A campy Diddy that knows how to properly shoot peanuts can be a pain. I played one of Floridas best Diddys at a tournament yesterday and peanuts are really annoying if you aren't aggressive enough. His fair is great against us in the air because the hitbox size is so large. Also his fair, bair, and uair autocancel early, earlier than our aerials. I can safely say that his fair beats out all of our aerials really and come out frame 6 which is the same frame as our nair. Luckily its not terribly strong.
If he is holding a banana, his options become potentially better but also more predictable. He cant use tilts, smashes, aerials, or grab normally (might be mistaken here, I do recall hearing about a way to use tilts when holding items). When hes holding a banana I like to stay in the air and try to safely poke at his shield or cross him up. You can also try to bait him to throw the banana and punish by taking it away or hitting him. Note he can side B while he holds a banana meaning he can still grab you with his command grab. His down tilt is also good against Jigglypuff and eventually combos into fair and possibly uair if your DI is poor.
Well, we went over the bad, lets talk about some of the good. Diddys dthrow to up air does work on Puff, however its fairly difficult to kill with the up air if you DI properly. Diddys down throw sends you at a 105 degree angle, which is behind Diddy. If you DI directly behind him, he can't get an up air on you when you're at kill percent. Its mainly because Diddy has to move horizontally to hit you which makes it take longer to reach where you are. This may not be true with rage being in effect as I haven't tried all the possibilities. I do know that its far more difficult to uair you and they generally start going for fairs instead which kill a lot later.
If a Diddy Kong uses side B to recover a lot, a well timed nair can beat both the grab and attacking option. Bair works too but its a lot harder to execute. Offstage its pretty easy to gimp Diddy if he is under the stage. Dropping with a nair is usually enough to KO him if he is forced to use his Up B. If he charges it a lot, just drop with nair, fast fall it, and use your remaining jumps to recover.
Kongo Jungle is likely going to be banned, and is banned at Apex in singles last I checked. Oh well, kinda sucks, we lost our best stage. I personally like Battlefield against Diddy Kong because the ceilings height makes it even harder for him to dthrow to up air you when lethal. The platforms are good for Diddy if he wants to stand under them and fire peanuts, however they also aid our juggling a lot because his dair is slow and his options are poor on platforms. Lylat can mess with Diddys recovery and the stage tilting doesn't mess with us much at all. Castle Siege isn't too bad and Delfino seems alright if you avoid the pillar transformation, I personally don't recommend Delfino, but I don't have much experience against Diddy on it, so I may be wrong there.
For bans, you have to absolutely ban Halberd. Remember how I brought up using DI to avoid dthrow up air kills? Well that goes out the window on Halberd and you are KO'd at ~60 before the down throw if uair is fresh (btw this is with zero rage so yeah, gg). We can't have this and this stage is an auto ban in my opinion. The only good news is that we don't have to worry too much about pocket Diddys and whatnot going to Halberd because we are usually banning it anyway. If the tournament allows two bans, Town and City is also pretty much an auto ban for similar reasons. The matchup on Halberd is probably 75-35, I'm serious.
I believe the matchup overall is 6-4 in favor of Diddy Kong. It's definitely winnable through gimps and a lot of his combos don't work very well on Puff if you DI properly. I think the matchup should be taken slowly and patiently. We need to be reactive on Diddy Kong a lot of the time, the better you are at baiting, the more doable the matchup will become, it's a staple for Puff but matters more so against this monkey.
