People way overrate how much of a commitment marth's moves are. Fair walls are bad, even jumping at all is such a huge commitment. You can boil down his neutral to empty DD/WD and choking off space with Dtilt and the threat of his max range. Only Dtilt has the IASA frames to which he doesn't get punished for throwing it out occasionally (other than jab) but its easily jumped over or shot at by any projectile.
This is fair enough, but I don't think I've ever once mentioned Marth throwing out random walling moves (except in MUs where they're absolutely not punishable). You seem to be assuming that Marth has to commit before his opponent - which, in fact, is very rarely the case due to the combined threat of his extremely large dashdance and grab range, plus the additional
threat of the disjoint of the sword.
The problem is that in PM there are larger stages where there is more room in which he has to choke off, higher/differently positioned platforms to escape too if you get cornered, and every character is generally more mobile and threatening in their spacing and approaching options. Movement is better across the board, he no longer has to only worry about fox and falcon out mobilizing him. Theres more projectiles to have to worry about locking him down than just falco lasers. there are more legitimate approaches than just spacie shffls and DD grabs. Characters are heavier on average, have far better high recovery options (bar tether characters), so if he doesn't catch bad DI or early gimps he wont get kills.
For characters slower than marth (most of them), the larger stages are a liability - not an asset- in the matchup. Sure, there's more room for Marth to choke off, but he can (again, in those matchups), do it much more safely than he otherwise could. You may have a point with regards to the platforms, though being above Marth is still almost never good for any character.
Regarding the heavier characters that supposedly die later, I think that's a huge, glowing red herring. Sure, they're heavier - but on average they're also floatier and larger -- against many characters, Marth has a non-reactable tipper fsmash DI mixup between fthrow and dthrow, which requires relatively precise (ie. just away won't always work -- for many characters it must be down and away),
very quick DI which is simply impossible to get correctly every time Marth grabs.
For easy comparison, watch any Hungrybox video. Is this top 5 Melee player able to consistently DI behind Fox every time? What about his opponent? Is M2K, the god of frame data and practice regimes, able to consistently DI out of the uthrow->rest? Of course not - it's not always reactable.
Marth's throws are even
more difficult to DI out of in PM than Jiggs/Fox's uthrows in the aforementioned matchup because not only are they of a comparable speed, but the opponent must necessarily guess which direction Marth is throwing, effectively before he even gets grabbed. Even if Marth throws for position (ie. towards the edge) every time, he's still bound to get a bunch of free tippers against an arbitrarily good human opponent.
Compounding this is the fact that though characters on average have better recoveries in PM, they're almost universally still pretty easy for Marth to gimp with some combination of his tools, but probably most notably dair.
I also dont think he does as well vs spacies as he does in Melee, spacies always being able to ban fd AND other stages they wont want is huge, + more large stages to work with if they want to run away, and more small stages if they are winning the rush down game and want more corner carry.
Inarguably correct. He probably loses convincingly to all the spacies in PM. Hell, Wolf in particular might have the tools (cough, fsmash) to punish him even harder than Fox for whiffs.
I think he could be top 20, but I would never put him top 10. Yeah, he still shuts down the immobile characters hard, and the stubby hitbox characters if they don't have a good projectile or burst movement. But his punish game is inconsistent, and so many characters take his stocks easy, as he is a good combo weight with a very linear recovery. He definitely wins MU's, like Bowser, Peach, GnW, etc, but as a whole I dont feel as confident on his MU spread as I would say, Roy, M2, Samus or Diddy.
What do you mean by "his punish game is inconsistent"? That sounds like a player skill thing; I'm extremely skeptical that Marth isn't capable of 0-deathing pretty much every member of the cast, or at least approximating it via the use of tech chases, stage control, edgeguards, etc.
I also think there is a huge mis-understanding of what marth does/is, which is what perpetuates why its still common banter that shiek beats marth in Melee, because people see marths getting away with putting hitboxes out and jumping in neutral, so they think thats how he plays every MU, so when they do that vs sheik they get grabbed/ftilted and lose a stock or take 80% at the least. Marth has to play some MU's so incredibly differently that its like he is a different character in times going from character to character, which is another reason why I think marth doesn't get evaluated.
Nailed it again. Jiggs is very similar in this regard - IMO to a much greater extreme, though, which is why she's (effectively) such a crappy character in PM; she just requires prohibitive amounts of matchup knowledge.
Marth, though, can pretty much always play the extremely non-committal DD grab game until he figures the MU out. He, at the very least, will not lose quickly.
I'm not a marth main anymore, but I hang out around so many good marth players and trust them completely on how marth works (Tai, Taj, Tagless Kyle, Axe, Taj, etc all have ****ing fantastic marths). He is a character about choking down space, and he taking stocks by either quick corner carries to gimps (fast fallers/mid weights) or keeping them in the air with his stupid juggles (floaties). In both of these rough MU archetypes he can't just throw out hitboxes because stray hitboxes just wrack up %, and a lot of % doesn't help marth in how he sets up taking stocks. yeah, you can hit Falcon with Up-airs and tipper fairs all day, have fun when he hits above 90% and you cant kill him anymore until 180%.
Obviously, those guys are all vastly better players, and more knowledgable than Marth about myself. To my knowledge, though, none of them take PM terribly seriously, and I'm not sure if they've taken the time to consider the effects that PM's physics, combined with the preponderance of larger, floatier characters, may have had on Marth's overall standing. Melee Marth and PM Marth are closely related, but I'm still not convinced that PM Marth shares all of Melee Marth's weaknesses.
That said, I think you've at least sold me on the idea that Falcon is probably better.
Uh, no. I think he's more a gatekeeper for skill than for tiers. Once you learn the art of how to beat Marth you have to be a fairly strong player. No slow character doesn't have the range to deal with him, and no character without range is slow. Everyone has fine tools to deal with Marth, but he does have his good MU's. Every character can bait, including...
I'd love to converse with you sometime when your responses are less dripping with condescension. =| If that's not your intent, my apologies. Either way, "you suck, learn to bait out fast, non-committal moves with your slow, highly committal character and then somehow punish them" really isn't productive.
