Trouble utilising speed from L-Cancel

[KasparV]

Hey all, I've been playing Melee since the day it came out, but only casually so far. Last June I kind of rediscovered my Gamecube, and I've frequently been playing Melee since. I have practiced L-Canceling and wave dashing and do it now pretty consistently with Marth.

The problem I run into however is that I'm not taking advantage of my L-Cancels. After I L-cancel successfully, I won't immediately continue moving/attacking because all my years of 'casual play' have made me used to the 'casual' speed of the game. Have others of you run into this and/or do you have any tips on how to work on it?

Thanks in advance!

 

[goateeguy]

I guess one thing you could do is get SHFFLing down and, in practice, SHFFL aerials repeatedly, trying to throw the next one out as fast as possible. You can use the audio cues of the aerials to hear the rate at which you're executing them and try to make the tempo faster. That would give you an idea of how much sooner you can act after you L-cancel an aerial. Another idea would be to do an aerial and then dash away as soon as possible, again trying to start the dash as soon as you can.

Practicing alone and developing muscle memory will help a lot. Just don't actually practice attacking computers because they don't react defensively the way people do and you'll develop bad habits.

 

[Mr. Bean]

Practice is really the best way. it'll start getting easier and you'll find it not hard after a while.

 

[djmath]

another way to gauge how quickly you can act after inputs is to go into slow mode and try to do as much as you can as fast as you can and see how long it takes for your inputs to register and get a sense of the frames and the timing that you have at your disposal. this is typically for more technical characters, but it's useful for marth as well

another thing you should look into is converting from shffl'd aerials (short hop, fast fall, l-canceled aerials) into tilts. up air into up tilt, fair into down tilt, etc. You should be able to have really smooth consecutive attacks if you're shffl-ing right. Mix up your practice with dashing as soon as you land and doing tilts and you should get a good feel for how fast this game can be

 

[Tarp]

One thing that's really helped me with this is to use the newest version of the 20XX hack pack's "color" option in the debug menu, which makes you glow green whenever you're standing still. So just practice doing a SHFFL'ed aerial and dashing/doing whatever after until you don't see any green, which means that you're moving as quickly as possible after L-canceling. Also on the 20XX pack, I like to set P2 to shield grab, then do a SHFFL'ed fair and work on dashing ASAP after landing to avoid their grab. I've definitely seen improvements from doing this practice in my tourney games, so it works (at least for me).