3 Marth things!

I know it's been forever since I posted...but I honestly haven't had anything I wanted to talk about, until now!

After a recent conversation with Zoso, I realized there was some marth stuff I do/know about that I felt like writing about. So here it is, three things that marth players don't do that they probably should. I'll go from least important to most important:

Reacting to tech in place on the ground with uptilt. This is particularly good because you will get the sourspot uptilt which sends them completely horizontal. Uptilt is fast enough that it is feasible to use it to react to tech in place. It's honestly a lot better than being forced to grab/up-b and if you uptilt sourspot a fox at like 80 he's probably dead. I've never really see anyone use this as a consistent option, but I think it is quite good. If marth wavelands on a platform after an upair string, this could also be useful. Waveland on platform, if they tech in place you send them off stage for an edgeguard. Just some food for thought.

The second thing I want to talk about is...using pivots to help tech chase on tech rolls. If marth stands on top of a fox/falco landing location, and the spacy does a tech roll then you might have seen me dash and up-b on reaction. While that isn't too bad, marth can actually do a lot better! The spacing/timing is different based on the exact landing spot and which character you are tech chasing, but here's an example of how it might work: 1) fox tech rolls behind you, just fsmash and it will tipper 2) fox tech rolls away, very short dash and pivot fsmash. On falco you might have to do a pivot on both techs, depending on the spacing. There are also ways you can incorporate dsmash into this, but I won't go into detail on that.

By combining the first two things, I'm suggesting that marth actually has a pretty good way to finish off spacies in mid-high% tech chase situatoins. Between sourspot uptilt and pivot fsmash he can turn any knockdown situation into a potential kill, provided they are at reasonably high %.

The last thing I want to talk about is fthrow vs upthrow as a DI mixup! Both of these throws are unreactable, which is very powerful. I'm sure a lot of people "know" that this exists, but it is absurdly underutilized/unoptimized. A basic example is marth fthrow on a spacy near the edge: they often DI away to avoid getting dtilted, so if you upthrow you can just dair and its a guaranteed kill. Now, why is this so unoptimized? Well, does anybody know the exact % where fthrow-->dair/dsmash/fsmash/regrab works? Let's say the fox DIs towards marth, and the marth does forward throw (which means marth "won" the mixup)...dtilt will hit with the middle of the sword, which isn't too great. If I mained marth, I'd test the exact % where I can fthrow  into each of my followups so that I know when the mixup is strongest. For example, if marth can combo fthrow to dair on a spacy, the % at which the combo works should be a 50% chance to kill the spacy immediately off the DI mixup.

Another example is in the marth ditto, or marth vs peach. I'm sure we've all seen marth do fthrow-->dash attack near the edge. The reason this works is because there is no stage to land on, so as marth/peach fall below the edge, the dash attack clips them. On stage they would be able to tech before the dash attack hits. The thing is, this does not work on DI down+away as far as I know; it only works on DI away. So, how is this information useful? Well, if the opponent is only DI'ing away, you get a free fthrow-->dash attack into whatever you want. But if they are trying to DI down+away, suddenly you know the exact DI they are doing and you can test the upthrow followups on that DI. I'm fairly certain that upthrow--> fair is guaranteed if they hold down+away, which is far stronger than whiffing fthrow-->dash attack and giving them the edge for free. Sure, upthrow fair is a known combo, but optimizing exactly how to fair to hit the DI down+away on upthrow could be very beneficial! If you drift+jump exactly correctly, you could probably get consistent tipper fairs into other stuff. So do they want to avoid getting upthrow faired? Well then they have to DI towards you, and fthrow becomes very dangerous (fthrow regrab, fthrow dair, fthrow into aerial combos, etc).

These are just a couple examples, though. Marth has a very strong mixup between the two throws which is very underutilized. Even for the marth mains that DO use this mixup and choose to upthrow near the edge...I'm pretty sure none of them have tested how to optimize their followups on specific DIs. To know which DIs to test it on, you have to understand the mixup (in the fthrow-->dash attack case, you would want to test upthrow-->fair on DI down+away).

That's all I've got for now, but I think it's some pretty important stuff! I didn't go into too much detail, but hopefully everyone reading can test things for themselves and be creative. This should also help people defend against marth near the edge better :)

If I post again soon, it will probably be about the "better player effect" that can often be observed...someone seems really good and hits their combos and followups, then they play someone good and suddenly they can't do anything??? What's going on? There are some pretty obvious answer to this question, but I think that I've figured out some interesting ideas on the topic that haven't been explored/discovered.

Also, even though I haven't been posting much, I *have* been trying to stream more! So check out my stream to hear me talk about this type of stuff and more ^__^