AMondAys Week 23 - Machiavelli

I liked JZ when I met him at Aftershock. According to the players in his area, we're very similar people outside of smash. I also see some of myself in how he plays Ivy, because I went into the character playing pretty aggressive. I refused to play "unfun and campy" at all. However, I eventually came to realize that playing defense sometimes is a part of smash, and something you have to do as everyone. I don't think Ivysaur is built for that kind of aggression, and while it worked for my in my region for a while, people ended up catching on and leaving me with no choice but to settle down and learn to wait my turn sometimes. I'm not sure how his style will fare in the long term - I'd like to see it work.

When it comes to Ivy's future direction, I like my game more aggressive than defensive, so I'd prefer her to be nudged in that direction if it comes to it. In the current metagame, Ivysaur seems very much viable to me, and that's good. Before I decide if I want anything changed about her, I want to let her sit in the meta longer, and allow flaws to either make themselves more clear or get buffered down by adaptation. I want to make sure I'm not changing something because of some inadequacy of myself, other Ivys, or our opponents as players, since I don't want to start elbowing around and messing with things needlessly.

I'd definitely like to go to LTC3, but I'll have to decide if I want to spend a bunch of money on plane tickets, or sit through another 44 hours of driving. It's a tough call :P

What if - hear me out - I remove all fun from the game instead?

got'em

Fuck off Maddox :P Or I'll remove all of your characters' legs or something.

Ike is next if you don't watch it, bud.

One villain at a time, I'd find a way to end up as one of their snacks. I would transform back into a human as I'm halfway in their mouth, just before they take a bite of me, and blow them up.

Well since bananas are going extinct we can sacrifice u/MachiavelliCF to bring bananas back and once more supply the world with the most wonderful fruit.

1. I end up valuing different things in different engines, and don't have feelings for any particular character, so I don't really have any consistant mains. In 64 I mained uair, who's more colloquially known as Captain Falcon, but rarely play the game. In Melee, which I still play sometimes, I main Falco. When I played Brawl I mained Ike, and then switched to Metaknight when I inevitably lost. In my brief run with Smash 4, I mained Dedede and the most annoying of Villagers, whom I made worse by constantly trash talking my opponent in a Skeletor-esque super-villain voice mid match.
2. I always suspected Jigglypuff was unpopular largely because she was boring, rather than as a result of being very underpowered. Who would want to play bair rest when you could play as someone really cool, like Squirtle? If I changed Puff I'd want a big redesign, moving her away from rest and bair, and making her under-used moves meaningful and fun. I really don't know what specific changes I'd make though, because that's a pretty big task.
3. I'll enjoy any music, maybe because I'm an amateur songwriter myself, but I always gravitated towards Rock. Electronic rock, alternative rock, any kind of Rock really. Some of my favorite bands right now include TV on the Radio, The Killers, and Tally Hall, among others.
4. I'd like to see a tropical Ivysaur, with a hibiscus for a bud, and little flower shapes decorating her instead of triangles, and maybe a sunny yellow body color scheme, since there's not a lot of yellow in the game.
5. Ham and Cheese sandwiches. Milk.
6. I definitely remember you - you're a cool dude. I liked that you seemed like a critical thinker about the game.
7. I'm not a very big gamer outside of smash, but Team Fortress 2, FTL, and a handful of SNES games like LTTP have entertained me for a long time. I like difficult games. Because of that, I tend to like multiplayer versus games a lot since, by the nature of competing with an equally capable human being, they're bound to be challenging.
8. I try to go to as many tournaments as I can, so I'm bound to see you around at one. I go to Symbiote and SOD regularly still.
9. I think Ivysaur is in a pretty good place right now. I don't think she's particularly overpowered or underpowered. I definitely don't want to nerf her as a character and harm her viability, but wouldn't be against nerfing specific moves if there's a problem with them. I really don't have any actual plans for Ivy at this moment. I want to let her sit in the meta for a while longer before I make any decisions.

