Okay, I went and tried Duck Hunt at my local this week, and I have some comments from my experience. Not sure what has been said before but I'd like to put my own notes as well. (Is there a basic archive of stage notes we can assemble at some point? I think there's one in the matchup thread, but some notes for stages in general would be nice too)
Overall, I think it's a great Toon Link stage, but I personally feel I'm not taking full advantage of what the stage offers. Some of the best things the stage has is the wall on the side, for wall jumping (And if you play FG, you get good at wall-jumping), and the low blast barrier on the bottom. I whiffed a hookshot recovery in fast fall once, but I didn't die off the bottom, and ofc the wall makes it easy to come back (Here's that clip so you can see how low I went:
https://youtu.be/LTQbdqIxZcc?t=9m22s). I think that low blast barrier can be a huge plus when you need to camp down low since the side barrier are pretty close, and if other's try to wall jump or wall cling, you have bombs to interfere.
The side blast barrier definitely seems close by, but it's not that drastically close either. A lot of moves that should have killed (Our back throw/F-Smash, a large variety of everyone else's moves) didn't kill early like we all might have hoped. (Back throw didn't kill at the ledge at 112%). Not anything good or bad, just important to note.
The ducks can be situationally good or bad. They can sometimes interfere with our projectiles, but they also interfere with your opponents, and I find that even when my projectiles are stopped by a duck, my opponent has been conditioned to not approach anyway, so it's not so bad. One thing I always feel could be really interesting is using a bomb on a duck to have the wide explosion hit your opponent off guard, but it seems too situational to bother trying.
The bush provides an interesting place for us to use as a situational advantage, and I find it to be useful to stay away from others with linear projectiles (Shiek, Greninja, Bowser Jr.), while we bombard from higher ground with bombs/boomerang. The tree is a nice relieve spot, as long as we shield before someone approaches, and we can have interesting shenanigans there too (Like here XD:
https://youtu.be/Cv_U5Xlh90o?t=4m26s). In addition, while we can use it to recover situationally, we can also use bombs as a quick projectile to disturb people who think they can recover high safely, as seen a bit later in that clip (4:40, please don't mind my D-air there, I've become too D-air happy recently..) Finally, the dog seems to help more then anything, since it tends to break up the fighting, and you can hold shield on it while it rises, making you almost untouchable. And if your opponent rises, it still reset neutral, which is a good place for us I'd think.
Overall, the stage feels good to use, but I'm definitely not as confident when I pick this stage as I was on Delfino Plaza (And I don't even know why I liked that stage, but I once heard it's a great Toon Link stage as well). Despite that, it's a good stage to pick, but I want to know what others think as well.
