Another thing to consider is that if you shine the top part of their character, you have more leeway to jump and hit them with an aerial.
This is a great point, forgot to mention it. To practice this you can head to FD against a level 1 Bowser, or plug in a second controller so the cpu doesn't randomly jab you and slowly walk away as you're practicing, lol. You'll want to jump over him, drop down and try and just barely clip his head with your shine and then hit up on the stick quickly. At 0% you'll easily be able to follow with any aerial. As you practice more and more the timing will get worked into your muscle memory and you'll be able to do it on other, smaller characters and at higher damages. Once you're comfortable you can switch to practicing on Fox, Falco, Sheik, or whatever char you want. After enough practice you'll be able to do it on a Peach on super sudden death mode no problem.
Anyone have some solid approaching mixups?
It seems I mostly space with lasers and then go in with a nair. I occasionally go in with a laser to grab. I rarely go in with a dair since my opponents shield di and I get grabbed. Every time I try something else I seems to get hit, especially by a marth.
Well, there are a ridiculous amount of good mixups you can use. It really depends on what your opponent's tendencies are. For all the following I'm going to assume you're about half the length of FD away from them and will always be approaching with two SHLs + something.
- If they play passively and mostly exploit your bad, predictable approaches by shielding and then shield grabbing or other OoS options then you'll want to punish that habit.
For example, if you always approach with SHL SHL Nair then they'll just sit in shield and wait for their opportunity to shield grab or shine OoS or whatever. If you know they're going to sit in shield you can just approach with SHL SHL grab or shinegrab. Or if you're super pro you can do SHL SHL and then shine -> fade back an aerial on their shield so that when they shieldgrab you'll be out of range and can dtilt or fsmash or whatever. This is a common mixup used in shine aerial shield pressure against players who tend to shield grab after a dair or nair high on their shield. Just note that against Marth it's much harder since he has that ridiculous grab range.
- If they play spacey and avoid your lasers by jumping around, dash dancing and running away you'll want to punish accordingly.
For example, if they always avoid your first two lasers by jumping and then DD grabbing your missed approach you'll need to attack where they're going to be rather than where they are right now. You can do this using more lasers than you'd normally use, or you can fade back and laser more rather than approaching and try to approach later once you've locked them down in laser pressure. Another easy punish is to attack where you think they'll DD rather than where they are right now. You can run extra far before your aerial approach and dair or whatever behind where you'd previously approach. Of course you can also just do the regular nair approach you were doing before but hold L after your L cancel and the c-stick down to buffer a spot dodge to avoid their predictable DD grab. You'll have a few frames to shine their missed grab if you did it right.
Other non-situationally-specific mixups include -
Crossup bair -> shine pressure limits their OoS options
Running past shielding opponents trying to bait a jump OoS -> fsmash or bair or something
Empty hop -> punish their shield grab
Just grab lol.
There are tons of other options, watch videos of players like Mango, Shiz, Westballz, Dr PeePee and whoever else you can and try and figure out why their approaches work and when they don't, why.
