. I mean, i guess almost all characters do that, but pika has the speed to get almost anywhere he wants pretty fast, so try to get pressure off them with hit and run stuff without interfering much with what they're doing.

I dunno if any of that made sense. Anyways, good luck!

 

[O Rly?]

Nah, it made perfect sense.

Some things I need help teaming AGAINST:

- Marth, for obvious reasons (Way too effective an edgeguarder, especially with a Falco or Peach covering the overhead recovery.)

- Ganondorf. I tend to clip my partner when I finally get within range to hit him, as well.

- (Insert irritation here.)

 

[Anther]

N64's great wisdom provides the perfect answer. XD

Learn to sweetspot and no one's edgeguarding matters anymore XD.
But I like Captain Falcon and Sheik as my partners. They don't accidentally kill you very often, and Uair leads to a lot of knees for falcon since they float around for so long, while sheik's every single move leads to upsmashes on platforms for pika. Plus any character that has a good grab game just cause it leads to even more upsmashes. Those are the most common team combos that I can call out.