Hello! I’m Bernard or ICYoyo. This is my weekly blog focused on improving at Smash Ultimate. Every week I cover a new aspect of the game and explore it in an effort to improve in that area and help others improve at it too. You can view the archive here. You can follow me on Twitter to get updated on new posts and other content @BernardICYoyo.
The past week was wild. On the Smash side, I did alright. I got 3rd at the Gamesahoy weekly but went 1-2 at ESF for the second week in a row. Not thrilled with my performance but it’s motivating me to practice more.
I also got two new jobs. The first is with a Lan center that is opening up in Fort Collins. I’m super excited to help this place succeed and make it a home for our local community. I know what a place like this can be for a Smash scene. When I first started playing Smash in Smash 4, I lived in Buffalo New York and we had a place where we played smash multiple times a week. It wasn’t a tournament (although we did eventually have a weekly there), it was just a place where we’d hang out and play friendlies. Because of this place, we had such a close community that also got very strong because of how often we practiced. I want to pay it forwards. I want to create a community like that for people in Fort Collins.
I also got a position with Cloud9 in their training grounds program. Needless to say, I’m super excited to be working with Cloud9 and I hope my experience making this series can help me instruct others in Smash. I’m also super excited to quit retail! I love Smash and I’m extremely lucky and grateful to have it become part of my job.
As for this week’s topic, I’ve covered it briefly in my piece on fundamentals, but I want to deep dive into this topic more.
Let’s start by defining what a game plan in Smash is. Your game plan is your objective during a match that can change based on your opponent. I’ll illustrate my early-game game plan against a typical opponent.
As a Palutena player, I want to land a Nair at the start of every match. I yearn for it. Her Nair can lead to a lot of damage early on giving you the lead and putting the ball in your opponent’s court because they now need to approach you to even up the percents. Players of a certain level will know I want a Nair so they will try to avoid it. This usually turns into them shielding more. If I know this, I can now start to grab them. Grabbing at low percents doesn’t lead to as much damage as a raw Nair unless they let you hit a Nair out of down throw (which isn’t true on most characters), but it’s better than stubbornly going for Nair when you know it won’t work.
That is just one small look at my game plan early in a match. This mindset continues for the whole game and goes much deeper than what I explained there.
I want to hit my Nair, but my nair can lose to disjointed moves, meaning that I can’t spam it willy-nilly against someone throwing out disjoints. People can also use their movement to avoid my grab and Nair. For more info on that, check out the neutral triangle video by “You suck at neutral”. There are a lot of factors to your game plan, but it all comes down to using your intuition to figure out how to hit your opponent first with your character’s tools.
As I talked about before, you want to identify what move is your character’s best for winning neutral. Ideally, the move will also lead to the most damage you can get on your opponent. For Palutena, it’s Nair. For Falco is uptilt. For a zoner like Samus, it’s a combination of her charge shot and side B. For Shiek, it’s her combo starting Fair. We’ll call these your neutral moves because they define not just your neutral, but your opponent’s neutral as well because they must avoid these moves or take a ton of damage. If you don’t know what your character’s neutral moves are, watch a top player of that character and see what option they throw out a lot. You can also determine what move it is by thinking about what moves force your opponent to respect you the most. If someone isn’t playing around Palutena Nair, I can easily combo them and win. If a move is that defining for your character, it’s usually a neutral move.
Once you determine your neutral moves, you must find your best options to deal with the counterplay to your neutral moves. As I explained earlier, people will shield a lot against Palutena because they expect her to Nair, so you can grab them instead. You still want to get damage on them or force them to play into your original game plan. Another example would be shooting your lasers as Falco to force your opponent to approach you, making them more likely to get hit by his uptilt. A stranger example is Luigi. His game plan is to get a grab at around 0%. This means you want to keep away from him. He’ll use that knowledge to corner you and use his amazing aerials to hit you before you can get out of that corner. The alternative is getting killed at 0, so you’ll always want to avoid his grab like the plague. Again, you’re looking for all these options while operating within the movement systems of Smash Ultimate. Your opponent always has the option of moving around you and avoiding you altogether. Try to pick up on your opponent’s movement in combination with their other options.
Your game plan is fluid. It changes based on the context of the game. Percent alone changes what will combo into what. As Palutena, once my opponent is out of Nair combo range, I now have a different objective. I need the build more damage to kill my opponent, but I don’t have many combos to do that so, I usually poke with my Bair and Fair in neutral. Palu’s bair can’t be beaten by other moves because it’s invincible so it will force people to respect it by shielding. This conditioning can lead to a grab where I’ll throw them off stage to potentially get an edge guard kill or ledge trap them for more percent. Other characters might have combos against opponents at higher percents and won’t need to look for stray hits. Some characters might need to use a different combo starter for combos at later percents, changing up what you would consider their neutral moves based on the context of the match. How your opponent is playing will also change how you play. If they’re camping, you can play slower and find openings in their defenses. If they’re rushing you down, you can try to hit them first and make them rethink how they can approach you. Your objective is to build up enough percent to then threaten your kill moves or kill combos. This is the final part of your game plan, your win condition.
Your win condition is how you’re going to kill your opponent. For Palutena, she has a pretty simple win condition. Once her opponents are at a certain percentage, all of her aerials kill, and many of her tilts. We try to get earlier kills from edge guards, ledge call-outs, and other hard reads, but eventually, we can kill with almost anything. Other characters like Falco can start to kill with up tilt to Bair and Captain Falcon can nair one to knee at decently early presents. Those combos will stop working after their opponent hits a certain percentage, so opponents will avoid those combo starters. Just like at low percents, you have a very obvious win condition so you will want to use options that will counter their counterplay.
It’s hard to know when to go for your neutral moves/win conditions and when to switch to the counterplay. You want to get a feel for your opponent. You want to condition them to expect certain options and then surprise them by doing something else. Mind games! It’s hard to do. You really need to pay attention to what your opponent is doing to get a feel for what they will do next. I’ve always struggled at it, but I have gotten better with time and hope to keep improving at it. This stuff isn’t easy and it takes a lot of dedication and practice to get good at it.
Thanks for reading. Again, I’m super excited for the future! I’m all in on Smash at this point and I hope I can continue to find success. I should have more time for the improvement blog and other writing projects now, but I need to get a feel for the workflow of my new jobs. See you next week!
Bernard Lamar Rice 