Thanks for stopping by dude. I appreciate it. I'll be seeing you around!

On one hand I could be a utilitarian and put the people's most popular pick into the game, which would probably be Shrek or some garbage like that, or I could put Gengar in because he's fucking awesome. I'd drop everyone for Gengar, but there's already so many damned Pokemon in this game.

Probably.

My tag doesn't have a very significant story behind it. In gaming, my tag was always Mach, because I valued speed. One day in a high school history class, we learned about Niccolò Machiavelli. I thought that it was neat how his name had my tag in it, and was actually a real name. It was like an extended version of my tag, so I could use Machaivelli and Mach could remain as a nickname or sorts. So then I stole it.

The moment I became interested in Ivysaur was when I got her on random one day, playing with friends. There was a moment when I was standing as Ivysaur maybe 15 feet away from my friend's character, and I thought, "Wow, right now I could heal, razor leaf, seed bomb, run up and attack, dash dance, try to space a dtilt, or jump and space a fair. I wonder how an optimal Ivy would decide between these things, and what their playstyle would end up looking like." I ended up picking her up out of curiosity, and continued playing her because she's fun. I like her because it feels like there's always something I can do, like I'm never out of options when I encounter a problem.

I like Dedede because he feels like a naturally designed, no nonsense character. When I pull off a big combo, it feels like I earned it, and I wasn't simply comboing with moves made for comboing. I also like him because he plays a way that I was never used to playing. When I first decided to pick him up to cover bad MUs for Ivysaur, I hated playing as him because his patient, bait-and-react style embodied the opposite of the fast and forceful style I wanted to play. As time went on, I was determined to overcome my mental block with him, and play him well. Eventually, and maybe because he was foreign to me and my style in that way, he become of my favorite characters.

I'm not a big fan of Ivysaur vs Lucario.

Lucario is much faster than Ivysaur, has a down B that lets him threaten a larger space in front of him than Ivy can, and has a projectile that Ivy can't kill quickly and reliably with jab, tilt, aerials, or specials. Not only that, but Lucario's aggression is much safer on Ivysaur (whos out of shield options are limited) than the average character. On the other side of that coin, Ivysaur's close range pressure isn't exactly air-tight to begin with. These things combined make neutral very unpleasant for Ivysaur. The neutral game mostly involves Ivy feeling cornered a lot, throwing out a lot of anticipatory moves to try and stay safe, and trying to trick him into wasting his aura charges, so it's easier to throw him offstage and gimp him.

Gimping with bair is the biggest thing Ivy has going for her in the match-up, especially if you're familiar with the Lucario you're fighting, and how they recover. Lucario can't easily gimp Ivysaur, so he mostly plays the standard "hold ledge and punish reel in" game against recovering Ivysaurs. That's not as good as Ivy's options on him, but it's decent.

They've both got pretty decent combo games on eachother, and both kill off the top pretty well with uairs and Up B shenanigans. However, since Ivy has killing off the sides and bottom (through edge-guarding) over Lucario, it's a good decision for her to ban low ceilings and put more emphasis on that advantage, trying to take him to stages with large offstage areas. Because of Lucario's neutral advantage, he'd probably want to take Ivy to a stage with a small main platform, where there's less leg room for Ivy to retreat and set up a defense if she makes a mistake. He'll be able to close the gap and punish her more efficiently on stages like that.

All things considered, if both players have their heads, Lucario has the advantage. He'll lose it if he surrenders center stage, approaches Ivy at the ledge, and gets gimped. Ivysaur will lose if she gets impatient and tries to force her will on Lucario, because she will have to play largely off of his spacing, and his decisions.

