Just had a few rounds of Elite Smash.
I'm getting better at noticing flaws in individual player's gameplans. Today I fought a pretty good Incineroar who'd use well-timed Revenges and Darkest Lariets to escape from pressure. I tried to bait them out, but I kept messing up the timing on punishing Revenge and instead trigger it instead. Unfortunately I didn't get the rematch.
I also fought a turtle Byleth who'd try to wall me out with Fairs and Bairs, occasionally going for more aggressive Nair mix ups or dash back F-smash reads. They would drift back whenever I approached, which made it easy for me to steal stage control. I'm a pretty aggressive player and I'll admit I ran into a couple moves that I shouldn't have, but overall I think I did pretty well. I won the first game, then lost the second, and they didn't rematch after that. I think I would have won if we did a best of three but eh, I guess I'll never know for sure.
On the opposite end, I fought a super-hyper aggressive Cloud. My instinct is to shield a lot against Swordsmen to give myself breathing space since, while they can pressure shields safely, their grabs tend to be pretty bad. That didn't stop this Cloud player from grabbing a ton and forcing me to mix up my defensive options some more. This guy was scary but was a bit too trigger happy when it came to pressing buttons, leaving a lot of openings for me out-box him or go for callouts. I beat him 2-1, with the final match being heavily in my favor because of some good edge guarding on my part.
As for myself, I've noticed I shield a lot more then most players do. Squirtle and Charizard have really good OoS games though, with Squirt having a fast and rewarding grab while Zard has Up Smash, three kill throws and Fly. I still need to shield less with Ivysaur though and use Fair and Bair as my primary defensive tools. 'Tis a shame Ivysaur doesn't have better grounded defensive options but as a top tier main, I shouldn't complain. At least she's got a good pivot grab.
I was supposed to watch Star Wars today. Why am I analyzing my Smash gameplay instead?