Tips for fighting against a good Villager?

[Mochamico]

Villager is already pretty difficult to fight for some reason he's especially difficult to fight with PAC-MAN. How do I beat him?

 

[SafCar]

You want him to try and take your Hydrant when you can. This keeps Villager from stealing your Bonus Fruit as easily. Even then, though, practice caution with your fruit.

Depending on the Villager player, the match can either be between him zoning you or him pressuring you. The matchup in his favor definitely, since he outranges us both in the air and the ground. Keep a cool head, avoid laggy attacks, and learn his playstyle. It's an uphill battle, but you can pull a win.

That being said, try to counterpick him. I personally started playing mewtwo to deal with the guy since he can reverse a lot of Villager's attacks, so a character that can out-zone/pressure VIllager works wonders.

 

[Nu~]

Definitely not in his favor. He loses CQC hard, and his projectiles lose to ours. Lloid rocket is blocked by the pellet on our side B, his ground moves come out slower than ours with less range, and his fair/bair can be outprioritized by our Nair and fair.

Maribro has this matchup down:

Villager/Pac is a really volatile matchup. It can be hard to make comebacks against Villager because of how scary his edgeguard game is (this threat has considerably diminished since he can no longer pocket tramps) but hydrant absolutely dominates the matchup. It can be used to rack a tonne of damage up off stage while villager is recovering low, maybe even getting a lucky stage spike if they mistime (I mean top players shouldn't but it's more than possible because tourney pressure). Key is an absolute godsend, it slices Villager's projectile game and should be the go to for almost all situations unless you have a good reason to not charge to key. Key can insta launch pocket hydrants, a completely disgusting, massive ranged, piercing projectile that travels super far, kills at like 70% and does around 25% damage. It took me a while to figure it out as well but I'd say quite confidently that I have the MU almost completely down pat. If you want any further advice, feel free to ask.

There is little that villager has over us in this matchup outside of disjoints, but even that doesn't matter much when we can rush him down pretty easily behind our galaxian, key, and hydrant which eat all of villager's projectiles. If he pockets the fruit, immediately charge another so he can't stop you from pulling out fruit once he takes it out of his pocket. Even with the fruit in his hand, he can't do much at all really since Villager's zoning game is severely damaged without his neutrals.

 

[Paper Maribro]

I'm no professional player and this isn't the best showing of the MU because it's online, however, this is the top guy in my region and here are some matches we've had together. At the very least this should give you some idea of what to do and how to handle the strong zoning and edgeguarding of the Mayor.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLo0weIvw1mkaBdMN1716SnFQIPQFN5DGp

 

[Tornado]

I played against a villager in "For Glory" the other day that was very smart with his pursing and use of the hydrant. He'd generally save it for the edgeguard use that I would. So when I'm off the stage, he would have the forward smash awaiting me if I went right up the edge (which I would of course avoid doing) and could jump off and throw down the hydrant at me if I didn't go right to the edge. Certainly made life much more difficult. In the end, it's not always about matchups, but if the other player is just really really smart, he can be very difficult to beat.