I'm glad you've stuck with her; I think she is a very capable character, and I think the fact that you've stuck with her shows that you're a very capable player. My periods of growth with Ivysaur usually center around me investigating specific moves. I'll realize that I've been doing the same setup for a while and then I'll explore other options. For example, for a while I would always uair body slam into utilt and try to hit an up B after. Then I put on my science hat and found a bunch of other better followups, like how at ~100%, the body slam will pop people up, and then I can Usmash, grab, nair, dsmash or a bunch of other things. I'm always finding new ways to use nair and its landing hit too. Nair landing hit to jab is pretty safe on shield, and catches a lot of people who try to shield grab you. I'd encourage testing around like that, and think it'll do a lot of good for you.

In the current metagame I think she may be around mid or upper mid tier. She's not bad, not OP, but she can be inconstant. She has a pretty erratic MU spread, in contrast with Dedede who goes close to even with nearly everyone. I want to let her settle in this meta for a bit longer before deciding what I'd want changed about her, because the longer you wait, the more clear her place in the game becomes. That said, I know I'd like it if she had an additional tool or two to make her a more well rounded, less polarizing character. I'm not sure what that would be though.

I hadn't heard that episode in particular, so I went and listened to it. You seem like a cool dude - we should play sometime. Anyway, iPK and I have played a lot in 3.5, and met up in many finals. He's up on me in sets, and I have beaten him a handful of times before, but I think there are two big reasons that led to me beating him this time at Sandstorm.

One: I had spend the whole day playing friendlies. I don't usually do this, but since I did, I was very warmed up and was able to execute my thoughts precisely. I am very familiar with how he thinks, and I knew how he'd react in most situations I got him into. But everyone knows that it's not always enough to know what will happen, but you have to be in the right position, react fast enough, press the right button, and make the most of your punish. Because I warmed up so much, I was able to do that very well.

Two: As of recently, I've become better and better at playing his aura charges. If you want my detailed thoughts on the character match-up, I explained them in another answer here. Ivy loses the match-up at close range, and if you watch you can tell that most of the match was me dancing at the edge of his Down B cancel range, trying to get him to burn his aura charges on Down B approaches (and sometimes Up B recoveries as a bonus). Maybe because iPK is relatively new to Smash, he kind of falls apart without the Down B cancel approach. It's pretty obvious in our set. As soon as he has no charges, I find a lot of new safe openings and his area of control shrinks substantially so I can rough him up more often. Playing "don't get hit" is my number one priority when this happens, and it works. In the past weeks, I've become increasingly better at exploiting that weakness.

When it comes to Ivysaur vs Dedede, I feel like I'm the only Dedede player who doesn't consider the match-up that bad. In 3.02 it was awful, but now It's a lot easier. In fact, I probably consider it around 55:45 or 60:40. I know Ripple hates that match-up, but I think he's being too reactive, which he often can be. There's a lot of strange characters in this game that, once you familiarize yourself with, become astoundingly easier to fight. I believe this is also why he doesn't like the Squirtle match-up, which most I've met (including myself) consider bad for Squirt, but anyway...

There are a few things that help Dedede hold his own in the match-up, and I think the most significant is the offstage game. Ivysaur should really never be able to recover against Dedede. She has no high/low recovery mixup, and her fair and RL are way too slow to defend her. She will always recover low, right in a comfortable range to be swung at, and doesn't usually have the recovery prowess to survive the first interception. Ivysaur can get big punishes off-stage on Dedede as well, but they're going to be more damaging than deadly. That's bad in its own way, but certainly better than losing your stock flat out. Getting sent offstage is harder to avoid as Ivysaur in this match-up, IMO. I think my next points will help to explain why.

Second: On stage, Dedede has just as much range and mobility as Ivysaur. He's got a move that matches each of Ivy's moves in range, and in the air, even more-so. It's very easy to identify opportunities to fair and other things when you are familiar with Ivysaur. Razor Leaf can be annoying, but if you play patiently, you'll find how to work around it and keep whatever Ivy you're playing from getting their follow-ups.

