Marth would have to be SH'ing and have already Fair'd to be safer in that situation, unless that Marth would be approaching with a SHFF Fair, in which case Falco doesn't necessarily beat it but he could by CC'ing I guess? Marth's DJ backwards is a fine bait for those types of measures though, and taking a laser in any of those situations is certainly not a problem.
I don't remember if that first line was a response to me or not, but I will say that someone who isn't keeping up with the metagame and just doing his own thing(while still being an amazing player) is only gonna get you so far.
I was trying to make a point regarding you saying opinions of players.....it was rhetorical lol. What if I disagreed and said Zhu was better but he's just inconsistent or something? Would that affect my views of the matchup? Sure it could. How about we just say that some people are better at certain matchups than others, and use our own judgment based on what we've seen(to a much lesser extent than what you like to use)+personal experience+theory to get a clearer view of a matchup?
Alright, so I just read the first line of that first major paragraph again, and I'm going to repeat the same response I gave you before about that. Ever since Brawl came out, we've seen a drop off in the number of great Foxes, and more recently in the practice and innovation from top Foxes. Falcos? They have been multiplying(me, Zhu doing new things, Chops getting deep into the psychological side of Melee and somehow enhancing his laser/combo game, Shiz returning and innovating well enough to give Falcos another prominent source of material to work with). Pre-Brawl, I seriously doubt the gap has been THAT big. I'm gonna look this up one of these days and I'll get back to you on it, but I only ever saw PC's and eventually Shiz's Falcos taking high spots all of the time. Maybe I'm just uneducated on a lot of the other Falcos(grassroots tourneys may have seen better days for Falco in the 05-07 era I'm unaware of?) of that time, but I feel as though I've seen plenty of videos and heard enough about history to the point where there were many solid Falcos, but they simply didn't outperform the Foxes at the top(especially compared to now).
What does Fox offer today hmm? Rusty, not-practicing Jman is the best Fox can offer right now. He's not out learning more about matchups or playing a lot to keep his tech up or even his comfort level in the game. How can you expect tourney results to show Fox>Falco when that is the case?
YES, Fox has Lucky and ColBol and Zgetto and Remen and lots of others, but they simply haven't pushed their character far enough yet to get over the familiarity associated with fighting Fox that players such as KDJ, PC at times, yourself.......and others offered(especially in terms of secondaries like what Ken/Isai/etc seemed to do), all taking top spots and certainly outplacing Falcos, especially after PC laid off the Falco.
Why is it so difficult to say that maybe the only/major reason everyone thinks Falco is better than Fox now is because of all of the PLAYERS pushing Falco so far, and that the Foxes simply haven't caught up yet?
For the record, I'm simply inexperienced vs a lot of Fox's development and I have to go home and internalize new thoughts and come up with ideas in order to counter them sometimes(much like you yourself do, only without the inexperienced part). I don't mind Fox except for when I'm dumb and can't figure out how to deal with stuff Mango came up with for him.
Outranged huh? What move beats Fox's upsmash? What move beats Fox's spaced Bair?
Okay come on now M2K, you can't tell me that stuffing an approach WHILE GETTING AN APPROACH AND DAMAGE isn't a great psychological advantage(both immediately and in the future), but it's also great for positional advantage, as well as allows Marth to pressure Falco to roll or even get a shield stab, which is something Marth was built to capitalize off of.
ASIDE FROM ALL THAT, why do you NEED to get a guaranteed punish off of stuffing an approach? What's wrong with a reset? If anything, that's a way to make Falco second-guess his approaches and gives you more data on what Falco does. It just makes your means of punishing/pressuring him much easier in the future and throws off the pressure on you in the immediate situation. Falco isn't that scary if you're swatting him away because then he can't do his shield pressure, right?
Uthrow/shine sure does start some good stuff. Fox is fast enough to keep the tech chase going and react to any type of defensive measure. He gets his DD back when/if he messes up a tech chase right? Falco would be stupid to outright laser because Fox is right in front of him and could hit him. So then, Fox gets to run circles around Falco even if he drops a combo. Does Falco get that luxury? No, he has to get EVERY read right or the combo is over and stage control isn't easy to maintain on a character that is significantly faster than yours.
If I were to agree Fox couldn't combo Falco as hard from one opening directly, I'd say Fox certainly can combo Falco as hard as a string or two of "consecutive hits."
1. If Falco Dairs to beat an Ftilt then Sheik's WD back gets her an Ftilt or a grab most likely when the Dair is punished. It's all just a mixup, and WD back tends to at least reset the situation so if anything, WD back should be the staple strategy and Ftilt should be used to beat any type of approach used to overshoot and catch Sheik's WD back. Seems incredibly solid to me and can certainly grants punishments that can rival that of a Dair combo.
