Where do we go from here?

[Rango the Mercenary]

So I played at TFC and placed 5th, losing first to Kai's Sonic and then Stinger's Diddy. While I made the mistake of going to FD on Sonic and allowing LC on Diddy, that wasn't the reason I lost. I got outplayed, plain and simple. My matches with Kai's Sonic were much closer, but it was still 3-1.

My ground game wasn't on point, and I got pressured to use Nair while landing to keep them off of me. This just turned into an autocancel bait into shieldgrab every time. I lost to Stingers' Diddy on Delfino, which is supposed to be OUR counterpick stage. I'll have some videos up soon on the Video Critique Thread, but I feel like as Ike players, and myself included, we still have a ways to go.

If you watch the TFC matches, just watch what Fatality does to Kai. 6-0, and on the first round of Grand Finals, ended it extremely quickly. Kai's #1 in NC, but Fatality just decimated. But how? Was it the Dair spikes? The setups? The ground games or just the reads? Is it the character choice?

As Ike mains, do we need to re-establish our battle plan? Once again taking cues from my opponents, notice that Sonic and Diddy are not meant to be quick-killers. Diddy is insanely good at pressure and keeping a player from getting back on stage. His stage control is second to none. Sonic is great at Nair reads, airdodge read Nair juggles, abusing active frames on Nair and Bair, etc. Captain Falcon is great at combos, dash grabs, Dair spikes, edgeguarding, mixups, jabs, and survivability. All three have multiple autocancels and attacks that keep them from being hit by endlag.

Ike is good at keeping spacing with ranged disjoint, killing with Bair, spacing and punishing with Nair, grab combos, DTilt, and killing early with edgeguarding. What are we missing that top players have? Is Ike meant for the early kill or the beatdown setups? Or do we simply play the neutral on our enemies to 100% and then go in for the kill? Edgeguarding is extremely risky with Ike since he does not have the most stellar recovery and leaves himself exposed to a counter-gimp if an edgeguarding attempt is botched.

Bair kills wonderfully until your opponent sees what you're doing. That leaves you with UTilt or a very risky USmash. After a certain point, your opponent will read UThrow -> airdodge read -> Uair and simply jump over it, leaving you no way to followup after UThrow.

What tools are we missing in general and what ways can we improve? Note that I'm not looking for matchup data or anything in this topic. I'm simply using TFC as an example. I'm hoping that we can observe top players' performances, patterns, and how Ike mains can ascend to that level.

 

[PyroTakun]

Aside from mixups and mindgames, I think the next way for us Ikes to step it up is to perfect pivot. It can get us just out of the opponent's range , but still be able to get something off. D-Tilt and U-Tilt are great if your C-stick is set to tilts, but perfect pivot jabs and grabs can work wonders too.

Overall I think this is a mechanic that Ike can abuse more than most of the cast because he relies so much on spacing, and his tilts are fantastic when spaced right.

 

[Linkmario00]

I think footstool setups will have a bigger space as metagame develops. Ike has some good footstool setups from Dthrow and Dtilt and can get a lot of reward from a jab reset. Also we may start to use OS with shield and moves for optimising our punish/neutral game, but that's still an incredible young part of the metagame so who knows.

 

[qwillinallthefish]

Though my view may not be the common one, I think we need to work on our conditioning game a lot more. If you look at HugS in Melee, he always says that he conditions his opponents to shield in certain situations so that he can get his very slow grab off. Samus's grab is a very hefty hit if you get it and a hard punish on you if you miss it. This is very similar to Ike's whole arsenal of moves. If we can condition opponents to think one thing and then do something else to punish what they think we're going to be doing, we could start killing early and do very well. For example, you might condition the opponent to think you're going to dash grab or dash attack both of which can be dodged by spot dodge or jumping and then punished. Once they thing they know what we're going to do, we could up smash on a read to hit them on their read.

 

[Nidtendofreak]

Eruption.

Master the timing of it against every recovery. If they don't have a projectile they can angle upwards, they should be dead if we have time to charge it.

That's a pretty small list of no goes. Link, Toon Link, MegaMan, Yoshi, Pit/Dark Pit in theory but I don't think they can really pull if off to save themselves, Mii Gunner and Samus with homing missiles, ROB... everyone else either can't aim upwards or has to be so close we wouldn't be using Eruption in the first place.

So 7-9 out of the cast are safe. The rest should be dead frequently.

 

[Arrei]

Don't forget anyone with a tether recovery. There's no timing on that, only futility.

 

[Rango the Mercenary]

Bait Eruption for fun, then walk-off Fair.

I fought Ian (#2 in NC) in some matches. His Lucas is the best I've played, but highly susceptible to walk-off Dair.

 

[Wonderguard]

Don't forget anyone with a tether recovery. There's no timing on that, only futility.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if they tether recover can't you still hit them with eruption when they pull themselves up towards the stage before they actually grab the ledge? Unless you're just saying that it's stupidly hard to time, in which case you're definitely right.

I personally want to work on how to get Ledge trump > bair to work. That setup can kill if you can pull it off, though if you do it too often people can just buffer getups to avoid it, which can be punished differently depending on the MU.

 

[Arrei]

Well, it's more the fact that they can freely decide when they want to actually reel themselves to the ledge, allowing anyone with a tether to simply wait until you're forced to release Eruption and get to the ledge for free, and making actually landing Eruption complete blind luck as they make no visual indication that they're about to snap.

Though I'd imagine you could intentionally use Eruption a few times to condition them and then try to slap them out of their tether with an Fair at the crucial moment.