When should I initiate the up air for it to autocancel? At the climax of the shorthop? Fair footstool is so hard for me to pull off, but yeah I need to learn that.
Not on topic, but switch to tilt stick for Fox. It is OBJECTIVELY better than smash stick for him.
Uair ACs on f25. Fox's short hop is 26 frames. You need to do the uair 1 frame after leaving the ground for it to autocancel. A bit hard without double sticking. Here's a couple different ways to do it:
Claw grip: take your first finger on your right hand and put it on jump. Middle finger on R. Larry does this. To do sh uairs you need to press jump and u on the cstick at the same time.
Traditional Double Sticking: Tap jump on. Press up on both sticks at the same time (specifics of it are that Fox has a 4 frame jump squat so if you press up on the c stick during it it buffers the uair and comes out IMMEDIATELY).
Modified Double Sticking (what I use): Set a shoulder button to jump (L for me). Press L, up on the analog, and up on the cstick. Same effect as the traditional method, but doesn't use tap jump.
Just regular button presses: Kinda hard, cause you have to press up + A within 2 frames of leaving the ground. I used to do this but got a lot of jump cancel usmashes that I didn't want so I dropped it for MDS.
You'll know you did it right if you can shield immediately upon landing with no lag.
As far as other things for Fox:
Learn to jump cancel Usmash consistently. It extends the range where nair/dair > usmash will kill by a large margin.
AC Bairs. I don't mean just sh bair immediately (though that works vs Rosa, Bowser and Ike), but there are specific heights to do it at vs many chars and still ac it. Practice on shorter characters and taller ones. The REALLY short ones are almost impossible to do it consistently so it's typically not even worth going for.
His bnb combos: utilt > uair, dthrow > rar bair (low percent), kill confirms, uair > uair, 2 framing with utilt. I could list a lot of combos, ngl, but these are the super important ones (and I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot).
Learning to air dodge read well.
Finding uses for his grabs. Uthrow sets up juggles, fthrow leads to tech chases around 40% until 115% or so depending on DI, bthrow is meh, dthrow is great at low percent and can combo into lasers at high percent.
General movement. Foxtrot, dash > shield, etc.
Fair spiking. The secret to fair spiking is you CANNOT buffer fair from a jump. You can only fastfall at the peak of your jump. So jump > fair > FASTFALL> jump > fs. Or even bring them down to the stage for a smash attack or whatever you want. To get a consistent fair > fs you need to hit with the 3rd or 4th hit of fair or else they can jump out and fs you.
To hit with util just... face away. Spaced well it's pretty safe on shield, but not 100% so be wary of that.
Once you got the feel for him get into more advanced stuff like ac bair combos, ac dair > fs/stuff, reading air dodge with firefox, perfect pivot for extending combos, etc.
And I'm sure there's more.
I can't really explain it, because I am not good with Fox's frame data, but from my experience, when you initiate the Up air, you should hit the floor right when fox throws his first kick. He should do a handstand, symbolizing the auto cancel. Please correct me if I am wrong.
No, that's wrong. If he does the handstand then you were too slow and got landing lag. Both kicks should come out. If you can land and shield immediately you did it right.