Is Fox even supposed to try to Nair Sheik? I thought Dair was better vs her? CC and apparently this Ftilt thing seem to make Nair not a favorable option.
My Dair has been beaten by Ftilt before, do you know what would have happened there then?
I've already explained Jab. Same stuff will apply to an extent for some of these things you listed.
For Fsmash: You could set up an edgeguard situation or outright kill with it? I'm pretty sure you can edgeguard very well M2K, so that shouldn't be a problem lol. It could also kill sooner because the Falco would be trying to FF the laser, soooo that seems **** to me too.
I do a Nair, and you don't CC/powershield/shield DI? I'm pretty sure you can BEAT Nair with several of your moves anyway, and that's what a matchup is about. My longest horizontal-moving approach is BEATEN by your LONG SWORD. Your LONG SWORD puts me into bad positions or gets me GRABBED....WHICH I DIE FROM. That seems bad to me. It goes both ways.
Dair gets beaten by moves too, and it's also easier to hit Falco on the head then, or simply avoid since the move is him spinning his feet below him....If you do get hit though, then yeah sure you'll probably eat a rough combo, but instead of feeling like the matchup is hopeless afterward, you should use your character's own powerful abilities and range advantages to just do the same type of punishment back to me.
M2K, why would a Falco attempt a dash attack on Marth? That's just....not usually a good idea. But okay sure, if Marth gets hit by a dash attack then yeah he could take damage or get spiked, but that's also somewhat situational, not to mention totally DI-able I'm pretty sure.
How does he make it hard to get in exactly? Aren't most of the Falcos approaching you and not the reverse?
Alright M2K, play me at Pound 5 with this planking puff, and if I really can't do anything about it then I'll start to believe you.
Have you tried such a strategy on Mango by the way?
Maybe Ken's Marth was playing badly that day?
Maybe you and Ken both sucked vs Falco actually??? And yes, I know you're much better vs Fox than you are vs Falco, but that shouldn't be an argument because those are just YOUR personal player strengths.
Also it sounds like Ken and PC went back and forth despite Marth being bad vs Falco....and PC being bad at the matchup? I don't know what those facts suggest, looking back.
Uthrow still takes a lot of damage out of the way, typically puts Falco into a teching position, which blows vs Fox, and if Fox hits him out of the teching animation then he can't CC so I don't even know why it's so hard to just do an extra easy read or two to keep a combo going whereas Falco gets no such luxuries and is being pressed for reads and tight execution on a much slower character more frequently.
M2K have you actually seen the way you combo/trick Falcos when you get an opening? I don't believe it's all THAT different in severity from what Falco can do to Marth.
@Last line: Just because I can/could combo Fox well doesn't change the matchup. It just means I'm personally dumb. Neutral position/range of each character/what beats what/metagame advancements/etc are things that more than definitely have to be weighted just as heavily when discussing matchups.
WHEW
Shine can't always be edgecanceled, and it's not like Falco can always be expected to DI it correctly since it's a 1 frame move. Even if Falco does do it all right and land on the edge, then it's still tough to recover vs such a quick and fairly ranged character.
Ledgedashes aren't always done correctly either, but if we just play like they would be with unrealistic humans or whatever, then Fox still holds the positional advantage and can certainly bait ledgedash attacks/defensive maneuvers, which is the same as Fox controlling the stage well anyway. It's not an outright advantage, but it's definitely not where Falco wants to be. No room to RSHL/retreat really and the possible shine gimp scenario+Fox's Bair/etc range? Not a good situation to be in.
Jab resets being ASDI'd just makes Fox have to use his speed another time to punish a getup....not that hard if you're keeping yourself close to react to whatever getup is chosen. Plus, if Falco rolls farther from the middle, then you get a better chance of a kill.
Uairs can't ALWAYS be SDI'd, can they?
Generally you aren't prepared to get Nair'd/Bair'd or you wouldn't have gotten hit in the first place, so I don't know how fair it really is to say that those techs or edgecancels are totally feasible.
It's entirely possible to get a grab and take Falco past 40 so that Nairs and Bairs can still **** vs him, besides, it's not like Falco can just CC those attacks every time he gets hit by them early anyway for the same reasons I stated for CC not being entirely reliable as before.
I never really liked pie all that much.
Despite Falco having "dial-a-combos" I bet no one here has seen a match where a somewhat even spacie match was just constant 0-deaths back and forth. The mixups and defensive options that make Melee an incredible game also prevent Fox vs Falco from devolving into some super fast death matches(I'm typing a lot and getting tired you know what I mean lol).
For Dair:
You've already said that Falco can't start this off at 0, so he has to find some way to rack damage initially, and no Fox is gonna sit around and eat lasers until they're above that Dair threshold.
For shine:
It's pretty tough to just outright shine someone, but shield pressure and stuff happens so okay. Teching shines is very hard to follow and a super fast mixup if it could be utlilized(something I've thought of but never actually put into this matchup idea I have), and of course tech in place to shine would be a very scary role reversal to have to worry about when attempting to combo.
