I've kinda thought about going through a list of the chaingrab options that Icies have, and whether they're escapable or not, and how the infinites work, and how easy everything is to do/escape, but I always decided against it because I still believe that the extent of their grab punish game is more or less irrelevant in their tier list placement at this point in the meta because regardless of whether it's infinite or not it's still really good and regardless of how good it is it doesn't fix what makes their bad MUs bad, but everyone seems to be talking a lot about it so I'll break it down anyhow so that everyone understands it at least well enough to assess their punish game in a rudimentary sense. Because the character is weird, yo.
D-throw -> D-air
The Ol' Reliable chaingrab. A little rougher on huge characters, but still pretty easy to escape with SDI. Most people know that, but I'll go through the motions anyway. At its best it's a mixup between FH d-air, SH d-air, and SH reverse d-air, but my training partner can usually get out after two or three reps at absolute maximum. People who know how to SDI this do well and make Icies look laughably bad. People who do not know who do SDI this get bodied out of every grab and make Icies look broken.
Ledge/Platform Handoffs
Work on ledges and platforms (nyuk). The d-throw -> f-throw -> repeat stuff. Actual infinites, but situational. If the Icies player runs out of stage/platform, they can infinitely regrab the opponent with Popo by dashing away, then quickly dashing back and dash-grabbing. Also, the fatties and some other characters don't require the dash grab and can be handed off in place infinitely. Should lead into a kill at any percent, either by a guaranteed spike (by the way, both Climbers' f-airs are spikes, stop telling everyone that only one of them has a spike and the other has a meteor or something) or by infiniting them until kill percent and then smashing them. If the player makes Popo throw immediately after grabbing, this should be inescapable, but doing that requires the player to cause Nana to walk forward while Popo is throwing in order to be close enough to regrab, which isn't really that hard but lots of people don't do it anyway so there's going to be a mash window until people get better at it.
Footstool Chaingrab
Also called 'ogeling'. This is probably the most tragically misunderstood chaingrab of the whole lot, even by Icies mains. Many people think it's inescapable (probably because even Icies mains call it "the infinite", tsk tsk guys), but this is actually false. There are two ways to get out. One is to mix up your DI on the throw to get the Icies player to mess up. This is tricky, and it's even harder for fatties. The other, more guaranteed way to bust out is to mash. When Popo grabs the opponent after the footstool, Nana does a falling n-air due to the grab input, putting her in a certain amount of lag before she can footstool again. This is your mash window. This is technically character-dependent, since throws take longer on heavier characters, and you can't mash out during throw animations, and on the heavier side of the cast you can wait out more of Nana's endlag during the throw animation itself, but that is complicated and weird and has yet to be fully explored and maths Most players pummel while Nana is in lag, though they don't need to do this and can actually throw quicker by just waiting out the n-air endlag, so it's suboptimal. Pummeling doesn't actually put opponents in grab-stun, and neither does the n-air, so the n-air gives you the window and the pummel increases it. The chaingrab can be hypothetically sped up by l-cancelling the n-air, which nobody does but I can see happening in the future as we optimize our play more. Even so, mashing is way easier in PM than it is in Melee, and top players who are ready for this should be able to consistently mash out at anything below around 100%, in which case the Icies main should be getting around to killing you instead of messing around with footstools anyway. So it's not and infinite, we just call it a pseudo-infinite because of all the factors going into how to escape it.
1 Frame Brawl Infinites
The big uh-oh. So, yes, Nana can accept an input to override her grab AI on the first frame her grabbox comes out. This can be used to cause her to pummel (Perfect Nana Pummel), or to control the direction of her throw midstage or otherwise (Perfect Nana Throw). Theoretically, this would allow for inescapable 0-death chaingrabs from anywhere on the stage a la Brawl, but this is kinda different from Brawl for a few reasons. In Brawl, you could buffer the throw input and control Nana's throw direction at any point in her grab. In PM, it's a true one-frame link, so it's significantly harder. Of course, since ledge handoffs are also true infinites when performed properly, you would only need to hit the one-frame link enough times to get to a ledge for a way easier infinite, so it's also positionally dependent. But from my view, the horrific future wherein Icies perfectly infinite everyone they touch is far off, since as of right now we have easier, better options and the best of us have only been able to get 2 reps in a row tops so far. The way I see it, we don't really need to buckle down on this until most people learn to mash.
Player -0
I mentioned that Icies infinites in PM 3.6 weren't exactly a new concept, but people seem to be interested in the timeline of how long this tech been known. So here's a timeline. It was commonly known that in 3.5 there were ways to control Nana's throw direction. These methods were patched out. After 3.6 dropped, it was observed that Nana would sometimes pummel. Records are murky, but I believe
I was the first one to really ask/investigate whether that could be controlled by the player. The thread's a bit old and some info is a bit off, but long story short this is how we discovered the window for overriding Nana's AI (if someone had it earlier than me please give me the heads-up, I don't want to take credit but I can't find any other mention of it). Nobody could figure out how to apply it to throws until TechNick6425
put it on Reddit around a month ago as a proof of concept. Very recently, Fudgepop cracked the frame data in
his own Reddit post, and now this tech is in the spotlight. When I said that infinites weren't new, though, I was referring to the ledge/plat handoffs and the setups we have for them, which were known well before PNT. This tech by comparison is much less situational but much more difficult, and I foresee it being a long while before anyone can consistently apply it in tournament. And even if they do, I still don't think it will affect Icies' viability that much for reasons I've discussed above. Plus I think their viability is in a really good spot right now, regardless of their poor MUs. I'm very optimistic, and I think Icies have the capability to be top-tier as their development goes on. But IMO that development has more to do with other areas than with frame-perfect chaingrabs.
So there you go. A semi in-depth view of Icies' grab punish game as it stands right now (or at least the most important points). I really hope this helps with future analysis of the character, so that people can look a little deeper into the play and counterplay rather than assuming their grab punish game is just "good" and not going a lil deeper. I'd like to see analysis like this for Lucario counterplay, come to think of it, as everyone says that his combos are easily escapable in some circumstances but I don't know much of the specifics.
That was a lot of writing, but I love this character. Peace.
