Of course, gotta practice. The problem isn't my execution(I do some pretty tough stuff in FGCs), it's my consistency, and that my hands trail behind my thoughts. I think I wasn't totally clear with my original post, hmm.
Consistency is one of the hardest issues to resolve in smash. I'll try to do a brief version of how to deal with it.
First, understand that how you play varies because people vary over time. Some days you have good days, some not. There's a physical aspect and a mental aspect to this (anyone who has read my writing knows I try to stay as far away from the mental aspect as possible). But it has a lot of merit here, so we need to address it.
Physical:
- Practice often, rust is a real thing.
- When you practice, do drills rather than free play. Practice one specific thing at a time, and practice only useful things. Ex. If you want to practice chaingrabs, you have no reason to wall jump, ever. Don't do it. Just practice the CG.
- After you play at a smash session, write down how well your tech skill felt to you, what you ate that day, and how much sleep you had. It's okay to be general. Just do it like a dozen times and start looking for trends. For example, I used to pound energy drinks at tournaments, but it made me play much worse so I stopped doing it. Look for things like this.
- Also, write down your emotional state when you are playing well. Look for trends in how you
feel when you play well.
Mental:
When you know what mental state helps you play well, try remembering 3 different non-smash occasions that made you feel that way. Write down those occasions and try to describe them to someone that did not experience it, kind of like a journal entry. Then, close your eyes and imagine putting yourself into those situations when you felt that emotional state. Then, do an action that lets you anchor those emotions to a physical action. The physical action lets you access that mental state as if you're hitting a button. Due to how humans are wired, you can develop this button over time to be more and more effective. So I'll give an example:
Let's say that I'm an inconsistent player, but when I play well, I generally feel very cocky and boisterous. I have also felt cocky and boisterous when meeting girls, driving with friends, or out hiking on park trails. I try to remember the times I was meeting girls, driving with friends, or walking park trails and what it felt like to me in my memory. While I do this, I snap my fingers. Doing this anchors those experiences together, and when I snap my fingers it makes me feel cocky and boisterous. In turn, I play that way and my tech skill improves because I was able to fix my emotional state.
Last but not least, if you're still having issues with tech skill, you may simply be trying things that are more difficult than the tools you need to be using. It's a perfectly fine choice to dumb down your play a bit, since forfeiting margin by doing something wrong is certainly worse than doing nothing and foregoing a lost opportunity. Over-extending is very bad in smash in a general way. That's probably why when you see melee players trying PM and they don't know what to do, they just don't even try anything.
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