Utilt usually doesn't start combos if Fox spaces/baits appropriately because Falco is rarely in a position where he can force Fox to approach and in a predictable enough manner to simply Utilt to beat it(I'm pretty sure Utilt doesn't even beat Fox's spaced Bair anyway). Maybe I just need to see more Utilt combo-starter whoring....I'm still hard-pressed to believe that though.
Falco Nair'ing Fox in the air? I never see that and highly doubt Falco could catch an airborne Fox who's watching and spacing correctly, so I don't know how that's pertinent.
Uthrows are going to happen. Tech chases are going to happen. Opportunities to gimp are going to happen. Knockdowns are going to happen. Foxes just aren't taking advantage of all of these opportunities as well as Falcos are for reasons that are beyond me, or they get nervous and don't do it well enough in tournament for whatever reason.
LOL GAH DANG THAT SET GJHBKFDN.SLHSGRKD,K..SVG,GJK.NHGJ,H,N
Fox wins on FD fo dang sho.
Platforms can help their combos, but FD lets Fox get those wonderful CG 0-deaths. To be fair, Falco also gets some aid because Fox can't tech on platforms, but Fox benefits more from the easier CG here.
Look at all this stuff we're talking about LOL. <3
You can hit Falco out of his tech animation so he can't CC.
and ****. =)
Fair OOS is good at punishing a certain spacing on laser approaches, but yes it is much better to WD OOS. With varied timing on the Fair as a mixup, I'd say it's pretty tough to punish too, should Falcos become proficient at punishing that option in the first place.
I always figured that once you developed a certain depth of smash knowledge/understanding that it would still carry you far and allow you to beat people more involved in the current metagame simply because you could have developed your reading/basic smash skills better or whatever. Thanks for sharing though, that's cool. =)
I agree, and Marth can pretty much bait those things and threaten in that way, and I may have worded my response to something wrongly, which I apologize for if I did.
Totally agreed @ the next line.
Dsmash is really that good there huh? Cool, thanks.
I think people overrate him. I still don't think older evidence is even close at all to proving Falco>Fox, while I have already supplied reasons in response to M2K's long post to explain why things are the way they are now.
A very interesting post. Thanks for writing that up.
<3333 waffles!
Sup baby how'd those Falco dittos treat you last night? <3
It's a fun one to have, regardless of who "wins" the discussion lol.
I just don't know how to fight a Sheik that knows their stuff so well. Maybe I'll be able to understand Sheik better after Pound 5. =)
yo man I'll MM dylan
My Falco is so weird lol. Thank you very much though! =)
Top Falcos are mad weird right now though. I wish I could play/watch Calle W more and have some more of them practice again....
<3
I'd like to play GG7 sometime to see this, but I feel like there have to be more players than just us that do this....
Forward liked Ftilt a lot. =p
Dudes don't know about Cam702. That guy is so creative and improving well too.
keep at it man! =)
Smith trolling, ladies and gentlemen.
<3 GG7, kneegalize was cool haha.
LOL yeah I'm sure. XD
I respect old school players and their knowledge so much. Thank you for posting here. =)
lmfao XD
Drephen made a thread a year+ ago saying he couldn't keep up anymore. Gotta keep up with the metagame itself to some extent or you'll get left behind, even if your own personal metagame stays relatively the same and in-practice.
I feel as though the current metagame should be taking principles of old and combining them with a lot of the new innovations and ideals of today. Marth would benefit worlds from this mentality, and it's what I try to do with my Falco...sorta.
I don't think it's fair to compare old school and new school top players like that because they'll just naturally be pushed along by different mentalities of what's best and what isn't to at least a fair degree simply because of how the game is changing, even if only at a more superficial level.
Nah I don't do double shines or shine grabs, but I've been meaning to get on that......I try to shine grab floaties but it keeps turning out as fullhops lmao.
I agree with the foundation thing though. The other(newer) stuff is certainly designed to supplement your foundation, but it's much harder to see such things today when everything is so shiny and fast.
Shine OOS, yeah it can still happen vs good opponents, but I almost see it as a mixup more than a natural response to a situation so people get a little careless in their pressure at times.
I also play a lot of NC's silly A's a lot. =p
yup
I still suck at it. F U
That's part of why, yes. It also covers my roll options very well. In addition to this, Mango attacks much faster than other Foxes will, and I'll end up shielding vs him more so he can apply more of that deadly option-covering reverse Nair shine stuff. It's gay lol.
It certainly makes matchups deeper, but developments like waveshining OOS only supplement the pre-existing foundation for the matchup. It certainly can be a very important piece of the matchup right now because it's a new, hot thing though.
Other Peaches edgeguard better now at least I'm pretty sure.
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