Month: June 2016

So you’re a Charizard player. Your crouching X into seismic toss helped you mash your way up to C rank. Look at all the damage! So easy! If it gets blocked, people freeze and don’t punish! Wow!

Then someone you play against blocks the tail, low profiles the grab, and in general ruins your day. Or the grab just whiffs because of range. Or your opponent mashed out a critical hit-scoring normal attack. Either way, Charizard faints. What can you do to make your beloved lizard dragon rise up?

You evolve.

A brief demonstration of j.6Y possibilities provided by Thulius.

Buried in the depths of the fire lizard’s movelist are the curious jumping forward+YY string (henceforth written as j.6YY), and some footnotes about jump cancels.  Though it’s a dexterous input, you can keep up the okokressure by jumping and doing j.6YY as low to the ground as possible. On hit, you have a multitude of combo options. On block, the claw of j.6YY pushes the opponent very far away, keeping you safe. You can also choose to only do the first hit of j.6Y and still get full combos and pressure off of it. This works on the full cast, though getting j.6YY to hit properly vs. tiny Pikachu is more difficult, of course.

Best of all, this technique allows you to confirm off all ranges of a hit 2X, which just special canceling into Seismic Toss does not.

Aditionally, the hits of j.6YY can be added to combos pretty freely and still keep the phase from shifting. Your standard 5YY combo can reach a whopping 171 damage and still score a hard knockdown in field phase, allowing you to followup with a meaty mixup:

5YY (jump cancel) j.6YY (land) 6Y, Dashx2

The timing on the dash means you are right over your opponent with frame advantage. As long as you don’t buffer, your 2Y and Seismic Toss both hit the opponent perfectly as they get up and shut down the vast majority of their wakeup options. Heaven forbid your opponent does any sort of counter attack here–that’s another 200 damage. A simple jab combo and command grab has netted you over half life vs the whole cast, and you still haven’t switched phases, and you’re still pressing mixups post command grab.

And this is just combos and setups. Charizard has a blistering amount of options in the air- j.X, jYY, j6YY, Glide, J.A… and if your opponent is thinking about all that, he’s probably not thinking about Fire Punch Cancels into Flight Stance. All of this mental stress, all from a single blocked jab or tail, is just the tip of the volcano.

If you want to blaze past the competition, have your Charizard forget it’s old ways and teach it some new jump cancels.

Sources: Thulius, TheBestTeaMaker