Third: Dedede is fat as hell. He can take a lot more abuse than light little Ivy can. Most of Ivy's non-solar beam combo into kill setups will stop working before Dedede is at a high enough percent to die from them. However, it only takes a few stray hits from Dedede to be able to send Ivysaur offstage. His weight makes it much harder for him to lose center stage, and it's within Ivysaur's normal playstyle to retreat in an attempt to stay safe. Things like bair, for example, are only safe as a retreating aerial. On top of that, one of Ivy's biggest weaknesses as a character is crouch cancelling. Dedede can make full use of this, and invalidate a lot of Ivysaur's moves.

Waddle Dees may be particularly hard to use here, but they've never been what makes Dedede good, or the main decider in his match-ups. My experience with JZ in this MU (which I won, fwiw) may be very limited, and I may not have fought with many Ivys in general, but I still feel pretty confident about my understanding of this match-up. Smash is a complicated game, and its hard to capture in words. I hope I was able to express my thoughts well enough.

Whatever sad songs exist by artists I already enjoy. I'm a fan of happy music though, and said artists usually don't make many sad songs. Luckily I'm a big optimist and things rarely get to me, so sad music isn't playing very often.

I agree that she has a polarizing match-up spread. I don't think it's good thing either, because it makes it very difficult for players to solo/main her if they like her. People like Project M because they can play as anyone they want, and I think that's a great thing. I'm not sure yet how I'd do it, but I would like her to become more well rounded, so there aren't as many strikingly bad match-ups or match-ups that make you feel guilty for playing out, like ICs.

The collective Ivysaur community has this pretty unanimous unholy trifecta of characters they like to debate over as the worst MUs. Those three characters are Marth, Fox, and Falco, and I've seen more tears shed over them than any other characters lately. I personally consider Falco to be the hardest, and I want to say JZ felt the same as well, when I mentioned it to him. As a general trend, the things that make a character successful in the Melee environment are usually things that Ivysaur has a hard time dealing with, so she has trouble with a lot of the Melee veterans. Because of this, I picked up Dedede back in 2.6, who is a solid pick against all of those characters.

There's not as much talk over her best MUs, but I feel like Ivysaur has everything necessary to make an Ice Climber's life awful, even without the momentum bug. I haven't fought any high level ICs yet, so I can't be that confident. Maybe I'll get surprised. Other than ICs, I've had an easy time dispatching most Ganondorfs and I'd probably consider that one of her best MUs as well.

The answers you are looking for are scrubs and Marth.

But Olimar has it pretty rough cause you can blow away his pikmin with synthesis or dair them for free health and solarbeams. Probably DDD is a good matchup too for similar reasons.

Can't speak for the guy but he released a matchup chart for Ivysaur one week or two ago :

http://smashboards.com/threads/super-effective-ivysaur-match-up-thread-updated-for-3-0.337770/page-5#post-18943244

As far as I'm concerned, Dedede, Olimar and ICs are particularly broken matchups. DK would be the easiest non-broken matchup imo. And hard matchups would be Fox, then Marth, then Falco. A lot of Ivysaurs struggle with Luigi as well. Like, the Ivysaur Skype group is pretty much the Marth and Luigi hate group.

Ivysaur has a wild match-up spread, and that can make her hard to solo. One thing I've noticed is how qualities that make a character successful in melee (speed, shield pressure, etc) are also the kind of things that Ivysaur struggles against. I first considered picking up Dedede back in 2.6, when Fly Amanita mentioned to me that he liked the Sheik MU, which I was struggling with at the time. Dedede, alongside Roy and I don't know who else, has one of the best match-up spreads against the top Melee characters in the game. He's also a pretty reliable character outside of that, because his strengths are so universally good, that he does about as well against most of the cast. He has a very even MU spread in my opinion, so I can usually count on throwing him out and doing decently with him, if I'm not feeling Ivysaur at that moment.

Metaknight killed my family...

LMAO HOW DID YOU KNOW OF THIS INSIDE JOKE?

YYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!

idk about the PMDT but I've done some research on it myself and it depends on many factors. The two most important ones are the move's knockback and angle of launch.